The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

This is true but nuanced in my experience.

Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers.

Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management.

I make this distinction because even group 1 managers usually have to raise their hand and say something like “can we please stop messing this up. I can help.”

Rarely is an awesome individual magically called upon to become a manager, particularly by poor managers who are already messing stuff up.

In an environment where management is good, there’s a longer cycle of development, mentorship, and nudging of high potential people into management. But if you’re not in that environment, you probably need to ask to help make it better. It won’t happen magically.

Reminds me of my favourite quote by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord:

"I distinguish four types [of officers]. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."

More details, from the people behind Apple’s internal leadership training:

Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics:

1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions

2. immersion in the details of those functions;

3. and a willingness to collaboratively debate other functions during collective decision-making.

When managers have these attributes, decisions are made in a coordinated fashion by the people most qualified to make them.

Article: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...

I think the article, and many of the comments here, miss the point badly. No manager of a team doing technically complex and creative work can for very long remain capable of doing all the work themselves. Modern projects and processes simply require too much specialized knowledge to function for that to work. What managers need that (probably) comes from having been a strong individual contributor is sufficient knowledge of the fields involved in what they're managing to be able to understand the critical elements in the project or process in the context of the overall goal, and to be able to evaluate well the value of ideas for improvement or problem solution that come out of their team. But they also need leadership and management skills. The latter are not the same as, and are not developed by, stellar individual contributor skills. Furthermore, it's important to understand that management and leadership are not the same thing.

My personal experience has been that I was a very able individual contributor, and that I was able to learn leadership skills (that is, how to inspire people; how to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and assign work that played to the former, and created opportunities to ameliorate the latter; how to point individuals and teams in fruitful directions without having (or often being able to) do all the hard work of pushing in that direction myself) by diligent study of people and myself. But I was never able to become more than a barely competent manager - I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me from individual contributor to team lead, to product line lead, to CTO of highly successful $10B billion medical and technology organization in 20 years.

Reading the article, according to Steve Jobs, the best managers are the people who are so good that they realise that they must do it themselves, even if they don't want to. The title of the article thus has only a necessary but not sufficient condition according to what Steve originally meant. In other words: Clickbait.

It appears that outside our bubble software-work enjoys such a low status that management does not possess, or admits to possessing, any technical competence. This is in stark contrast to engineering or manufacturing companies, where engineers make up the highest levels of management and also adjacent areas like running the factories, and generally management prides itself with being hands-on, dropping knowledge and walking through the shop floor frequently.

In an agile environment (the most common structure in software development) the professional class of scrum masters and analysts are often non-technical, and management is sparse and hands-off (teams are "self-organized"). Key technical decisions are relegated to senior individual contributors, allowing for CV driven development, cargo culting, and bad habits. Stories of a Microsoft VP who files a bug report and points out the line of code where the error occured could never have happened anywhere where I worked.

"And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of conferring one."

Plato, The Republic

Plato said this too--no great king desires the role, but when assigned it they will do what must be done for the good of the state.

The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying

Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better

The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting shit done) are the ones who make it very far in the IC path and become team leads. Team leads are the best managers, the actual managers are just there to do boilerplate shit and politicking that team leads aren't interested in

(disclaimer: not talking about all managers or all companies, just the ones I've personally experienced)

I'm a counterpoint to this.

Outstanding IC wanting to get into management for job security / ageism. Turned out to be a bad manager too focused on team and unable to effectively manage up and sideways.

I'm now a consultant. Ageism is suddenly on my side in consulting. Coding until I die.

I think the solution is to hire both, because there is also the Peter principle: "promoted to incompetence".

The professional managers should be in a deputy position to the promoted ICs. This way they can bring their skills and expertise in management and empower the promoted ICs who understand the business or problems deeply.

The professional managers can be pretty useful if they don't have people reporting to them and help with processes, compliance, planning, making presentations and excel tables and yet the capacity for damage will be limited as the promoted ICs will need approve anything.

DEC apparently had "administration" instead of management, implying it didn't rule but rather assist, but I don't know the exact details.

Worth mentioning that management vs. IC is not a decision for life. Charity Majors wrote about the opportunities and challenges when switching throughout one's career between management and individual contributor [1] and [2].

[1] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...

[2] https://charity.wtf/2022/03/24/twin-anxieties-of-the-enginee...

