Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

inc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 166 posts

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

#121

Post by ajmurmann »

gtaylor wrote: post #115
ajmurmann wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is how you become a manager as you call out, but what happens after? How to stay an excellent IC as you spend more time in management and become a manager of managers? Picking up a small enhancement it big once in a while can be helpful for you, but also really interruptive for the team. You can code on your own time, but that only goes so far. What are strategies to keep these qualities a manager brings who al…

Why do you need to be a top IC after years managing managers? Some of the worst managers I've seen tried to cling too much to the technical details, which is smothering to the actual ICs.

It's the article's entire point that top IC's make better managers, no?

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

#122

Post by thenerdhead »

oldstrangers wrote: post #114

I've gotten a lot of pushback (from two different companies) when I suggested openly that any PM should have an extensive if not intimate understanding of the projects they're managing. They should realistically be able to do the work they're delegating, because you routinely need that level of understanding if the ones you're managing expect to get useful information out of you. If the manager doesn't understand the…

I get the spirit of what you’re saying, but to realistically be able to do the work seems a bit far. This would be hard to apply to even Steve Jobs. Maybe another way to phrase it might be that they should intimately understand what the vision of the work entails rather than need to always ask for the next horizon.

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

#123

Post by shanusmagnus »

baruch wrote: post #87
gopalv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The main reason I took my first management position was after I remembered the pain of refusing a previous offer and getting an awful manager to lead the team. Though I do not think I'm very good at managing myself. Though I might be an OK leader.

In my experience, leadership and management are pretty disjoint. You can be good at one and not good at the other. Although, FWIW, I suspect that your introspection about whether or not you're a good manager means you're a lot better than you're giving yourself credit for.

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

thenerdhead wrote: post #122
oldstrangers wrote: post #114

I've gotten a lot of pushback (from two different companies) when I suggested openly that any PM should have an extensive if not intimate understanding of the projects they're managing. They should realistically be able to do the work they're delegating, because you routinely need that level of understanding if the ones you're managing expect to get useful information out of you. If the manager doesn't understand the…

I get the spirit of what you’re saying, but to realistically be able to do the work seems a bit far. This would be hard to apply to even Steve Jobs. Maybe another way to phrase it might be that they should intimately understand what the vision of the work entails rather than need to always ask for the next horizon.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by oldstrangers »

thenerdhead wrote: post #122
oldstrangers wrote: post #114

I've gotten a lot of pushback (from two different companies) when I suggested openly that any PM should have an extensive if not intimate understanding of the projects they're managing. They should realistically be able to do the work they're delegating, because you routinely need that level of understanding if the ones you're managing expect to get useful information out of you. If the manager doesn't understand the…

I get the spirit of what you’re saying, but to realistically be able to do the work seems a bit far. This would be hard to apply to even Steve Jobs. Maybe another way to phrase it might be that they should intimately understand what the vision of the work entails rather than need to always ask for the next horizon.

The entire spirit of the article and research though is that workers make better managers than pure managers. They don't need to actually DO the work, but understanding to that level is invaluable and why Steve emphasized it so much.

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

#126

Post by kenjackson »

civilized wrote: post #110
jokethrowaway wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you don’t known what is done with reports on progress, you probably shouldn’t comment on such things and should instead go find out.

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

#127

Post by sumedh »

diego_moita wrote: post #30
sumedh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of it's technologies were copied straight out of Xerox's Not sure copied is the right word, Xerox bought shares of Apple and in return Apple got to use Xerox's tech.

True, but those are just the conditions on which Xerox accepted to be copied. Xerox' acceptance to be copied doesn't change the fact that the whole concept of GUIs and LANs were alien to Apple. Please note that I used the term "copied", not "stealed".

> whole concept of GUIs and LANs were alien to Apple

But Apple knew the potential because of Jobs.

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

#128

Post by drekipus »

lossolo wrote: post #109
gopalv wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 punish…

This reads like the pr comments of a junior on my team

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

#129

Post by Communitivity »

Management is a skill set, as is engineering, as is technical writing. Rare individuals have significant overlap of high skill in these areas, most don't. I have been a tech lead several times. In those roles I developed communication skills, mentoring skills, and planning skills far more than I had as an individual contributor. I also developed different subsets of those skills.

The best leaders though are the ones that have that overlap, are great individual contributors but have gotten to the point where they focus on tough key problems and facilitate their team's contributions and growth.

You can have good leaders that are strong in communication and planning, and ok on individual contributions. It is harder for them to plan effectively though, and they'll need to lean on their high skill contributors in the team.

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

#130

Post by yodsanklai »

zaphar wrote: post #53
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 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.

> There is a lot of stuff about being a manager I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Could you expand?

Post reply on HN