Yeah I was fortunate to work with some of the good ones. The gold standard for a tech manager / director is someone who understands the big picture in enough detail to make wise decisions and also has excellent people skills. Because we techies can be arrogant pains in the a** to manage
lol. But I worked for a couple of those.
Then there was the management cesspool - where in turn I worked for
- a very nice guy who didn’t really understand what we did and who couldn’t make a decision to save his life. He also used to hover and ask stupid questions when we were dealing with a crisis. Ugh. I used to give him something useless to do to get rid of him. Like make copies of something.
- The guy who was usually drunk by noon. His proudest achievement was collecting vendor swag. Total a-hole.
- The guy who was bright but obnoxious and a back stabber. Strongly suspected of walking off with thousands of dollars of company equipment in the confusion of a merger. This was an infosec manager.
So the guys who can’t spell make the equipment - sounds like the point of failure in inspection is time / training...and sheer volume of what they deal with...weak link for sure.
Sounds like your type of job really doesnt need supervision, or mgmt anyway. Set milestones, realistic and leave you alone. Which in such a case middle managers shouldn’t get in the way or exist. You are right, Technical project managers should know enough to be dangerous and deal well with people issues.
As an employee in a large public corp, I worked with continual bad decision makers, “its not our responsibility” types, 9-5 mentalities, unknowledgable technically (my weird niche wasnt taught in colleges), bean counter management and not people with any manufacturing experience or engineering, people who never got their hands dirty, lots of bs’ers, overly optimistics, ladder climbers, brown nosers where politics more important than results. Cost overruns were caused by bad designs in hw and sw. etc.
Best part were a few dedicated smart coworkers, a couple genius inventors, I had no schedule nor anyone to look over my shoulder, worked with customers and engineering people and fly all over the world to train them.
Sheer volume is a big issue.
I have been involved with large machines like that for other kinds of applications, so funny to think back today at the incompetence... a govt org or subcontractor will buy one then they do a ribbon cutting on a big machine like that, write press releases, color photos, bring in tribes of upper mgmt or like the base general for dog and pony shows. All were really clueless as to details.
I did lots of demos with curvilinear motion control robotics, data acq w color imaging, etc then and worked in acceptance testing where it took a month to “commission” it. It was fun. Most customers operators were scared of complexity, so lots of hand holding not to crash the machines and damage anything. Always a couple smart people though that learned and they taught others. This was early 80’s, so nobody I taught to operate really knew anything about computers and I had to also teach operational basics on cryptic command line crap on mini’s. Init tape, Attach disk, change disk, release disk, dir *.dat , copy *.*... haha. People now are spoiled, everybody including kids owns 4 “computers” most that fit in you palm.
“We do R and D in our facilty, not yours” was the sales pitch claim as our competitors would underbid, get a big contract, then deliver it half operational. They’d Spend time fixing things that should have happened before it shipped, tie up the customer for two years or in some cases walk away. Crazy unprofitable niche business.