There are different flavors of not wanting to be a manager.

The good kind Jobs refers to are people who see the necessity and that no one is doing it (or doing it well). They aren't the kind of people who don't understand people and fall into the trap of simply controlling and micro-managing people.

Let me give you an example of the bad kind. Google's SWE ladder goes all the say from L3 (new grad) to L9 (ignoring exceptions like Google Fellow and execs). There is an expectation of growth from L3 to L5 (Senior SWE). There is a lot of reward if you can get promoted to L6 (Staff SWE) but it is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of luck (eg being on the right project that doesn't get cancelled). Getting to L6 now is much harder than it was 10-15 years ago.

One of the things Ruth Porat did when she came in was to control costs by reducing the promotion target percentage because it wasn't visible to people (there was a leaked memo). All promo candidates go to committee and effectively get stack ranked across committees. There is a quota ("target percentage") of who gets promoted. This creates a backlog and raises the bar for getting promoted. It gives more time for your impact to dissipate or your project to get cancelled (which was your promotion case).

Compare this to getting promoted as a manager. Your manager level (M0 to M2, which is the same level as L5 to L7) is effectively a function of your head count with the added requirement that M2 requires you to have managers as reports. So if you're an M0 (which is rare), getting to M1 is typically as easy as getting to 10-15 reports (as long as you don't screw up so badly).

So there is a breed of SWEs that bridge these worlds. They're half an IC and half an EM in the hopes that this gets them over the line.

In my experience, these managers were generally the absolute worst. They had no interest in ever being a amanager and were just ticking a box for an L6 promotion case. Career development tended to be zero. Everything was seen through the lens of what helped them get promoted. If that means throwing someone under the bus, so be it.

I think one of the best things Facebook did was they effectively didn't allow this. Having reports as an IC generally wasn't allowed. Being an L5 with reports was mostly not allowed. I mean there were some exceptions in some orgs and for some people but it was exceedingly rare. You'd see people ask "why can't I be a manager at L5?" and you heavily suspected the main motivator for this question was an inability to get promoted to L6 as a SWE.

I know an amazing IC at a software company I once worked at that I still keep in touch with. He has extremely deep technical knowledge, which you can simply deduct from basically everyone in the company (even from other teams) coming to him for advice. He's been at the company for >10 years.

He has strong opinions on current processes and just getting things done.

This post resonated deeply with me, since I've discussed before with him his role and how it could evolve. I know for a fact that he dislikes lots of meeting and really likes working on the core product, and so far hasn't really jumped on the opportunity to go into management - he doesn't really want to be manager. So he is kind of exactly the guy the post is describing. The company is growing though and he is very slowly getting pushed by the head of development into a more managerial role..

Let's see how it works out. I believe he is going to be a great manager though.

I've gotten a lot of pushback (from two different companies) when I suggested openly that any PM should have an extensive if not intimate understanding of the projects they're managing. They should realistically be able to do the work they're delegating, because you routinely need that level of understanding if the ones you're managing expect to get useful information out of you. If the manager doesn't understand the project, it becomes a repetitive effort of "let me ask the client, I'll get back to you" and you end up wasting tremendous amounts of time.

Only one article cited，and it's about employee wellbeing which while an important topic is not the catch-all 'best leaders' headline.

So, to play Devil's Advocate, a study [1] of a technology company, Microsoft, that finds that

> technical skills are not the sign of greatness for an engineering manager.

[1] What makes a great manager of software engineers? https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8094304

As a manager, I want to see myself in what he said because I really enjoy writing code and engineering solutions. But honestly , I don’t think the “want to” matters all that much when it comes to management.

I do think many good managers are problem solvers. They are often hands-on, in the thick of ideation and problem-solving.

They have the knowledge necessary to evaluate the competence and solutions submitted by the people being managed. And that knowledge and skill also helps them understand what their reports need to succeed.

I completely agree with this. The best leaders are those who have proven themselves to be great individual contributors before moving into a management role. This gives them a deep understanding and appreciation for the work that their team members do, which is crucial for effective leadership. Professional managers, on the other hand, may not have the same level of experience and can sometimes struggle to effectively support and lead their team.

Empirically speaking 90% of the managers out there became so because they were intentional in becoming managers. The reasons are myriad. Most want the power so they can hire or fire. Others with reaching the job safety inherently built into the role.

