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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

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Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#101

Post by pdimitar »

lhnz wrote: post #99
pdimitar wrote: post #84

Right now I am 36. I had a team- and tech-lead position for the first time in my carreer back when I was 28. All other programmers loved me (except 2 slackers who hated being asked for statuses, even if it was twice a month). QA was much better than before, frontenders were happy to receive clear directions and tasks while having some freedom in choosing designs. The devs from other teams loved interacting with me, I…

Although I was never demoted (I left), I completely see where you're coming from. When I was a manager, I stripped away red-tape and created an environment which I felt gave engineers room for self-improvement - particularly if I could see that they were smart and ambitious and needed to be stretched. Since then I've been freelancing, however a few of my ex-colleagues from way back have told me that I was one of the…

>> Non-technical managers often see somebody that's good as a resource that must be overseen and endlessly exploited for as much work output as possible. Bean-counting ensues.

This is probably a highly subjective opinion, but IMO such people lack emotional intelligence -- not only technical expertise, or any idea on WHAT does it mean to actually work if you will.

I know this is less than flattering statement but it has been my face-to-face experience with such people. They were completely unable to execute casual human interaction outside of work, and I believe both phenomena (that plus the un-empathic view on their subordinates) are tightly linked together.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#102

Post by _m8fo »

wageslave2 wrote: post #44
quantumhobbit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Successful managers need both people and technical skills. That is why it isn't an easy job.

Actually technical skills and then people skills and in that order.

I disagree. A manager is not an individual contributor. It's important for them to have technical skills, but I don't think it's necessary they be on par with an average developer, let alone better than the best.

* The developers they're managing.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#103

Post by fpig »

CarpetBench wrote: post #9

The most surprising part about this to me is that this matters at the top. Sure, for a middle manager it makes sense that it matters quite a bit. I'm pretty surprised that it matters much at the top, though. If Elon Musk decided to head a major grocery chain I wouldn't stop to consider whether his lack of experience in retail groceries mattered much. But maybe it does? Really interesting to see the analogy extend to…

I don't understand what your point is, coaches are precisely an example of a boss having deep understanding of the work being done, as opposed to being hired purely for his people-management skills. You don't poach the manager of a retail chain to be your basketball coach.

Obviously a coach can't replace a player on the field, that's primarily because playing is more important and pays better than coaching at the top level, so no sports star wants to be "promoted" to a coach, they will coach once they can no longer play. And even then, being a coach is not necessarily the life goal for super-rich star athletes. It's a downgrade from what they used to be in their prime.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#104

Post by randcraw »

dahauns wrote: post #59
christophilus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, this part isn't true: "And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date." One of my best bosses was largely a C programmer (from back in the 80s). He'd still tinker with things from time to time, but I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. A software engineer who could have written a book like SCIP or Pro…

> I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. Not sure I agree with that. A lot of todays best practices and workflows (and the tech to go with it), especially considering team and release management, simply weren't around or at least widespread even twenty years ago. You know, stuff like CI, TDD, DVCS etc. etc.

As a S/W dev who started 30 years ago and finished his MSCS 27 years ago, I totally agree - S/W engineering (SWE) today is NOTHING like it was in the 1980s. SWE then was seen as mainstream CS and often a required part of a CS degree. Today, CS profs working in SWE are rara aves.

SWE's desiderata then was to become an engineering process, where components were marshalled into a formal blueprint, and only THEN did implementation begin. And when implementatione ended, only THEN did testing begin. And only pro TESTERs do the testing. And only pro librarians did the project configuring and building and SCCS control and S/W maintenance and releasing.

Much of today's SWE is subsumed by the choice of programming tools, esp the language: its innate constraints its object model, its hierarchical library interdependence, and the sundry constraints & guidelines these impose.

In 1985 there was a LOT of discussion of how to introduce more proscriptive programming models as ways to shape how programmers think and design and implement. Today most of that discussion is moot, since most prog. languages implicitly enforce most of that (implementation) proscription. And where voids exist (as in design), language convention and idiom (and community bias) tend to step in to constrain choice to shape thought and close the loop.

No, I think SWE has changed enormously since the antedeluvian world views that wrought the invention of Ada or Beck's first writing on Agility. Perhaps for S/W devs under age ~50, who grew up in the mature world of OOPLs, unit testing, and 'Agile uber alles', that form of SWE seems to be inviolate and have existed since time began, perhaps discovered on clay tablets in an ancient Ark. But no...

