Suits Afraid Of Debate

{EditHint: I remember another topic about the conflict between technical thinkers and management, but I cannot find it now. If found, perhaps this should be merged with it.}

Many managers do like to debate issues, even important ones. I believe this is because most business is driven by sales, and sales is mostly an intuition-based discipline. Those at the top got where they are because of their sales intuition, and tend to promote those like themselves who are also from the sales/intuition world. In such an atmosphere, "one does not need debate because we can use intuition".

Intuition is probably the best way for sales to humans, but us techies often question its value for technical decisions. This is where a CultureConflict? arises because the suits are perfectly comfortable using intuition only for nearly all decisions.

Debates and intuition are not necessarily mutually-exclusive. A debate may make one better able to use intuition, and intuition can be used to settle close calls in debates. However, the suits still avoid debates, perhaps because they know they are less skilled in that arena (at least written debate). There is an underlying assumption that if you are a manager, then you have to be smarter than your underlings. Of course techies reject this idea, seeing managers as experts in negotiation and diplomacy, but not so bright or not up-to-date on tech issues. We see it more as a division of labor along specialties rather than "levels" of ability. But the notion of level seems to percolate through most organizations. --top