I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner).
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah.
In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs.
Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
Yes that’s how analogies work, they’re not exact equivalents.
The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.
Isn't this just the nature of the business? I'm sure there aren't many plumbers or factory workers who have a level similar to a senior director in plumbing companies either: as an IC, there is a cap to how much contribution you can bring to a company, limited by the type of job you do. Of course, the same is true for managers as well, and the vast majority of directors are vastly overpaid, but that's a different discussion. My point is that all or almost all industries have this distinction, and the people in charge of companies are almost all doing a different job than someone just starting in their fields. Even in law firms, the senior partners are very rarely, if ever, doing the type of litigation they would when they started out. Probably no different than a CTO doing actual technology work.
I deliberately stayed in a first line management position, for most of my career.
I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level.
Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades.
I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level.
That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
The Navy has Seaman-to-Admiral-21, a modernized version of the NESEP (or MESEP for Marines) program. If selected, you go to college while on active duty, more or less like NROTC midshipmen, with full pay and allowances and up to $10K per year in tuition, books, fees.
Not really. Command Sergeant Majors technically dont lead anyone. They are just advisors. Plenty of other senior NCO positions in the army are just staff advisors as well.
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons:
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
Strange that you’d say that. What I’ve seen is that promoting homegrown ICs to line management is a favored strategy of nontechnical MBAs in upper management. Any large organization is bureaucratic. Given the intensely bureaucratic record of communist governments, your invocation of Marxist rhetoric here is frankly laughable.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
> he used the word "class", let me find Marxism in my dialogue tree.
If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant.
Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
"bourgeoisie" refers to the capitalist class. Made more rigorous, we can say the set of people who do not need employment to pay their bills, they can live off of investment income. They often still perform labor, but as a part of their own businesses.
The bureaucratic class depend heavily on employment income. They are very lucky to have their jobs, and could be easily replaced or eliminated. They are desperate to maintain the structure of the bureaucracy in which they thrive. They create a cost born by both the "working class" and the "capitalist class". They consume the resources of the capitalist class, and mis-allocate the labor of the working class. If the investors and employees could coordinate without them, more value would be created for the capitalist and more wages could be kept by the worker.
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.