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I thought we were all in clear agreement that promoting engineers into managers creates poor managers? Engineers are good engineers, management is an entirely different skill set.

Promoting engineers into managers loses you a good engineer and creates a poor (and unhappy) manager.

If the person wants to be a manager, great! But otherwise, don't do it.

5 comments

I am not sure who’s in agreement with that. Being technical or a manager are not genetic traits, but acquired skills. I love working with people and tech, always have. Forcing people to do either against their will wont work, indeed, but what you describe sounds like what a manager would say to justify their position of doing nothing, really. Also part of a good technical person’s skillset is self management. If you cant manage your own time then i am sorry, you are not an experienced engineer.

The problem I see is that even though managers have a different skillset, they have out-sized influence on technical or technically related decisions. And a lot of times it's more than just influence; They just make the decision themselves.

This is on the spot for me. I went this route so I could make actual decisions. Otherwise in most cases I'm just a glorified ticket closer in an assembly line with the design given to me on a platter.

"Promoted" should not necessarily mean "became a manager". Tech companies need to embrace the concept of very high-level, very high-paid Individual Contributors.

Raise your hand if you're a "Senior Software Engineer" or "Staff Software Engineer" and there is no other next level for your career to go besides management. It's a common problem.

I've been really proud of Amazon for recognizing this a while ago and creating a path to Distinguished Engineer for ICs, which is VP-level (and then actively promoting ppl to that level, it's not just a special role for hiring externally).

No, almost no one agrees with that except for entrenched MBAs and capital allocators.

Almost no one agrees with the idea that you shouldn’t promote people into jobs they don’t want and aren’t good at? I’m as anti-MBA dictatorship as the next person, but c’mon.

C’mon no one is saying people should be “promoted” against their will. There are those who like managing and those who dont and thats fine. By managing in this context i mean organising and coordinating. Motivating people with “fun” stuff and jira tickets is not management, thats supervising. A manufacturing concept forced upon scientists and engineers that everyone frowns upon.

variant of Peter principle

See, thats what incompetent management doesnt understand. Management is not about status or power or rising among ranks just to score points, its about who can best organise and coordinate. Power hungry managers dont belong in tech or science jobs.

Not even organise / coordinate, that's not the most important thing that I get from the best manager, actually that's the easy part.

The best managers I had were helping me debug things when I get stuck. When there's a seg fault in a multithreaded program, or the project just doesn't seem to go anywhere for some time because I don't really know what to do or I'm going in a bad direction with my local improvements, somebody more mature than me / person with more experience just knows what to do.