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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

#131

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #123
baruch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree, they are different. Middle managers particularly don't have to be leaders, and in many cases shouldn't be. But for things to work well, they do need to be good at management with all of the people skills, cat herding, and organizing that go along with it. In my experiences, the best managers were the ones who protected their teams from the whims of the 'leaders' at the higher levels. The worst ones were the ones who carried out their every wish without a second thought.

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

#132

Post by angry_octet »

People who think being an IC is making a huge difference are usually self deluded. You are not Carmack. There are people higher in management who rely on mid career experts to guide technical decision making responsibly. There are junior people to guide and mentor. If you manage both tasks you have the beginnings of leadership.

It seems people do conflate supervision and project tracking with leadership. Being a scrum master is another technical function, not leadership. Being a technical expert is some other facet is also not leadership. I've seen good leaders with both project management and engineering skill sets, but neither stands out as any more qualifying.

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

#134

Post by WalterBright »

zolland wrote: post #14

Plato said this too--no great king desires the role, but when assigned it they will do what must be done for the good of the state.

> no great king desires the role

Great kings know it is effective to disguise their desire for the role.

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

#135

Post by elihu »

I think this is true, but I wonder if there's also a problem with supply versus demand: we can't just replace all the professional managers (PMs) with great individual contributors (GICs) because there are a lot of the former and not enough of the latter to fill all the roles. So, the most desirable workplaces can maybe attract all the GICs to fill out middle management, whereas the less desirable workplaces have to stick with PMs because GICs won't work for them.

In theory GICs could work their way into management organically in any organization, but it would require both that they be willing to take on a management role and that the organization is able to recognize who the GICs are.

(There are also some GICs who just shouldn't be managers because they're unusually bad at dealing with people. They're probably the minority, but they exist.)

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

#136

Post by doktorhladnjak »

yodsanklai wrote: post #130
zaphar wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

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

Not the above commenter, but these were things I experienced as a middle manager that really sucked:

- Having to always sell the company message. No promotion because the system is fucked? Sorry, you gotta say “better luck next time”. No raises because the company is being cheap? Sorry, gotta say “the cost of labor has not gone up even though inflation is through the roof”. Say what the company tells you, not what’s personally right.

- Certain kinds of politics where you have to screw over other teams or people in order for your team or reports to not get screwed over. Many companies are very dog eat dog.

- Layoffs and firing people. It’s not as bad as getting laid off/fired but firing someone or trying to keep the rest of your team focused when a team member got laid off is not fun at all.

- Overall, managers almost never get credit when something goes well but are always blamed when something goes wrong. It’s a really thankless job.

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

#137

Post by nr2x »

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 have a not-so-small network of people I unofficially mentor, but on the org chart I’m an IC. I’m happy with the situation, but dread the day I need to manage somebody to get things done.

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

#138

Post by plint »

There's some game theoryish ideas such as the Peter Principle which might explain why meritocratic promotion may not work out in the long run for organizations.

See: https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455

which won the parody Ig Nobel prize, but I don't really understand why, as I thought it was at least as interesting as Robert Axelrod's simulation of successful strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

In fact, I think it would be even warranted to do an extension of this model, considering possible assumptions such as Dilbert principle, negative selection, and alignment of agents with different goals and basic strategies. I am not understanding why such a model would be considered silly instead of insightful.

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

#139

Post by nr2x »

kazen44 wrote: post #113
karaterobot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this kind of thinking highly depends on what field you are in. My father worked in a technical role all his live in a automotive plant. (Eventually being technically responsible for overall design and implementation of all production lines). A lot of his former collegues moved into management during the early 2000's. Most got fired after the great recession because being a manager is considered a non skill co…

Essential workers.

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

#140

Post by nr2x »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #21
mdorazio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>management is the best path to money, competence and effort be damned Basically every German company ever. ICs be dammed.

I wonder if that’s why Google has so many badass ICs in Germany.
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