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Comment by havblue | Hacker News Reader

I think we're in a different world from twenty years ago. The upper-middle class kids I know understand that you can get your hands dirty and that a degree isn't a meal ticket to class security anymore. If you want to be a manager you have to understand the jobs of people you manage.

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> I think we're in a different world from twenty years ago. The upper-middle class kids I know understand that you can get your hands dirty and that a degree isn't a meal ticket to class security anymore.

This has always been the case throughout my life. I've heard the same thing year after year as long as I can remember. One of the episodes of the Cosby Show had Princeton grads working as plumbers because of the bad job market. What might be different now is comparisons with the job market in the aftermath of the pandemic. New college grads will never see a job market like that again.

> If you want to be a manager you have to understand the jobs of people you manage.

What? No you don’t. You have to know how to identify people you can trust, how to establish and grow that trust with them, and how to maintain that trust.

If you have bidirectional trust, then you can successfully manage people who do things you don’t understand.

Edit: read my reply to surgical_fire below

During my career the only managers I could trust were the managers who could have some understanding of the work I was meant to do.

It was alright if they didn't knew as much as I did. They just needed to know enough that I could have a meaningful conversation about what was going on in the projects they were trying to manage.

Maybe I’m being too specific in my interpretation of GP’s use of the word “understanding”

I interpreted it to be an understanding derived from experience from having done the job, but now after your message I could see it meaning an understanding of what the output should be, not necessarily how that output was produced.

Good leaders always lead from the front. There's nothing special about this "knowledge work". It's the same as any other industrial job in this respect. A good foreman can do everyone's job better than them and knows how to keep the higher ups off your back. They're someone you look up to professionally. There's no way you can look up to someone who can't do the job well.

The military gives leadership classes to officers. In one class, the lieutenants were asked how would they raise a flagpole?

The lieutenants wrote out detailed plans for it. The instructor marked them all wrong. The correct answer was "Sergeant, get that flag pole up!"

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