Dave Cutler is, seemingly, a good example of this. If you have not read it, I recommend the book Show Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary, about the development of Microsoft Windows NT under his leadership.
The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
61–70 of 166 posts
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#62I’ve encountered significant evidence of the opposite being true in my experience
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#63I'm a counterpoint to this.
Outstanding IC wanting to get into management for job security / ageism. Turned out to be a bad manager too focused on team and unable to effectively manage up and sideways.
I'm now a consultant. Ageism is suddenly on my side in consulting. Coding until I die.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never wanted to be a manager until I experienced one of the worst managers I had ever run across and decided maybe I should revise that particular opinion. I'm now a VP and I make it my goal not to be that kind of a manager. I do still sometimes wish I were just a regular coder though. There is a lot of stuff about being a manager I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
Are you me? I also miss doing the individual contributor stuff. But… I know the business. I know the team. I know the pain points, why the exist, and the organizational dynamics that allow them to persist. Now that I have moved from informal to formal leadership, I try to focus on: (1) adroitly executing the approvals and things where I could screw up the team by being slow (2) coaching individual team members to bui…
Now imagine trying to do the same thing as an IC :(
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#65I 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 ou…
That's a distorted view of what business is. You don't need to invent anything to be a great business or a great business leader: just to do it in a form that the market appreciates.
In fact the invention is mostly irrelevant to the business part. Ford didn't invent the car either, IKEA didn't invent the furniture (not even the self-assembly furniture), and Walmart etc. didn't invent the supermarket.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#66This is true. And no more buts.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#67This is an editorial written by someone who is heavily biased and doesn't know how management or organizational improvement works.
> In my case, I didn't need someone to manage what we already did. I needed someone frustrated by our current level of productivity. Someone irritated by our current level of quality.
That's called Operations Management, buddy, and you don't hire an IC for that job.
> Someone annoyed by the fact very few shopfloor employees were being promoted to higher-level roles.
That is literally every manager's job. And, one could argue, a bad idea in general (see Peter Principle).
> "If your boss could do your job, you're more likely to be happy at work."
Why? Because the boss has empathy and compassion for her workers, and makes an effort to understand the work. That doesn't mean she has to do the work herself. She simply needs the context and understanding to be able to facilitate effectively and make her reports happy. Anybody who cares enough can do that.
I have had IC bosses who were insufferable, and non-IC bosses who were insufferable, and good bosses of each too. The ability to do the work has both helped and hindered their management. Focus on efficiency is good, but often efficiency isn't technical at all.
Managing is it's own skill, separate from being an IC. Simply promoting an IC who does not know how to manage will not always lead to good outcomes.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm predisposed to dislike Steve Jobs (I'm predisposed to dislike anyone who exploits other people tbh, so virtually all high-profile CEO). But there's already 5 pretty big successes in your list. At which point it stops being statically improbable he isn't exceptionally talented by some kind of metric?
Meanwhile there were a lot of failures: Apple Newton, Lisa, Copland, G4 cube, Pippin gaming console, the Nokia-iTunnes fiasco, ...
The Newton, Pippin and Copland were done before and without Jobs. And Lisa wasn't his thing (the Mac was, he was remove from being involved with Lisa).
As for the G4 cube, it is just a failed model, not some huge company bet - every company has some models that don't sell well. Apple's laptops and iMacs still sold greatly from Jobs new iMac to this day - if a particular model didn't do well that's not exactly a big deal. In fact it's an expected part of doing business. Apple had several other such products on its way to becoming the #1 valued company on earth.
Also, what Nokia-iTunes fiasco? Nokia folded, and iTunes became the biggest music store, and then an app store and a streaming service.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm predisposed to dislike Steve Jobs (I'm predisposed to dislike anyone who exploits other people tbh, so virtually all high-profile CEO). But there's already 5 pretty big successes in your list. At which point it stops being statically improbable he isn't exceptionally talented by some kind of metric?
Can you read? The point being made is that none of them were his.
The point being that this is irrelevant. Do you think Bezos invented Cloud services or coded AWS himself? Did Musk invent the electric car? Did Ford invent the regular car?
It's about leading and putting things to market and succeding there, not about inventing stuff. They're not in the inventing or research business, they are in the selling commercial products business.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#70This 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 agree with every word of this. I would also add that there's a third category, or maybe a 2.b: individual contributors in their 30s and 40s who look ahead to their future and say "well, I guess I better become a manager at some point" without having any particular aptitude or even an intrinsic desire. Many organizations have quite intelligently created parallel paths for contributors to keep advancing, which somewh…
In defense of your 2.b manager, many organizations are improperly set up where the only way to advance is to move into management.