The Promotion Problem | Hacker News Reader

The Promotion Problem

coroutine.com

3 pointsrbranson8 comments

I think the problem comes from promotion being seen as a linear path, which conflates the two orthogonal values of programming skill and management skill. Getting managers out of programmers is a good thing, that's how you get managers that understand programming, which is important. However, manager is not always strictly an upgrade, or strictly a downgrade, from senior technician, in any sense. Management should be a separate, parallel career advancement path, and technicians (including but not limited to programmers) should have promotions (and raises!) available that recognize skill and add responsibility in the areas that they are best suited to, be that managing, or technicianing, or sales, or whatever.

Intel for instance has a very well organized promotion track for purely technical roles (principal engineer and Intel Fellow if you go far enough). Many companies do not have such deep respect for engineering and management often becomes the only way up.

Its competitor ARM does too, iirc. In addition, almost everyone (including many in top roles, such as the CEO) come from an engineering background.

Can be tricky, as the managers decide salaries, and most managers aren't happy giving someone they manage a higher salary than they have.

I would submit that that would perhaps be a sign of a bad manager.

The purpose of management, in theory, is to (by whatever means) enable the people they manage to more efficiently create value for the company. Someone who would rather drive off a valuable employee by underpaying them instead of "manage" someone making more than the manager does is probably a manager in name only.

In general, it's almost always a bad sign when employees who don't directly create value for the company have ego issues directed at the value-creating employees (see also: power-mad HR or IT departments).

I completely agree. Still probably happens more often than we'd like to think

This seems to be a specific instance of the Peter Princple. It's typically concieved as a joke, but probably often inevitable in a linear carreer path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

The Peter Principle is darkly amusing, but it's not joke. I wish it were.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com