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#105

Post by ryandrake »

I guess I have to be a little bit contrarian. Of course we want our managers to have good technical fluency and to not have to have everything explained to them. It's necessary but insufficient. The skill set of a good manager is different from the skill set of a good individual contributor. I've worked with way too many engineering managers who were great engineers but needed a lot of coaching in order to manage well. At lots of tech companies, you get managers this way: Roger is "smarter than the average bear" and we want to reward smart people, and the only promotion we know is management, so congratulations: Roger is now a manager! Go manage people, Roger! Go understand the business implications of your team's work. Go communicate effectively with execs. Go write a project plan. It's not that Roger is stupid--far from it, its that he is now in a role that requires a totally different skill set.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#106

Post by CaptSpify »

bluGill wrote: post #63
zzalpha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Well, the traditional view of "management" is that it's a distinct job from "doing". Therefore, so the thinking goes, there is a distinct difference in skillsets, and thus the manager should be good at the managing bit, and the doer should be good at the doing bit. The reality is that in order to effect…

> The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. Actually it is not. One of the best bosses I ever had had no clue what I was doing. He was smart enough to admit that he didn't know how to do my job. He was excellent at his job though: figuring out who were good people and removing roadblocks from their way. He identified a few good programmers to do the…

I had a boss who was a decent manager, but not very technical. At first I hated her because she thought she could learn to be technical overnight, and wouldn't listen to our teams technical suggestions. Fast forward to a year later, and she was a great boss. She had given up on becoming technical overnight, and just referred to her technical employees instead.

I also had a boss who was very technical, but not a great politician or manager. It was nice being able to discuss the tech-side of things with him, but he didn't know how to get shit out of my way so I could get the job done. Nice guy, but I'd never want to work for him again.

I think a good boss knows their limitations, whether they be technical, political, managerial, etc. and knows how to delegate to the right people.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#107

Post by taeric »

bognition wrote: post #2

>The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Honestly some of my worst work experiences were getting jerked around by a superior who completely failed to understand the work required to do my job.

This is also one of those "discoveries" that raises the suspicion hairs on the back of my neck. Survivor bias will play large into this. In particular, people often assume teams that failed had failed members. That goes up to the leadership.

So, it is likely that people were happy on successful teams. This will be a post-hoc explanation for why they were successful. Which will also be a post-hoc for why the members are happy.

I want to give this research the benefit of the doubt. So, please take my post as an overly pessimistic view of the landscape. Hopefully this will help persuade me otherwise.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#108

Post by fpig »

benmarks wrote: post #77

From the comments: "I'd bet a lot of workers who are unhappy for other reasons end up judging their supervisor to have low technical competence, making causality hard to determine." Curious to see how competence is objectively measured in this case.

In my opinion, if the people who work with someone consider them incompetent, they likely are. I would even go so far to say that the opinion of coworkers might be the best predictor of someone's competence, better than any "objective" measure.

At least if the people you're asking are themselves competent in the skill they are judging (asking the dev team whether someone is good at sales might not be predictive).

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#109

Post by CaptSpify »

pdimitar wrote: post #84

Right now I am 36. I had a team- and tech-lead position for the first time in my carreer back when I was 28. All other programmers loved me (except 2 slackers who hated being asked for statuses, even if it was twice a month). QA was much better than before, frontenders were happy to receive clear directions and tasks while having some freedom in choosing designs. The devs from other teams loved interacting with me, I…

You often hear the idea that all business cares about is the "bottom line". I don't think that's true. IME, all businesses care about is ego with a heavy correlation to the bottom line. IME management doesn't care if they are making money, as long as they look like they are making money. Often the best way to look like you are making money is to make money, but sometimes it's easier to manipulate data sets...

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#110

Post by sage76 »

At a unicorn I was working at, MBAs were being hired to be engineering managers. I did not see a single engineer promoted to management, it was mostly all MBAs. The few I had direct contact were really useless at helping engineers out, all I ever heard from them was "Just get it done.". If I asked for help, they'd say "Well who else is gonna do it then?".

I felt demoralised and lost some of my confidence. But the company was bleeding talent at the engineering level, plenty of engineers called out this crap and asked the CEO for answers. CEO would make excuses and not do much. Now the company is not doing well at all, even the senior leadership is leaving in droves, the CEO has even been replaced, the valuation has also declined quite a bit.

I am not in silicon valley, so not sure about there but over here, it seems to be a trend to have MBAs in all management positions above engineering and even CTOs of startups who are MBAs.

I had no interest in an MBA until I saw this trend. Now I am seriously considering that route, because it seems there is a serious glass ceiling. Doing an MBA might be necessary for me to move up the ranks.

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