The further away one gets from the technical side the more one is operating with imperfect information. Even if you're technical yourself you can't oversee everything so you look for rules that you can impose to try to guide things without having to micromanage.

If every function could be reduced to rules, however, life would be a lot simpler than it is. Rule makers need to understand why people have to do X or Y before banning or forcing some behaviour and I think this is where rules go wrong - the people that make them aren't the ones necessarily having to live by them.

I've been a manager and I know of no way to deal with this other than to make time for development myself and see where the problems are. I think one shouldn't really be making rules for things one isn't doing oneself - if you are then you're going too low level.

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scarface_74 a day ago | parent [-]

Sure there is a way, hire good people, fire bad people , give them wide guardrails and hold them accountable for results.

Hire people based on their proven ability to deal with ambiguity and gets things done. Like Joel Spolsky said, the only hiring criteria is if they are smart and get things done.

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t43562 18 hours ago | parent [-]

With unlimited budgets and American employment law perhaps .. or if you're in a startup and have the luxury of beginning from scratch.

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scarface_74 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Most businesses don’t need rockstar ninja developers. They just need professionals who give a damn. That doesn’t mean have “passion” and work 60 hours a week or filter based on people who can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.

Ordinary enterprise CRUD “senior” developers don’t cost that much especially if you hire remotely.

No offense to enterprise devs intended. That’s what most developers are who work in the US as was I for the first 25 years of my career.

	▲	t43562 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My problem, when I was hiring for my company about year ago, was with not having the money to get people like that. This was in the UK of course and this year the employers seem to have a big advantage thanks to world events.