Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgun | Hacker News Reader

Or stop promoting engineers to management roles they aren't educated for or socially prepared for.

But that results in MBA culture! ::nerd shudders::

It's a source of constant amazement to me that people who will drill incessantly on red-black trees won't put in a modicum of effort to learn even a little bit about the inherently more complicated business of managing people.

>It's a source of constant amazement to me that people who will drill incessantly on red-black trees won't put in a modicum of effort to learn even a little bit about the inherently more complicated business of managing people.

This isn't really an issue if you promote an engineer to mgmt when they have demonstrated that can manage people, rather than before and assume they can grow.

That's a fair point, but I think that clean idea can be messy in practice.

For one, engineers rarely manage people before they are managers. They might lead a team or be a product manager, etc., but those have different (albeit overlapping) challenges from managing people.

Another important factor is that in small or fast-growing companies, there's often not a formal promotion to manager. One day, you're the solo dev or maybe the you're senior dev of some secondary system. That system gets unexpected popularity/traction, and your manager starts throwing resumes or new recruits in front of you. And before you know it, you're managing a team, still trying to lead code reviews but also dealing with personnel issues, manage timelines, etc. You weren't really promoted. You were just the person in charge of this thing, and the thing grew underneath you. I'm not saying that's ideal, but it's something I've seen fairly often.

It'd be great if you were right, and it was that easy. But you're wrong, and it's not.

I appreciate the appeal of Starship Troopers style leadership: "everybody drops, everybody fights" is wonderful for morale, but everyone needs to go read the book to see what needs to happen before it is organizationally feasible.

In the Troopers universe, promoted troopers are sent to a grueling OCS course that trains them to understand the ins and outs of leadership. NO technology organization I have been exposed to has had a similar training course for new promotes; leadership skills are assumed to blossom overnight upon promotion.

There's an alternative: put them in management and enforce mandatory management training.

A former employer of mine had a rule that anyone at a "management level" (including engineers of a certain rank, even if they weren't actually managing anyone) had to complete a set of training courses within a certain period of being promoted. As an engineer entering management, I found the courses to be surprisingly useful in terms of understanding and managing people and so did others. Classes like communication, negotiation, basic finance, employment law, etc.

Then HR decided they were useless and stopped offering them. And they went back to the state the GP is complaining about...

>There's an alternative: put them in management and enforce mandatory management training.

IMHO, I think your faulty assumption here is every good engineer can be trained into a good manager, and I think thats just not realistic...

I'm not assuming anything: I'm saying that there's an answer to the question of how you put an untrained person into an unfamiliar environment: train them.

Whether or not a good/bad X can be retrained into a bad/good Y is a wholly different question.

I would highly recommend this. I didn't understand why a WBS made sense to do or how to keep a list of risks, but after attending a project management class it made sense. Not only that, but as we worked through a project in the class, it enforced how tasks and communication work properly for projects.

Basic finance and negotation are a must.

It's amazing how many people don't have much training in these skills.

You've got a chicken and egg problem here. The only way to train an engineer in this scheme is to have him manage people without having a clue, which necessarily implies breakage for the people working under him: definitionally a new person entering a specialized role has no idea how to carry out said role.

The only thing that fixes this is extensive training before promotion -- but this is anathema in modern corporations.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another way to learn is to work for a great manager and pay attention, or work for a crappy manager and see the consequences of mistakes. The latter is painful, but also more instructive than the former.

Life is way too short to spend time working for the abusive and the incompetent.

I prefer to mark the organization as broken and move on to greener pastures.

>You've got a chicken and egg problem here.

Not really, say you are a manager and you want to groom a good engineer to become a manager as well. Step one is, can they manage their own projects, step 2 is can they manage a project with 1 other, step 3, several others. Once they can do that and display moral and technical leadership, they are ready to be a manager.

>The only thing that fixes this is extensive training before promotion

When it comes to leadership and people skills, training can increase chances of success, but does not guarantee it by far.

Well, you can test an engineer to see if they understand red-black trees fairly easily.

How do you test if a manager is a narcissist or a psycopath? And is it even legal to do so?

You're asking the wrong questions/ missing the bigger picture. Plus personality disorders are not always negative[0].

The underlying condition is "culture." Companies higher people with similar values that'll fit right in and "go with the flow." Now, how do we make it so the culture of fledgling companies does not turn into a frat house?

Restricting the freedoms of these types to start business will not work.

[0]https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-type-of-narcissist-that-can-make...

Why not both?

Get your engineers who want to go into management to get a MBA (regular, part time, or executive). Eng background with a MBA is IMHO one of the best combinations around.

Managing people & businesses isn't something you're born with, it's something you learn and train. Just like coding, but sometimes way harder.

Full disclaimer: I have a computer engineering undergrad and a MBA, so take my opinion with a lot of salt :)

That means investing in your employees, which is, if possible, even worse than MBA culture.

If comments on any thread that mentions whiteboard interviewing are anything to go by, many engineers refuse to drill incessantly on red-black trees, too.

There are plenty of engineers who ended up as a good managers. The problem is that management roles attracts people who seek control and power over others and can not get it otherwise. Some companies see the above as leadership material, promote them and crrate hell for everyone else.

What exactly do you mean by "socially prepared for"?

A lot of engineers have never held a position of leadership in any respect. As well, they're stereotypically tech-focused, rather than people-focused.

This makes them less prepared for the stress and less in-tune with the emotions of others, i.e socially unprepared to be leaders.

Acculturation takes time, which HR and upper management is pyschopathically unwilling to provide. They're too busy moving fast and breaking shit.

Is complete acculturation practically possible?

It seems that all cultures have foundations that never go away.

How about partial acculturation? Has it successfully been done before? Has a company ever managed to completely change their inner workings without becoming something unrecognizable?

I'm not asking for Borg-style assimilation: I'm asking for basic management standards followed by all managers.

Upper management's pervasive refusal to pay anything more than token lip service to this standardization makes 99% of technology organizations a political hell to work in.

What if it's the opposite? What if they see, much more clearly, that leading other than by doing is a load of BS?

Look up the recent interview with Linus Torvalds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com