Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvanKelly | Hacker News Reader

I think the "technical people make for bad managers" idea derives from:

Companies which have limited advancement opportunities within the technical realm force technical folks with no desire for management into management positions that they're unfit for, leading to the conclusion that technical people are bad managers.

View on HN

The company I works for has a great solution to that, it allows people that want/deserve to move into management paybands (they leave the union), but stay in their technical roles. The become managers without direct reports. Career / Pay advance, without having to take on managerial responsibilities.

Are you a Software Engineer in the United States? I've never heard of unionized programmers (at least within the Bay Area, which I shouldn't presume you're in.)

No I'm in a western province in Canada. Most government or publicly traded companies here have massive unions that represent the majority of the work force, including programmers.

Which leads to the Peter Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

I see someone's already generalised it to the observation that systems grow until they are failing systems.

In my experience, technical skills and management skills are orthogonal. Many technical people, however, are pushed into management because there's no comparable career path strictly in technology. Organizations then pay twice: the opportunity cost of losing a good technician; and the much, much more damaging cost of a bad manager.

not to mention his salary, too

Yeah like the article states, you get to look at the complete picture and can make your own - multitude of conclusions can be narrowed to a certain subset when running a company and have a decision to make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com