Good management is just leadership.

Real leaders understand the burden of command and take it seriously and the stress is not sustainable for nearly anyone for the long term, so experienced leaders don’t want to do it unless it’s absolutely essential.

I managed several people for few years. I knew the ends and outs of everything. I can tell them what to do and how to do it. I preferred to let them do it on their own and be there to help them when they fail. No one ever came to me for help without getting the help they needed. My team told me I was the best manager in the world. But I wasn't happy being a manager. It was boring. I required me checking on them often. I loved my work, it bothered me to watch people struggling to work in job they didn't like. I wanted to do the work. No one could do it as good as me. I didn't want to get bogged down with administrative tasks. On top of that, I didn't have the authority to make decisions even as a manager. I was basically a baby sitter for people that didn't need baby sitter. So I let go of my manager position and I am happy. I knew some people could do better but I can't make them do it. I want them to do it without me asking. Just as I do.

Being a manager is like having kids.

A lot of people don't want to have kids, because they see how other people's kids behave. You can do the right things and raise incredible children.

A lot of people don't want to be a manager, because they see how other people behave as managers. You can do the right things and be an incredible manager.

In my contrary opinion, this should apply to tech leadership, not management. The best managers (for employees, not the company) are not necessarily great ICs. The best team leads / architects are great ICs. The problem is that "best" really depends on whether you are coming from the employer or employee's perspective. It's probably best for the company if they're great ICs: they can choose the right feature and deliver quickly and who cares about employee satisfaction at the margin.

We should all be leery of those who actively and openly declare and pursue positions of leadership.

Agree that great managers are sometimes individual contributors who take on the job because they believe doing so is the only way to ensure effectiveness. But it's important to filter for ego-as-motivation, which can make for a terrible manager....

There's another type of great manager, too, whose best quality is their ability to defend the team from b.s. and politics originating elsewhere in the organization. This is especially valuable in large, established companies.

In the article that has been cited in the link the abstract says "Science says". I wonder if the writer even knows what Science is or means? No wonder our mass media today and public discourses are filled with utter quality garbage rhetoric and discussions that are not even worthy of two minutes of reading time.

I think this is true, but I wonder if there's also a problem with supply versus demand: we can't just replace all the professional managers (PMs) with great individual contributors (GICs) because there are a lot of the former and not enough of the latter to fill all the roles. So, the most desirable workplaces can maybe attract all the GICs to fill out middle management, whereas the less desirable workplaces have to stick with PMs because GICs won't work for them.

In theory GICs could work their way into management organically in any organization, but it would require both that they be willing to take on a management role and that the organization is able to recognize who the GICs are.

(There are also some GICs who just shouldn't be managers because they're unusually bad at dealing with people. They're probably the minority, but they exist.)

Management is a skill set, as is engineering, as is technical writing. Rare individuals have significant overlap of high skill in these areas, most don't. I have been a tech lead several times. In those roles I developed communication skills, mentoring skills, and planning skills far more than I had as an individual contributor. I also developed different subsets of those skills.

The best leaders though are the ones that have that overlap, are great individual contributors but have gotten to the point where they focus on tough key problems and facilitate their team's contributions and growth.

You can have good leaders that are strong in communication and planning, and ok on individual contributions. It is harder for them to plan effectively though, and they'll need to lean on their high skill contributors in the team.

There's some game theoryish ideas such as the Peter Principle which might explain why meritocratic promotion may not work out in the long run for organizations.

See: https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455

which won the parody Ig Nobel prize, but I don't really understand why, as I thought it was at least as interesting as Robert Axelrod's simulation of successful strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

In fact, I think it would be even warranted to do an extension of this model, considering possible assumptions such as Dilbert principle, negative selection, and alignment of agents with different goals and basic strategies. I am not understanding why such a model would be considered silly instead of insightful.

MBAs (from insert pedigree university) believe they're smarter, better, and more capable with zero knowledge, wisdom, and/or experience, which inexorably leads to Theranos-like hubris.

People who are good generalists, able to switch contexts quickly, enthusiasm, interest in excellence, and have good social and customer service skills tend to be good managers. People who want to be managers and/or CEO by any means necessary typically shouldn't be allowed anywhere near non-IC work.

