Hacker News Reader

Comment by yafbum | Hacker News Reader

Big +1 on too technical leaders. Seen this a couple times with brilliant engineers who, once they became in charge of 50 different teams, appeared to try to just do the same work they did in one team but "scaled". Put every team in a spreadsheet and try to automate management through uniform metrics instead of focusing on managing and growing his direct reports.

And another time, seen a less technical leader step in, see engineers around me roll their eyes a couple of times at the lady (with maybe a smidge of male chauvinism blended in), but then see her actually fire bad hires, hire star players, and get everyone to align their priorities so they could be productive. Leadership is a very different job from the kind of technical excellence that too often gets rewarded by promotions (vs raises or bonuses).

View on HN

It's interesting that you have experienced both sides of the leadership problem space. Honestly a bit glad to hear that others share my experiences and that I'm not just unlucky or something.

Also, oh my do I ever have an extremely similar experience of an IC-type engineer going into a leadership position and trying to "engineer" it: put all teams, sprints, tech visions, growth frameworks, etc. in huge spreadsheets. I look back in jest now, lessons to be learned!

I've seen this in science as well. Analysts get promoted to managers and managing is a completely different skill set that involves social skills, communication, empathy- all people skills that they didn't need to be a good analyst. They were promoted because they were good at being an analyst- meticulous, quiet, just do their job and don't interact with others. Unfortunately almost none of this carries over to being a good manager. I wished many times that they just hired people with management skills from some field completely outside of science, a manager doesn't really need to know the intricacies of the work to do their job well.

My last industry job saw the company implode from this cycle as everyone got pissed off and left the company. My old ex co-worker sent me a letter from the CEO last week saying layoffs were starting because revenues were down and they keep losing clients...

That's true. It's also the case that, if you polled people here, you'd find no shortage of people with zero respect for managers without technical backgrounds.

> I wished many times that they just hired people with management skills from some field completely outside of science, a manager doesn't really need to know the intricacies of the work to do their job well.

Having been there too, I feel like this is another recipe for disaster. Technical management needs to be able to make calls on escalations — that's in fact one of their main jobs — and when they don't have the depth of knowledge to make the call on merit, they make it on rash impulse, or favoritism, or (perhaps worst of all) don't make the call and let issues fester.

> I've seen this in science as well.

Academic science is pretty much designed this way.

You get a faculty job based on your brilliant work as an IC (i.e., first author papers) but running a research group is a totally different skill set—-and often one people get very little training for.

Another +1, I left a startup over exactly this, all the managers, directors, and VP of engineering were IC engineers maybe 2 years prior. It was a shame, because I really enjoyed my role at that company in general, but ended up opting to leave after getting a really terrible leader.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com