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Comment by Reimersholme | Hacker News Reader

> Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.

I'd say the opposite is true. In modern management theory, the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued.

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I a big company I worked with, they had a special program for future top managers, they have them do grunt work in several departments for several years before they get the position they are hired for.

We had one of these guys working with us at one point, awesome guy: friendly, humble and good at everything he does, including partying! We only knew he was "special" much later, when he left us to continue his journey.

I have many bad things to say about this company, but this is not it: hiring people who are actually good, making them understand the work the company does by practicing, and thinking long term, hats off.

But back to the subject, even though the guy did actual productive work with us, and did it competently, he wasn't destined to be an expert, he was destined to be a manager and he was only here to get enough domain knowledge for that job. This is not the same path as a technical expert who will keep doing the same job, but better.

Story I've told here once. A director I worked under had climbed up from the bottom.

Now one weekend, us 3 ITers were going to replace the building switches and fix and cleanup the network cabling and move all servers. Massive weekend job. We start saturday morning, and deadline is monday morning or 400 people cant work. A second team is doing the phones. He promised to be there to open the door for us.

Junior me comes in, and he is at the door, with breakfast! We begin. He's not technical, so he resigns himself to sitting in the corner, popping ethernet cables out of bags as we request them.

He sees what we do, where we struggle. He sees IT take out the plan and execute it steadily, while the phoners are missing their team lead and every phone forgot its number. I learned PBXing on the fly there and had more fun than a job is supposed to be.

At the end of the weekend, all is well and monday is actually boring (except the emergency phone in the elevator wont stop ringing and connects random elevatees to customers. Oops. My bad. Forgot to reprogram that one.)

The next weekend, the bookkeepers have to do some mysterious all weekend bookkeeping thing. Director is not a bookkeeper at all. He was there, doing the bookkeeper equivalent of unbagging ethernet cables.

Now that smiling, helpfull man turns out to be a wolf in every exec meeting. He knows just enough about every job in the company. You can't fool him for 1 millimeter. You flood him with jargon, he jargons right back at you. In his circle of evil backstabbers, with life changing decisions to make, he's an absolutely scary steamwaltz. I admire him and don't want the job even if he makes a fortune.

> the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued

Sure, but you can always pick that up as you learn how things work. It's a bit harder to do that in engineering as it requires years of experience with your craft.

Just like a manager just starting out isn't gonna have the right intuition and hunches until some years of experience, you can't just "pick that up", that is the expertise, unlike domain knowledge.

Would you put a professional manager straight out of business school with no military experience in charge of a platoon of marines and send them into a war zone? How do you imagine that would pan out? if not, why would you put such a person in charge of an engineering team? Do you imagine it would go any better?

Like sure eventually the person will learn the job but only after a significant cost in bad decisions.

Eh, I'm not entirely sure if you commented this to the wrong parent comment, if not, how is this connected to what I wrote about?

Just to clarify just in case; We're talking about domain knowledge here, not management knowledge, I'm not entirely clear how that maps to your example, as you're talking about any general experience I suppose? I'm not saying we should put people without experience into management positions, if that's the misreading you did.

During the first World War, Belgium divided in its Dutch (Flemish) and French (Walloonian) speaking constituents, had many such Walloonian officers rule over often Flemish soldiers. It wasn't unheard of that an officer got shot by his own people.

I'd dread managing technical people in a field I have no experience or knowledge; in my experience, especially in tech, such managers are often held hostage by engineers who stubbornly don't want to do things, tell fibs about feasibility, ... The other side of that is that such managers often make progress making said engineers promises that often turn out to be carrots on sticks or outright lies.

If you can't go with in the trenches, what good are you and how do you expect to build a trusting relationship?

Every manager I've ever had sees me as an extremely competent multidisciplinary engineer. So obviously ever one of them thinks I'd be perfect for management. Every time I've tried a management role, it's been a flaming disaster.

At my last job I argued for six months on this point with my manager. I eventually relented and... disaster.

I don't know how to more clearly articulate "I cannot and will not manage others. I am not capable and it will end badly." But apparently that's not clear and understandable enough for management brain.

New job now and I think the boss is intelligent enough to understand "no, that is not possible"

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