> is highly dependent on how well it’s managed.
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
That's the kicker, right there.
I am kind of in despair, at the quality of tech managers; especially "first line" managers, these days.
They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs.
First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible.
In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs).
Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow.
And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
We could have many parallel units and yet each unit can keep making technical progress.
I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Co...
Granted, to rise up the ranks in the NCO corps ultimately requires holding leadership positions, but it’s kinda ironic that the most senior NCOs are really just advisors.
Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority.
Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.
I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level.
Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades.
I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level.
That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.
1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle.
2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute.
Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant.
Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
The bureaucratic class depend heavily on employment income. They are very lucky to have their jobs, and could be easily replaced or eliminated. They are desperate to maintain the structure of the bureaucracy in which they thrive. They create a cost born by both the "working class" and the "capitalist class". They consume the resources of the capitalist class, and mis-allocate the labor of the working class. If the investors and employees could coordinate without them, more value would be created for the capitalist and more wages could be kept by the worker.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.