Ask HN: Can you truly lead engineers without being an engineer?

It sort of became a qualifying criteria. During interviews if an interviewer asked me technical questions and s/he was going to be my reporting manager, I knew we will not be a good fit.

Edit: When I was young and inexperienced, I preferred bosses with technical chops and mentoring mindset. Later in my career, I preferred non-technical bosses and senior technical team members with mentoring mindset.

I believe that the analogy holds true. Yes, a non-technical "leader" can manage a group of technical folks to deliver something that is pre-existing, something that has a clear path to completion which if you follow, you will be successful. Civil projects are a great example of this. Repaving a road for example.

Now onto what I've worked on my entire career - highly complex engineering driven technical projects - "cutting edge". I have worked for both types of leader in this environment. I have never seen the non-technical leader be successful, nor the project being directed by the non-technical leader be successful. To make the right decisions the leader needs to be able to intimately understand all the trade offs (technical included) involved to be able to lead the project to success. If this person doesn't personally have the knowledge, understanding, wisdom or ability to seek such out to understand these fundamental trade offs they are required to rely on the information they are given, to rely on trusting the folks telling you things. This is difficult because on the most challenging projects there are always different opinions and the leader must find the thread of truth between them.

This is why Mr. Musk has been so successful with Tesla and SpaceX - he intimately understands what he is making at the most technical level - and is passionate about it.

In the context of an engineering organization, leadership on technical tasks is actually inverted. The person most capable of leading in decisions about that task, is the person most recently deep into it. That means on some tasks the new intern is the leader when it comes to leadership in the sense of "expert on the topic".

Engineering mentorship largely must be done by senior engineers. That said, there is no reason those senior engineers are necessarily your project manager, your product manager or your people manager.

At the end of the day, I much prefer working in organizations that understand that people management can and should be done by people managers and technical leadership can and should be done by technical leaders and those 2 things needn't reside in the same office.

Not necessarily the best in the team but they have to get the mechanics and prognosis of technical decisions in order to manage risk, know where or who the problems are, make trade offs, etc.

I've often seen the non technical leader adopt a technical right hand who defacto does the leading whilst the alleged leader reports up, administrates and generally takes credit.

Further like someone else said, leading and managing are like chalk and cheese (superfluously similar). A project manager may happily be non technical because there job is mostly triage, comms and tracking.

At the point that your in "leadership" it isn't about doing it is about providing the tools for others to DO. Good leaders remove distractions, focus on the heath of the group (and the individuals within) act as a contact point and a buffer from outsiders.

Can being technical help. It depends. Stable products, well established domains (with experienced people) don't need deep technical knowledge to deal with the day to day. However, if you systems can be described as a disaster, if you having major issues all the time, a leader with technical chops is going to be of benefit. You want an empathetic manager when the shit hits the fan not a sympathetic one.

While his skillset is that of a perfectionist, in which he is probably great at catching mistakes and being a micro-manager, he lacks some other skills that I would've thought necessary to "supervise" us. In the beginning, he was taking his "old skills" that he knew from his entire time at the company and trying to apply it to his department and it was like he was miserable... because you cannot apply the same rules for our department as others. Almost all other departments work on a "errors made" platform, so if you make an error, it is caught and counted towards you.. we have a high turnover rate in all other departments.

Our department, however, has no platform like that where "errors" can be caught by a computer, and are caught manually. So trying to convince him to throw out over 15 years of everything he's ever knew.. aside from his perfectionist mindset was extremely hard for him. It took 2 years just to get him to a point where he started to realize: We are a whole different department that cannot be classed in with all others.

Fortunately, he's definitely improved.

Sometimes I think its a good thing and sometimes bad... he's always spying on our work before it is done and quickly makes assumptions and goes kind of crazy every so often because he thinks that's what it's going to look like, but as you're developing something... most things never "stay looking" like they would in development phase. So convincing him: "Can you let me finish the product before you start peaking at it?" is something I have to do every so often.

He can't be doing too bad, after all, there are two main offices that my company has, and only one person has ever been promoted in the other office, while we've had about 5 people who received "promotions" ... which basically just means a little extra money and a new title called "senior", but it must say something about how he is doing for his team.

He's proof that all you really have to do is know people in the company, acquire that status of a perfectionist (and manager), apply for the job, and you can fake it till you make it.

To "manage" people (including engineers), it's totally fine to be a non-tech person. It's actually even better if you're not tied to any project as a manager. Because you can focus on career growth and conflicts, which is what I'd expect from a manager.

If engineers believe they can't be led by a non-engineer it says more to me about the engineers than anything else.

Of course Ballmer could never had grown Microsoft well enough to begin with to even give Ballmer himself the size of opportunity we would be so aware of at this point anyway.

Not that Gates actually graduated from an engineering school, but he had the technical chops to out-engineer most of those who did in the ways that count.

This allowed Microsoft to overcome hurdles that could not have been passed any other way, even as Gates participated to a much lesser degree in the actual engineering details of the products over his years.

Cats are best herded by other cats.

At least Ballmer had been with the company almost as long as his technically qualified predecessor, and that was since almost the beginning.

When HP failed on these points too it was even less pretty.

Seems like from large engineering company scale down to single engineering project scale, one trend for success might be when the leader is actually inherently capable of virtually all of the engineering needed for a successful product. Just when the project, product, or company is too big for this technical leader to accomplish all or even any of the engineering single-handedly, is when the judicious delegation of the technical fragments becomes the valued talent that non-technical operators also have an extreme disadvantage with.

It's more financially sound if the leader when needed can solve technical problems that his team alone can not overcome when they arise.

Even if the company is started because of a businessman's vision of a market he makes come true, if it is largely an engineering company, the technical leader needs controlling interest or the shareholders will be shortchanged.

This usually works the other way around, which is why we hear about far fewer of them becoming sizable regardless of how amazing the engineering seems sometimes.

There simply needs to be a way for the non-technical but gifted business talents to earn enough to be more rewarding than what they would experience having more control of a lesser pure sales company without the engineering talent.

So the engineering does need to be outstanding, exactly what some of us are here for.