I cannot wait to compare the LinkedIn comments this receives in comparison to the HN discussion.
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The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
71–80 of 166 posts
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#72Earlier 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…
In defense of your 2.b manager, many organizations are improperly set up where the only way to advance is to move into management.
To have a large impact in most orgs, one often needs to directly influence how other people work. In software, the leverage might come from technical output instead.
This might be a deeper reason why moving into management is often necessary for most orgs. Exceptions include software-focused organizations where code can be one's channel for impact.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#73This is exactly my experience, if you can't measure it you can't manage it, if you don't know how to do the tasks yourself, how can you grade others work?
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#74The core problem is that all people suddenly believe in the dichotomy ic/manager in the first place.
This is an artificial separation.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#75It appears that outside our bubble software-work enjoys such a low status that management does not possess, or admits to possessing, any technical competence. This is in stark contrast to engineering or manufacturing companies, where engineers make up the highest levels of management and also adjacent areas like running the factories, and generally management prides itself with being hands-on, dropping knowledge and walking through the shop floor frequently.
In an agile environment (the most common structure in software development) the professional class of scrum masters and analysts are often non-technical, and management is sparse and hands-off (teams are "self-organized"). Key technical decisions are relegated to senior individual contributors, allowing for CV driven development, cargo culting, and bad habits. Stories of a Microsoft VP who files a bug report and points out the line of code where the error occured could never have happened anywhere where I worked.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#76I'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.
Im just curious here. Did your team love you or hate you? Were they happy with your focus on them besides your managing upwards and sideways inefficiencies?
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#77The 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, mentorship, etc.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#78Earlier 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.
He didn't have the ideas, but he was a core part building the organizations. So you shouldn't listen to him when it comes to computer engineering, but you probably should listen to his thoughts on leadership and organizations.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#79This 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…
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…
I struggle a lot with this, I’m trying todo some side projects to keep up but man it’s hard. I think the only way is to on a high level keep up with new technologies and best practices.
Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
#80Manager wannabes should be screened for narcissism and sociopathy and rejected if exhibiting these or similar traits. Unfortunately, recruiters are often already screening for these traits for the top management candidates and reject anyone who doesn't exhibit them.
It's also really hard to parse that stuff out until you see people in action.
Any self-aggrandizing jackass can talk a good game about servant leadership or supporting the team as a whole in an interview, and then go on to make himself the main character. Some of the worst of them are really, really good at telling you whatever you want to hear, and will gladly perform humility.
I don't have an answer for this besides hope there's someone above them who will observe this behavior and nip it in the bud.