Isn't the job of a dev manager to make reasoned judgments about legacy code, tech debt, etc.?
Do people really work in environments where "managers" aren't capable of understanding these things? If you do, I'd highly suggest getting a job where the person supervising you has at least an ounce of development experience. As developers, we don't have to put up with this.
That's incredibly hard to figure out during an interview.
-- someone whose boss is king anti-midas: everything he touches is brittle duct-taped shit that breaks if you glance at it crosseyed. I just spent 4 hours looking for queries in our codebase to finally discover a bash script loads query templates from a sql db (completely non-source-controlled, naturally), seds parameters into them, and runs them, and of fucking course, doesn't escape quotes quite right...
> the person supervising you has at least an ounce of development experience.
In my experience, they were a developer for a couple of years 15-20 years ago and while they might think they're still a developer, they're generally more clueless than a manager who has no development background.
The absolute best manager's I've ever had were one's who still did at least some active development on the product. I know that's hard for a manager to fit in to a busy schedule but I really feel like there should be concessions made in the organization for this to happen.
Careful with that assumption. Sometimes your Manager has enough Fortran knowledge to know what programming is, and has very sharp ideas about how it used to be done and how it should be done ... God forbid he also micro manages and has an opinion about stuff he does not really understand. I prefer a humble 'ignorant' manager who delegates than a 'tech-savvy' manager who is delusional.
Jobs in one's chosen field in one's chosen location aren't always so easy to come by, with a lot of risk of ending up in the same--or worse--situation.
Do people really work in environments where "managers" aren't capable of understanding these things? If you do, I'd highly suggest getting a job where the person supervising you has at least an ounce of development experience. As developers, we don't have to put up with this.