Software developers are people too

I was just in a conversation where it was revealed that a development manager for another team had recently left the company. An actual statement that followed:

But it doesn’t matter [that he left] because he didn’t write any code, and it should only have a psychological impact on his team.

I am a software developer, which means I know a handful of languages that computers understand. As far as I’m aware, that doesn’t preclude me from being a human being. The statements above tell me that the person who said them considers the “smart people” (term used when I was interviewing) who work for the company are hired exclusively as machines that are micro-managed to produce a narrow set of outputs and nothing more. This is demonstrated clearly when there are questions of design and creative problem solving that addressed in meetings restricted to a handful of managers who are clearly the only one’s capable of creative thinking.

Regarding the “psychological impact”, I’m no doctor or linguist, but I’m pretty sure that I use my brain when I write software and the term “psychological” has something to do with the brain. This leads me to conclude that psychological impacts would, in fact, impact my ability to perform work that involves my brain like writing code.

This is a bit rambling. I’m increasingly frustrated with the organizations that have no concept of what it means to employ human beings. This latest episode has me more outraged than I’d care to admit. It has been suggested that the statements above were made in an effort to disguise the amount of damage that was actually done by the departures. Well they managed to multiply that damage.