Another solution to pyramid-building: flat orgs - make managers and all other roles equal to others in terms of respect and influence, and differentiate managers as have responsibility areas rather than god-like status. Empire building doesn't solve any real problems while it creates others.

A great IC with the right skill sets and inclinations to be a manager will be the best manager compared to a mediocre IC or someone out of field. Most ICs don’t have the right skill sets or inclinations for management and end up being a disaster of a manager.

People who think being an IC is making a huge difference are usually self deluded. You are not Carmack. There are people higher in management who rely on mid career experts to guide technical decision making responsibly. There are junior people to guide and mentor. If you manage both tasks you have the beginnings of leadership.

It seems people do conflate supervision and project tracking with leadership. Being a scrum master is another technical function, not leadership. Being a technical expert is some other facet is also not leadership. I've seen good leaders with both project management and engineering skill sets, but neither stands out as any more qualifying.

Not always, but sometimes, the problem with people who want to manage is that they want to direct work. They like that power dynamic. I find the best managers kind of hate telling people want to do, but will if and when they have to.

They're quite different roles and traits so I don't know people think this is the case.

Not all managers are leaders and not not leaders are managers.

The best leader I know owns and runs a fairly massive company and does no or at least, very little management. And the company uses the knowledge that leaders and managers are different to run a well oiled machine. They put managers in where managers are needed and use leaders where leaders are required. Of course there is crossover in places and they hire with the two traits in mind for those positions.

This is exactly my experience, if you can't measure it you can't manage it, if you don't know how to do the tasks yourself, how can you grade others work?

The article discusses senior-level management, but the comments here mostly focus on line-management. IMO, these are very different beasts. The former set overall strategy and need to be highly competent in their area of expertise. The latter focus on tactics and don't necessarily need to be competent in their team's area of focus as long as there are other mechanisms to provide their team with technical guidance, mentorship, etc.

My take: Great IC skill is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a great leader. Leadership requires various other skills and experiences.

I feel like people interpret this wrong. Those who are great ICs and then assimilate into the traditional management role is not what Jobs was talking about. It is the spirit of an IC to push beyond the politics of the workplace and keep the philosophy of what makes a good IC alive.

In other words, politicians cannot practice philosophy and vice versa. They are incompatible or fail quickly when attempted.

This is an editorial written by someone who is heavily biased and doesn't know how management or organizational improvement works.

> In my case, I didn't need someone to manage what we already did. I needed someone frustrated by our current level of productivity. Someone irritated by our current level of quality.

That's called Operations Management, buddy, and you don't hire an IC for that job.

> Someone annoyed by the fact very few shopfloor employees were being promoted to higher-level roles.

That is literally every manager's job. And, one could argue, a bad idea in general (see Peter Principle).

> "If your boss could do your job, you're more likely to be happy at work."

Why? Because the boss has empathy and compassion for her workers, and makes an effort to understand the work. That doesn't mean she has to do the work herself. She simply needs the context and understanding to be able to facilitate effectively and make her reports happy. Anybody who cares enough can do that.

I have had IC bosses who were insufferable, and non-IC bosses who were insufferable, and good bosses of each too. The ability to do the work has both helped and hindered their management. Focus on efficiency is good, but often efficiency isn't technical at all.

Managing is it's own skill, separate from being an IC. Simply promoting an IC who does not know how to manage will not always lead to good outcomes.

The core problem is that all people suddenly believe in the dichotomy ic/manager in the first place.

This is an artificial separation.

A fundamental problem at most organizations is that if you want more pay, then sooner or later you _must_ be promoted to, or apply for a leadership position.

If you want to keep on working in a 100% technical position, with little to no leadership duties, well, the options tend to be few...if any. So what can you do?

I cannot wait to compare the LinkedIn comments this receives in comparison to the HN discussion.

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I'm not sure Steve Jobs is someone you should be taking management advice from.

The truth is that it boils down to the best person for the role to be filled rather than blanket statements based on anecdotes from a notoriously bad manager.

Dave Cutler is, seemingly, a good example of this. If you have not read it, I recommend the book Show Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary, about the development of Microsoft Windows NT under his leadership.

I don't want any job at all.

Does that make me a good manager

Basically, be Aragorn (movie version).

