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Comment by lamp_book | Hacker News Reader

> It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is justified.

I see this sentiment or implication that technical skills and people skills are somehow mutually exclusive often, even on here which is crazy. I think this stems from some broader trope that people are "balanced" like RPG characters or something, e.g. nerd vs. jock or artist vs. scientist, salesman vs. accountant, etc. The reality is that people who achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others. If someone figured out how to be a good engineer, they can probably figure out how to be a good manager, too, if they wanted.

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> The reality is that people who achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others.

Aptitude is in general going to be either uncorrelated or positively correlated across different areas, but time invested is going to be negatively correlated. Hence the stereotype of nerds with poor social skills: building social skills takes time and effort, and time and effort spent on building those skills is time and effort not spent on, eg, improving your programming ability.

Of course, people who have off the charts aptitude will be in the top percentiles across the board. But you're not going to find too many organizations staffed entirely by those people.

Yes, you make some good points here but I would argue that in most organizations that skills that make for effective engineering are aligned well with those required for managing. At a certain point, reinvesting into programming ability sees diminishing returns and ROI on e.g. mentorship, task planning and delegation out-paces improvement in technical skills dramatically. Of course, this is not universal and there are specialties, domains, and organizations that require technical competency and competitiveness above all else, but I don't think that's the general case for most engineers.

> At a certain point, reinvesting into programming ability sees diminishing returns and ROI on e.g. mentorship, task planning and delegation out-paces improvement in technical skills dramatically.

True, but this may not be seen as relevant to the individual if they enjoy engineering more than those other things.

It's fun to be a "star player" developer, but in terms of maximizing your own individual potential, you're always going to be able to produce more value by leading people than by your own output alone.

There are some technical mountains to climb which require superlative engineering talent, but in terms of impact it's hard to compete with a leader who is able to coalesce a team or organization effectively towards a single goal.

The savant/nerd engineer with poor social skills is a troupe which does exist, but so is the manager who washed out of the developer track because they couldn't keep up on the technical side, and they're not a better manager than they were a developer but those failures are harder to quantify.

I think even that "poor social skills nerd" engineer trope might be partially an example of Berkson's Paradox [1]. You have to have serious technical chops to compensate for a lack of social skills, and it's hard to see all of the people with weak social skills who aren't engineers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

edit: removing markdown syntax

> But you're not going to find too many organizations staffed entirely by those people.

The number you are looking for here is zero, at least for organizations of any size. With a bunch of luck and money you can put a small team together like this; otherwise they are just too scarce.

They might. But it could easily take a few years, during which time they'll very likely be a mediocre to poor manager.

Expecting someone with five years of engineering experience to become an effective manager overnight - often with no training or mentorship at all - makes as much sense as expecting an intern to operate at the same level as a senior on Day 1.

Even really smart people with multiple talents need more of a warm up than that. And most people are neither that smart nor that talented.

But that's true of non-technical people too right? So the question is if you as an organization are considering investing a year or two to develop a manager, why not start with a subject matter expert?

Hopefully it is never an overnight switch and the engineer's career goals are respected. Any non-shite company is going to have engineers taking on leadership responsibilities at various levels they are comfortable with before turning them full loose.

In some companies, like Gore Industries, and other employee owned entities the engineers and operations people organically select their own supervisors by consensus and set pay democratically. I have been in environments that did that without explicit structure even, and it was very productive. Unsurprisingly,none of those were publicly traded.

That sounds fantastic, I wished it was easy to find places like that.

Pure luck.

While aptitude correlates with aptitude, at a given level of accomplishment they may be anti-correlated due to Berkson's paradox[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

> If someone figured out how to be a good engineer, they can probably figure out how to be a good manager, too, if they wanted.

The "if they wanted" part is key. It's hard to become extremely good at something unless you really enjoy doing it. I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers would rather be doing engineering than anything else. If you make them a manager, they're going to enjoy that less and not be as good at it -- but a lot of people get pressured into becoming managers nonetheless.

> I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers would rather be doing engineering than anything else.

Really? I love software development, but I don't think just churning out random CRUD software based on some specs is very interesting. A lot nicer to solve problems of your customers, see how the product makes them happier and think about ways to improve their user experience.

Somehow I assumed that's how others felt as well.

If the top engineers at your company are churning out random CRUD software from specs, you may want to reconsider where you're working.

Good engineering is about understanding the problems of your customers, designing software that solves these problems, and improving their user experience.

Majority of jobs are going to be like that though.

The cool part about being a technical manager is that you can expand the scale of what you are capable of. So for instance if you ever had an idea like "if only I had infinite time and infinite energy I would do X", you can build a team which has the tools to provide that.

If your goal is to have an impact, you have to be lucky to do this as an engineer. There has to be a structure around you which converts your work into value. As a manager it's much more reliable that you can be the person to create that structure.

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