I think we've reached the point where we can no longer have federal, defense, state or local Chief Information Officiers much less Chief Technology Officers who can't develop, inspect, compile, deploy or run modern software and source code from scratch.
And I don't mean they did it a while ago on punch cards or remember how bad Fortan was. No we need CIOs and CTOs who can standup a VM, a server, create a cloud and even run DevOps.
They don't need to be crazy in depth coders, but they have to still be playing around with code and even better have commits or bug reports on some open source projects. I just think with how fast technologies are moving a CIO/CTO has to have one foot planted firmly in tech land and the other in policy or the other core part of the business so that they can call BS on tech when they see it. This would probably mean moving younger folk into these positions, which isn't a bad thing.
SEE: JFDI as an example of folks I'm talking about
Agree, disagree? why?
John -
You're talking about a dilemma that we constantly deal with in educating officers in modeling and simulation at the Naval Postgraduate School: how technical does a "technical manager" need to be? Our students are selected for the operational skills rather than educational background, and most of our students don't come with bachelors in either CS or OA, which our program mainly consists of. Thus, the math and programming courses are difficult for some of our students. We often get the question, "Why do I need to learn this? I'm going to have guys working for me who will do it."
I, and the faculty here, feel it is important to get the technical background. While our grads won't be doing the coding, your point about spotting BS is right on: it is much enhanced when you have done the activity yourself.
One of the problems in this field, however, is that it changes so rapidly, and it's difficult to keep up when the majority of your job involves management rather than hands on
Posted by: Perry McDowell | April 09, 2013 at 20:21