I’ve encountered significant evidence of the opposite being true in my experience

Manager wannabes should be screened for narcissism and sociopathy and rejected if exhibiting these or similar traits. Unfortunately, recruiters are often already screening for these traits for the top management candidates and reject anyone who doesn't exhibit them.

And the best politicians never want to be politicians.

This is true. And no more buts.

That is not true, an urban myth.

Leaders who don't want to be leaders are bad leaders.

I lead a guild once, because I wanted to decide how my time was spent and didn't want other people to decide for me. I didn't want to be a leader. I don't want to tell people what to do. I don't want to give orders everyone else has to follow. I like the team approach. But people are conditioned to follow. Except they aren't following... when you apply too much pressure.

I set up a website to plan raids. Paid for a domain. Went through the hassle to configure it and a discord server and a bridge between those and all I wanted was that people fucking sign up or off from raids. I asked them when they're available and made a plan most people are comfortable with. Only 5 out of 30 people did even register on the site. They joined the guild because it was advertised as a raid guild with social spots but raid being the main theme. A RAID GUILD. After 2 months I was so stressed out that I simply abandoned the guild and left the game.

I can't do everything alone. When I said that I never felt so stressed out in all my life 2 people offered to help with leading raids but at that point it was too late. Some players joined from other guilds, got spell upgrades for free, then left the guild. Some people joined from other guilds to cause drama and distress.

This is of course not real life. But it's close. You don't pay your members money for work and can't expect they follow guidelines. But holy crap, can you at least expect some interest in the main theme of the guild and them to sign up on the site and sign on and off of raids?

I never wanted to be leader. I feel well in the role of an advisor, someone who helps lead. But not the sole person responsible for everything. I'm not perfect. No one is. I was overwhelmed because every piece of the hierarchy in the end asked me what to do. And if I postponed answering things would get worse.

In software development I can be agile and change things around, but people demand stability. They want a bed already made but are not willing to do the effort to build that bed.

In retrospect I should've continued and "fired" 90% of the members even if that meant the end of independent raiding. But I was too stressed out and losing key people, because that game was designed around key roles being present in a raid. I didn't make the necessary decisions because I didn't want to lose anyone and not piss anyone of. But in the end key people left regardless. So lesson learned if you do something, focus on just doing that one thing and don't get ballast on board in the first place. It's better to have a small, dedicated group, seeing eye to eye, than a large group where the majority doesn't care about success.

Anyhow, see I wasn't a good manager, despite me not wanting to be a manager.

I wonder what kind of people are these Steve Jobs cultists...

Most of the "wisdom" of all "Steve Jobs said..." is just subjective interpretation of vague and ambiguous statements.

Truth, the guy had a lot of successes. But if you look at them most were just accidental and he only recognized them as success when they hit him in the face.

* Apple didn't "invent" the Mac, all of it's technologies were copied straight out of Xerox's Palo Alto research center. He found them in a demo.

* Jobs didn't "invent" Pixar. George Lucas and Ed Catmull did it. His project was to create an hardware company (the only thing he knew to do) and to sell it. But Pixar "accidentally" found success creating animated intros for commercials and television shows and Jobs did nothing to discover this early market.

* Jobs didn't invent the iPhone. He was scared of dealing in an area where Apple didn't have expertise and tought it would be dangerous (a call to 911 failing because the phone could be stuck in a processing task). It took years of internal pressure by Apple engineers and management and a personal fiasco on a Nokia phone with iTunes for him to accept the iPhone.

* Jobs didn't invent the AppStore. For the first 6 months the iPhone didn't had an AppStore because he tought it would relinquish control of the platform to others. He only accepted it because in these first 6 months the iPhone sales were a disaster. He accepted the AppStore because the customers were screamming for it. It was the AppStore that saved the iPhone.

* Jobs didn't invent the Apple I, Wozniak did it. And the idea to turn the kit into a functional computer was not Jobs'. It was a precondition imposed by a RadioShack manager.

* NEXT wasn't a commercial success. An expensive computer for college students with a black and white monitor was not selling enough to sustain the company. He was basically lucky that at the same time, Apple under Sculley, was a much bigger failure and the management board called him back.

"Reality distortion field" and "stealing" other people's ideas were Jobs' greatest talents. But then, these are the talents of most cult founders from Jim Jones to Donald Trump.