True. Non technical managers can get in the sea. They're protecting their asses 99 percent of the time. Those who can, do.
Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
171–180 of 212 posts
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully it is never an overnight switch and the engineer's career goals are respected. Any non-shite company is going to have engineers taking on leadership responsibilities at various levels they are comfortable with before turning them full loose. In some companies, like Gore Industries, and other employee owned entities the engineers and operations people organically select their own supervisors by consensus and…
That sounds fantastic, I wished it was easy to find places like that.
Pure luck.
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#173People also prefer people of their own race, gender, age group, etc. It would be remarkable if they didn’t prefer people of the same educational and work experience.
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, when I was working with small companies this kind of thinking was all too common: Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? “Yes it’s just a backend and a frontend.” Vs “with support for 187 million active users? Which level of accessibility? Will we have a cloud provider? Media upload support? Redundancy? What kind of login functionality? Do we have support if they loose their email account? Why are you lookin…
And the common question..."How quickly can you do it if I add 10 people....ok 11, but no more, because we have to be mindful of cost"
This question depends more on the manager’s motives than on their knowledge.
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#175The more junior you are, the more likely it is that not only can your boss do your job, they can do it better than you can. The more senior you become, the less likely that is to be the case. How many CEOs could do all of the CFO, COO, CTO, and General Counsel's jobs? Zero. How many programming team leads can do the junior programmer's job? Basically/hopefully all of them.
How many programming team managers can do the programmer's job? In my experience, often, not many. And it is usually a recipe for disaster.
On a large engineering team doing complex work, many engineers can’t even do each other’s jobs without an extended period of retraining
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see it mostly as a refutation of the idea that MBA style management-as-a generic-function works - nothing more.
I have come to the conclusion that management is not a profession. Engineering, law, medicine, teaching are professions, that is, occupations that require considerable training or study. Manager is a role in a team that requires you not to be deficient in social and organizational skills. In settings where the people being managed are professionals, I have come to think that there should be a vote of no confidence op…
This comment should be upvoted to the moon. Such a VALUABLE idea.
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in my teens, I got my first "real" job. It was working at a service station. The station was a part of a chain of dozens. The owner was a well-known local multimillionaire. For whatever reason, he happened to be at my station on my first day at work. He and I spent over an hour pumping gas, checking oil, doing an oil change, patching tires, and so forth. I learned a lot more than simply how to work at a se…
I love this story and the owner is exemplifying the moral behavior I'd want to if I were in that place... However, > Never saw the guy again. It doesn't scale. If you have the knack to build a company like that, eventually you won't be able to touch the front lines of what your company is doing. Hopefully, having that type of leadership at the top creates emulation all the way down, but still, it rings of "die a hero…
I disagree.
If you are a leader in a field, and you have forgotten or no longer can do the work at the very lowest levels (for example, even something simply like mopping), you have lost an expertise that made you valuable in the first place.
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
This ... it is a total fantasy to think that the leader(s) of a company are somehow aware of all of the work that is entailed by every job in the company. For really small companies, or junior employees with a line manager, that may be true. But as you said, the more senior you become, things completely change. There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sal…
> There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible. Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands of small business owners every month.
Hahahahahaha, owned in such a concise way. To the moon!
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reality is that people who achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others. Aptitude is in general going to be either uncorrelated or positively correlated across different areas, but time invested is going to be negatively correlated. Hence the stereotype of nerds with poor social skills: building social skills takes time and effort, and time and effort spent on building those skills is time and effor…
The savant/nerd engineer with poor social skills is a troupe which does exist, but so is the manager who washed out of the developer track because they couldn't keep up on the technical side, and they're not a better manager than they were a developer but those failures are harder to quantify.
I think even that "poor social skills nerd" engineer trope might be partially an example of Berkson's Paradox [1]. You have to have serious technical chops to compensate for a lack of social skills, and it's hard to see all of the people with weak social skills who aren't engineers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
edit: removing markdown syntax
Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in my teens, I got my first "real" job. It was working at a service station. The station was a part of a chain of dozens. The owner was a well-known local multimillionaire. For whatever reason, he happened to be at my station on my first day at work. He and I spent over an hour pumping gas, checking oil, doing an oil change, patching tires, and so forth. I learned a lot more than simply how to work at a se…
I love this story and the owner is exemplifying the moral behavior I'd want to if I were in that place... However, > Never saw the guy again. It doesn't scale. If you have the knack to build a company like that, eventually you won't be able to touch the front lines of what your company is doing. Hopefully, having that type of leadership at the top creates emulation all the way down, but still, it rings of "die a hero…
The legend scales infinitely. You don't have to pump every gallon of gas, or write every line of code. But if everyone knows that you can, will, and often do...