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Comment by oakfr | Hacker News Reader

It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way.

Leadership is a lot more than about "shuffling paper" in an "ivory tower".

As a lead (in any decent company), you get to participate in critical design reviews; you get to read and review code; you get to shape the trajectory of others; you get to participate in discussions with the product teams. If you work smart, you get free time that you can use to keep coding. All of this can be extremely rewarding.

You are not serving our domain by painting this kind of picture of leadership. The truth is, you can excel as a software engineer, but you can also excel as a lead. And none is better than the other.

I dedicate this message to the "wet behind the ears" people you are referring to who would never consider the role if they were to stick to this poor vision you're delivering.

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> And none is better than the other.

I agree with you, but few companies know how to appreciate those who decided to progress in the technical excellence. In most not taking a "leadership" (aka management) position means your career reaches a dead end.

> It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way.

I think you misread the post.

I don't see where this is criticizing the role of leadership. Good leaders exists (though, they are rare). I have been led by some of those inspiring people. But I've never met a leader (as good as it was) who continued to be a great software engineer.

The point is that they all were stuck in the "Sort of knows what they are doing" zone. And that's ok for being a great leader. But then, nobody in the company is kept long enough at a position to become what the author describe as "Experienced".h

> It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way.

It saddens me to time and again be stuck with "leaders" who don't know what they are talking about and think they need to weigh in on everything, even though they add negative value when they do so, because they want to justify their mostly pointless job.

In a 14 year career, I have had "leadership" that is not completely horrible for about 6 months, but that I still would not call good, at best it is mediocre. If only most "leaders" were wet behind the ears instead of bordering on grossly incompetent.

If people's experience of leadership is that it is almost always dead-weight, then the problem is that it is almost always dead-weight, not that people call it out for being almost always dead-weight.

And by the way, I have never met one person who thought they were a good leader that was even slightly so. People who think they are good leaders are almost invariably pompous, arrogant and ignorant.

So have you met any good leaders? Or are you saying that good leaders are nearly impossible to find (and therefore perhaps the job is difficult?)

> So have you met any good leaders?

I have met people who lead well, but I have not met anyone who's job it was to be a leader that lead well.

> Or are you saying that good leaders are nearly impossible to find (and therefore perhaps the job is difficult?)

It's almost impossible to find someone that has a job of being a leader that is good leader. The job being difficult does not explain why the worst possible people end up being leaders, and it also does not mean that we should somehow not call out the phenomena that leadership is mostly feckless and adds negative value.

We should call this out more often, and we should tell people who want to be leaders that they better not suck because there are enough people who suck at it, and we should let them know that going by actual outcomes, they will likely suck, and are even more likely to suck if they think they are good at it.

What is good leadership, in your opinion? What makes someone's job a "leader" job, do you mean management only, or technical leadership roles as well? What is a leaders job?

When you say that "leadership is feckless", do you mean the leaders you've encountered, or that having a role of official leadership or hierarchy is irresponsible or negative?

If leadership does not stand in the way of delivering the product, lets the devs make their own decisions, and can get the organisation above them to go along with this, they’re good leaders in my opinion.

Of course we have all met people who were pompous, arrogant and ignorant.

But there are some good and outstanding leaders out there. If you never had the chance to meet one (or did not recognize them when they were in front of you), I am sorry for you.

> But there are some good and outstanding leaders out there.

There are, though they are just almost never the people who's job it is to be a leader.

> If you never had the chance to meet one (or did not recognize them when they were in front of you), I am sorry for you.

The worst of the worst are the "outstanding" leaders that just "did not get recognized" as such. Not even the worst part of the worst hell would be good fitting for that group.

All that being said, I agree with you: leadership is hard. In 20 years in industry, how many (really) good leaders have I met? Three maybe.

My original point is that the _role_ is a lot more interesting than what the article seems to suggest.

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