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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

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Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#11

Post by nobleach »

My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able to see the big picture and know the potential pitfalls. When I spitball ideas at how to solve a problem, he seems 5 steps ahead. With that said, he plays a different role. He is more like the arbiter between business and engineering. And I like him having that role.

With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas. I love knowing that our CEO is one heck of an inspiring guy but I don't want him meddling in engineering. I'm sure he's smart enough that he could figure it out, but that would be a waste of his talent. Right now, his brilliance is evident in the people he's put into leadership. They're all experts of their domain. This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding)

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#13

Post by commandlinefan »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #4

I don't mind if my boss can't do my job. I mind if my boss can't do my job AND tells me how I should do it. The major difference there is one is support and tracking, the other is just incompetent in all areas if management.

I don't know - in my experience as a programmer, when I work for somebody that's never worked as a programmer, they tend to estimate based on how long they wish something would take (which is usually an hour, two max). Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to time are far more realistic about how long something might take to complete.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#14

Post by MattGaiser »

commandlinefan wrote: post #13
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #4

I don't mind if my boss can't do my job. I mind if my boss can't do my job AND tells me how I should do it. The major difference there is one is support and tracking, the other is just incompetent in all areas if management.

I don't know - in my experience as a programmer, when I work for somebody that's never worked as a programmer, they tend to estimate based on how long they wish something would take (which is usually an hour, two max). Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to time are far more realistic about how long something might take to complete.

And about how much small differences in assumptions and what was written in the ticket can impact development times.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#15

Post by [deleted] »

helge9210 wrote: post #3

"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job" Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department. My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.

[deleted]

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#16

Post by codegeek »

The boss "should" be able to do most of your job BUT they Should not need/want to. Good bosses understand the word "delegation" and that is what it takes to build a real team and company. I am a boss and I can do most of my team's work (whether efficient or not) but I don't want to because I have higher priority things to do to get the most out of my time. For example, I can code but I don't (well mostly). I have a team of developers. I focus more on customers (existing and prospective). But then again, I have customer support folks who help with daily requests so that I am not answering every support question myself. Can I ? You bet. Would I ? Not if I want to scale my company further. If shit hits the fan, sure I will talk to a customer but I trust my team to take care of them before it gets to me.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#17

Post by realityking »

nobleach wrote: post #11

My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able to see the big picture and know the potential pitfalls. When I spitball ideas at how to solve a problem, he seems 5 steps ahead. With that said, he plays a different role. He is more like the arbiter between business and engineering. And I like him having that role. With that said, I actuall…

My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that reports directly to them.

The CEO certainly shouldn’t be expected to have the skills of every expert across the entire organization. But if they were to be the executive in charge of Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they’d ideally do a passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP level down it works out quite often.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#18

Post by AlwaysRock »

I couldnt agree more. A previous boss held a company wide meeting and everyone laid out their yearly goals. When he got to his it was something like establish channel partnerships. Very wishy washy and difficult to measure. I knew almost at that moment that I wasnt going to be at the company at the end of that year. He had decided his job was now to manage rather than do the job the rest of us were doing.

At a certain point that may be effective but we were not at that point.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#19

Post by Frost1x »

dandanua wrote: post #5

On the other hand, if your boss thinks he can do your job (and do it even better than you), while in fact he can't – you will get the worst nightmare.

Is worst nightmare the new normal? Various levels of management often handwave away a task because they understand its function at a high level. True quality management requires a deeper understanding of what it is you're managing.

I understand the function of creating, launching, and orbiting a satellite geosynchronously to do GPS so it's easy, right? Yea, not so much.

I'm a firm believer that you need to understand everything at least one layer deeper than high level functional descriptions so you can start to reason about the difficulty or amount of skill needed to accomplish something. You understand the real problems (even if only at the surface) and know where opportunity lies. With a pure functional perspective many current managers have, you simply can't reasonably manage and plan and are instead a glorified resource scheduler with whims.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#20

Post by markild »

Supermancho wrote: post #8
helge9210 wrote: post #3

"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job" Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department. My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.

> My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed. If your boss can do your work, has the time to do your work (eg there isn't enough work), the work doesn't need to be done in parallel, and can do similar quality work, and is willing to do that work, you're not needed. That's the takeaway, without oversimplification, which makes sense.

Agreed. If not, you could just as well have said "If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed."

It's actually an interesting point that. Oversimplified a bit, I feel there are two different ways that people measure their worth in the workplace. There is "no one else can do what I do" and then there's "I make sure that everything I do can be done by someone else".

Personally I much prefer the latter.

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