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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

#101

Post by pleb_nz »

They're quite different roles and traits so I don't know people think this is the case.

Not all managers are leaders and not not leaders are managers.

The best leader I know owns and runs a fairly massive company and does no or at least, very little management. And the company uses the knowledge that leaders and managers are different to run a well oiled machine. They put managers in where managers are needed and use leaders where leaders are required. Of course there is crossover in places and they hire with the two traits in mind for those positions.

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

#102

Post by therealdrag0 »

elgar1212 wrote: post #94

The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting sh…

I sympathize because even being a team lead has reduced my coding enough I sometimes code in my free time to make up for it cuz I enjoy it.

But I think your mistake is saying only those who love coding are “most inspiring” and most “get shit done”. There’s definitely lots of people who love to get shit done who are indifferent about coding.

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

#104

Post by seahawks78 »

In the article that has been cited in the link the abstract says "Science says". I wonder if the writer even knows what Science is or means? No wonder our mass media today and public discourses are filled with utter quality garbage rhetoric and discussions that are not even worthy of two minutes of reading time.

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

#105

Post by hrpnk »

Worth mentioning that management vs. IC is not a decision for life. Charity Majors wrote about the opportunities and challenges when switching throughout one's career between management and individual contributor [1] and [2].

[1] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...

[2] https://charity.wtf/2022/03/24/twin-anxieties-of-the-enginee...

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

#106

Post by shepherdjerred »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #95
antipaul wrote: post #40

More details, from the people behind Apple’s internal leadership training: Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics: 1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions 2. immersion in the detail…

A special kind of disaster happens when a manager thinks they have deep expertise but they don’t. I have to be actively vigilant of what this manager is doing because one statement could lead to hours wasted. Just the other day they were about to launch a whole S3 tangent involving two teams because some report came back saying a few EBS volumes were not encrypted.

Interactions with my managers at Amazon made me a much more cynical human being (at least when it comes to managers/corporate politics).

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

#107

Post by rawgabbit »

antipaul wrote: post #40

More details, from the people behind Apple’s internal leadership training: Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics: 1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions 2. immersion in the detail…

But that runs counter to all the arguments professional scrum masters and agile evangelists make. "All you need to do know is agile/scrum/fad du jour". /s

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

#108

Post by FlyingAvatar »

__derek__ wrote: post #77

The article discusses senior-level management, but the comments here mostly focus on line-management. IMO, these are very different beasts. The former set overall strategy and need to be highly competent in their area of expertise. The latter focus on tactics and don't necessarily need to be competent in their team's area of focus as long as there are other mechanisms to provide their team with technical guidance, me…

What is the role of the manager, if they are not providing guidance and mentorship?

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

#109

Post by lossolo »

gopalv wrote: post #84
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…

> Rarely is an awesome individual magically called upon to become a manager, particularly by poor managers who are already messing stuff up There's a passage in Platos' Republic which is illuminating about this particular circumstance. And I quote from [1]. """ And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the…

I put your quote into ChatGPT:

This passage is discussing the idea that good people do not want to hold public office because they do not want to be seen as hirelings who are only interested in payment, or as thieves who are secretly enriching themselves at the expense of the public. The author argues that good people are not ambitious and do not care about honor, so they must be forced to serve out of fear of punishment. The worst punishment, according to the author, is the fear of being ruled by someone who is worse than oneself. This fear is what ultimately compels good people to take office, even though they do not want to and do not expect to benefit from it. The author suggests that good people take office out of a sense of necessity, because they are not able to entrust the task of ruling to anyone who is better than themselves.

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

#110

Post by civilized »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #97
swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non technical scrum master fills a very important role for higher management: somebody to take blame and responsibility.

I've never seen this, I've seen them be some kind of project manager role or just bubbly people who say some BS and convince company to pay them to waste employees time.

In my company, the project manager is essentially just there to report progress to management.

Why is it necessary to report progress to management? I'm not sure; as far as I've seen, nothing is ever done with the information, except to propagate it further up the chain. I can only speculate that, without progress reporting, management would seem to have too little work to do to justify its headcount.

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