VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

I think this is an error. Taking your best coder and then spending their time on not-coding is wasteful of their talents.

Furthermore, insofar as you create competition to hold that position, you're creating a destructive work environment. Software development is a cooperative activity that can't be efficiently partitioned.

Or the way I look at it, such a guy in a leader ship position can mentor young passionate folks to be just like him.

>>Furthermore, insofar as you create competition to hold that position

Having competent guys compete for a position is far better than promoting a total idiot to lead such guys.

>>you're creating a destructive work environment.

How is appointing a competent guy creating a destructive work environment, and appointing an incompetent guy not creating a demotivating environment.

Most demotivating part of my day is when I spend time with my higher ups, explaining them some very basics things like SQL or regular expressions or about network call latency which most of the times they have no clue of. Many times its so bad, you really have to talk to them like you talk to your 9 year old nephew and even after hours of explaining things are so bad they can't really get simple things like the difference between a DOM parser and a SAX parser.

I am not saying the guy must code like a champion 24x7. But he should have atleast been some one who has built a thing or two under tough demanding deadlines. Some one who has leaned stuff doing it by experience and not just some guy whose only known accomplishment is being at the right place at the right time, riding an economic wave or being some god father manager's yes man.

>>Software development is a cooperative activity that can't be efficiently partitioned.

Exactly that is why we need one of us to lead us.

Because you based it on competition.

Holding that position, which presumably comes with better pay, perks and a résumé line item, is a zero sum game.

Everything good that programmer A does for the company now directly disadvantages programmer B and vice versa.

Do you think this creates conditions conducive to cooperative efforts like developing and maintaining complex software?

If you want to pick a leader, pick a leader yourself. Boohoo, it's hard and you might hurt people's feelings. Well too bad. Picking leaders is itself an act of leadership. Too many senior managers shirk the responsibility of growing a cadre of good managers by connecting it all to numbers that encourage destructive behaviour. It's the lazy and gutless way to lead.

See Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations for a full enumeration of why having people compete for a tech leadership job would easily destroy any small company.

Either way competition is inevitable- If its not from the inside, it will be far worse- from the outside. And in most cases companies have to acqui-hire people or purchase out an entire product line because they just can't get innovation out of their own people.

But the sad fact is its not current employees are at fault here. Unless you are super foolish, why should you ever work hard when some guy who isn't doing 1/10th work you do or is 1/100th as competent take all the credit, money and power stealing your work? The net result is no one contributes, the company struggles and buys their life saving kits every now and them from the outside.

And no competent person will accept a incompetent person over them, especially when getting a job or doing a start up/side project is so easy these days. How many times have we seen companies that claim to hire all super candidates with all those algo/ds questions routinely acquire start ups at big prices, yet they can't get something half decent out of their super star regular hires.

If you look down below, you will see it all gets down to incompetent middle management.

>>Too many senior managers shirk the responsibility of growing a cadre of good managers by connecting it all to numbers that encourage destructive behavior.

No, they do it because they know competent folks will grow and become a threat do their positions.

I'm sorry, and this is going to sound harsh, but this is awful, awful advise. And pitifully shortsighted.

So, a manager that leads developers should be the best developer?

What about a director that manages developers AND architects? Or developers AND QA? Does the director have to be the best at both those functions? Or some "best of the combination" of the two?

What about the VP? Now the VP of engineering likely leads (in a large enough organization) directors of QA, engineering, product, maybe some other roles like IS as well. In turn, they might lead managers or some function directly. Is this VP the uber of all those roles?

And then we get to the CEO.

No, this is terribly short sighted. Amazingly so.

In sports is quite commonly known that the best players usually make terrible managers. There are quite a few theories on why, but the end result is that very few great players have been great managers (oddly enough, MLB has more ex-player managers than the other leagues, and is more immune to the above criticism...again, many theories why). In fact, quite a few of the best managers in some sports are typically borderline players, if they played at all. Using your "best should lead" theory, only the best ex-basketball, ex-football, ex-baseball players should be running teams in the NBA, NFL or MLB.

No, the best leaders should lead. Doesn't matter if they are not the best developers And how good a developer one was becomes irrelevant past "team lead" or manager at best.