I like to code, and am thankful that my company enables me to do it most of the time instead of dealing with a bunch of non-coding issues.
I understand this, but I think that you'll eventually get bored if you can't get a sense of progress out of your work. This requires that you pick your tools and problems. If you're lucky enough to work in an open-allocation environment, and if that persists for 40 years, then that's great and you'll never be bored or frustrated.
However, most programmers want their work to be progressive: bigger challenges, more interesting problems, high-impact opportunities. This'll inevitably put you on the battlefield with status quo rent-seekers who hate you just for improving things. Even if you're not a threat to them in anyway, they'll hit you preemptively, just to prove that they can.
I really don't want to learn office politics
I understand. Who does? How many college kids say, "I want to get out there and be a private-sector politician"? Probably very few.
It's a shitty game. It shouldn't exist. But it does, and the only way we can hold it back is if good people are willing to join the fight, and able to win it.
what makes them my enemies? If they weren't around I'd have to do more of that non-coding crap work
It's not "programmer good, business bad". There are good businesspeople and bad, turncoat programmers. What makes the bad guys bad is not what they do, but the mentality. The bad guys are the ones who see us as overpaid cost centers and peasantry. Decent people managers and entrepreneurs are worth their weight in gold, but very rare: maybe 10% of the tribe.
A good manager knows that his job is to be a "sheep dog". His role is to protect the people doing the work, from assaults on all sides, so they can do the work. Whether it's an executive trying to squeeze employees or a low-level employee being a toxic jerk (i.e. making sexist remarks, insulting others' work) a good manager fights that. A bad manager thinks that his reports exist to serve him and that it doesn't go both ways.
The most obnoxious boss I ever had was a fellow programmer, and the problem wasn't that he was a turncoat. He was just obnoxious. I think you could take the problem you're describing and generalize it to any manager-managee relationship, and it reduces to simple bad management. Some managers will be attentive and make positive contributions, others will be inattentive and destructive. The latter style is self-defeating, and that's going to be hard to get away with forever.
The key element is motivation. Good managers are about getting the job done.
Bad managers are all about abusing the people under them to make themselves feel more important.
These are not compatible goals.
One of the tragedies of MBA culture is that it teaches businesses to screw over employees, customers, and often shareholders too.
There's no sense of making a contribution - it's all about being the criminal with the knife, taking on people who can't defend themselves or don't even understand they're being mugged.
Bad managers are all about abusing the people under them to make themselves feel more important.
I agree but it's not that simple. Most bad managers (the garden variety bad ones, not the psychopaths) aren't trying to abuse the people under them, but are trying to make themselves look good at any cost.
They often look like they're making "hard choices" (i.e. choices against the interests of others in the organization, including their reports) in the interest of "getting the job done" but they're actually externalizing costs or pushing problems into the future.
I would say that good managers try to direct action toward the shared interests of the employees and the organization. Good management tries to prevent those kinds of conflicts, long before they've become obvious, because when the organization and employee play against each other, it starts getting bad for everyone. As you correctly mentioned, MBA culture is all about squeezing pennies out of every transaction, which endangers any hope of good will in the business.
I agree that most managers, even if they are bad, would not abuse people under them just because it feels gratifying. That kind of behavior would be a really strong indicator of a serious mental problem. Most of the time the abuse pattern would be more about neglect or a failure of empathy. The abuse might be in plain sight and look calculated to inflict pain, but the manager would either be oblivious or practicing denial. Their attention would be on some other priority, like pleasing their own superior.
I don't know this person, but did you ever think that his obnoxiousness is the result of a broken culture of anti-intellecutalism, recklessness, and machismo that emerges naturally in a world where programmers are business subordinates, as opposed to one in which we are autonomous professionals who are sponsored rather than traditionally employed or managed?
It's not like obnoxious bosses have a tribal affiliation to "managers" versus programmers. Sure, there are some who consciously think that way, but I don't think it's the norm. The insufferable management consultant fuckheads who comprise MBA Culture don't have any conscious allegiance to "MBA Culture". They have an entitled way of thinking, for sure, but and some executives do think tribally, but I don't think that a mentality of conscious allegiance among and to "business people" is the norm.
The boss I'm talking about is a special case and one-of-a-kind as far as I know. He also happens to be foreign-born and from a country that I don't know much about. But he admitted once that his friends had nick-named him Eeyore on account of his not-so-sunny disposition, so I think being obnoxious was/is a cross he has to bear alone.
I'm too far removed from corporate culture right now to really feel what you're saying. But Zed Shaw seemed to have similar gripes and he is very funny. I'm sure you know of him, but if not, look him up.
I wonder if my comment was downvoted because I made him sound as if he was cursed with some condition outside of his control and that's all. I feel sorry for people who have self-defeating patterns of behavior that cause them problems -- even if I, myself, could not stand to be around them, because I don't believe anyone would willingly choose to have problems. This boss may well have even been in that category. Who knows. But in point of fact, his behavior was frankly abusive, vindictive, and bullying toward me, and he would throw demonstrative fits of temper and behave in ways that I've never thought possible to get away with in a workplace, all the while being very personal and spewing pure hate. When this type of person is your boss, it only makes it so much harder to deal with.
I understand this, but I think that you'll eventually get bored if you can't get a sense of progress out of your work. This requires that you pick your tools and problems. If you're lucky enough to work in an open-allocation environment, and if that persists for 40 years, then that's great and you'll never be bored or frustrated.
However, most programmers want their work to be progressive: bigger challenges, more interesting problems, high-impact opportunities. This'll inevitably put you on the battlefield with status quo rent-seekers who hate you just for improving things. Even if you're not a threat to them in anyway, they'll hit you preemptively, just to prove that they can.
I really don't want to learn office politics
I understand. Who does? How many college kids say, "I want to get out there and be a private-sector politician"? Probably very few.
It's a shitty game. It shouldn't exist. But it does, and the only way we can hold it back is if good people are willing to join the fight, and able to win it.
what makes them my enemies? If they weren't around I'd have to do more of that non-coding crap work
It's not "programmer good, business bad". There are good businesspeople and bad, turncoat programmers. What makes the bad guys bad is not what they do, but the mentality. The bad guys are the ones who see us as overpaid cost centers and peasantry. Decent people managers and entrepreneurs are worth their weight in gold, but very rare: maybe 10% of the tribe.
A good manager knows that his job is to be a "sheep dog". His role is to protect the people doing the work, from assaults on all sides, so they can do the work. Whether it's an executive trying to squeeze employees or a low-level employee being a toxic jerk (i.e. making sexist remarks, insulting others' work) a good manager fights that. A bad manager thinks that his reports exist to serve him and that it doesn't go both ways.