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The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

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Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#11

Post by mdorazio »

obblekk wrote: post #5

This is true but nuanced in my experience. Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers. Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management. I make this dist…

I’d say the worst managers are the ones who decide that management is the best path to money, competence and effort be damned.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#13

Post by TimPC »

A great IC with the right skill sets and inclinations to be a manager will be the best manager compared to a mediocre IC or someone out of field. Most ICs don’t have the right skill sets or inclinations for management and end up being a disaster of a manager.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#16

Post by quelltext »

debacle wrote: post #6

Being a manager is like having kids. A lot of people don't want to have kids, because they see how other people's kids behave. You can do the right things and raise incredible children. A lot of people don't want to be a manager, because they see how other people behave as managers. You can do the right things and be an incredible manager.

Unfortunately, my impression is that there are more bad examples than good ones. I have some notion of what I'd want my managers (or I if I became one) not do, but I don't know what is necessary to be a good manager.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#17

Post by TimPC »

debacle wrote: post #6

Being a manager is like having kids. A lot of people don't want to have kids, because they see how other people's kids behave. You can do the right things and raise incredible children. A lot of people don't want to be a manager, because they see how other people behave as managers. You can do the right things and be an incredible manager.

I think you have a very skewed view on why people aren’t having kids. Many people want kids but choose not to have them because they can’t afford enough space for them or don’t want to raise them while living with their parents. The number of people scared off by watching a few bad apples misbehave is a negligible fraction.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#19

Post by phkahler »

instance wrote: post #2

I know an amazing IC at a software company I once worked at that I still keep in touch with. He has extremely deep technical knowledge, which you can simply deduct from basically everyone in the company (even from other teams) coming to him for advice. He's been at the company for >10 years. He has strong opinions on current processes and just getting things done . This post resonated deeply with me, since I've discu…

Some of the best I've seen are highly technical people who moved into management and then realized they can actually do more by leveraging their people. It's not the same hands-on, but they enjoy working with others to get things done.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#20

Post by diego_moita »

I wonder what kind of people are these Steve Jobs cultists...

Most of the "wisdom" of all "Steve Jobs said..." is just subjective interpretation of vague and ambiguous statements.

Truth, the guy had a lot of successes. But if you look at them most were just accidental and he only recognized them as success when they hit him in the face.

* Apple didn't "invent" the Mac, all of it's technologies were copied straight out of Xerox's Palo Alto research center. He found them in a demo.

* Jobs didn't "invent" Pixar. George Lucas and Ed Catmull did it. His project was to create an hardware company (the only thing he knew to do) and to sell it. But Pixar "accidentally" found success creating animated intros for commercials and television shows and Jobs did nothing to discover this early market.

* Jobs didn't invent the iPhone. He was scared of dealing in an area where Apple didn't have expertise and tought it would be dangerous (a call to 911 failing because the phone could be stuck in a processing task). It took years of internal pressure by Apple engineers and management and a personal fiasco on a Nokia phone with iTunes for him to accept the iPhone.

* Jobs didn't invent the AppStore. For the first 6 months the iPhone didn't had an AppStore because he tought it would relinquish control of the platform to others. He only accepted it because in these first 6 months the iPhone sales were a disaster. He accepted the AppStore because the customers were screamming for it. It was the AppStore that saved the iPhone.

* Jobs didn't invent the Apple I, Wozniak did it. And the idea to turn the kit into a functional computer was not Jobs'. It was a precondition imposed by a RadioShack manager.

* NEXT wasn't a commercial success. An expensive computer for college students with a black and white monitor was not selling enough to sustain the company. He was basically lucky that at the same time, Apple under Sculley, was a much bigger failure and the management board called him back.

"Reality distortion field" and "stealing" other people's ideas were Jobs' greatest talents. But then, these are the talents of most cult founders from Jim Jones to Donald Trump.

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