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Leaders Aren't Being Made At Tech Firms
theodp writes "In this article Vivek Wadhwa laments that short shrift is paid to management training these days at many high-tech firms. You can't be born with the skills needed to plan projects, adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law, says Wadhwa. All this has to be learned. Stepping up to address the problems of 'engineering without leadership,' which may include morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover, are programs like UC Berkeley's Engineering Leadership Program and Duke's Masters of Engineering Management Program, which aim to teach product management, entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, finance, team building, business management, and motivation to techies."
It sure looks like it.
Isn't that the exact same complaint developers and IT folk have about management? That the senior execs don't know C# the language from C# the note?
What you are saying is that management doesn't need to worry about those scum in accounting—they can treat accounting like a black box were magic goes in and magically record growth numbers come out. Kind of like how programmers take in cheap pizza and "make it work" as a spec and by magic crank out a working product in a single weekend.
You better be caraful with statements like that because if you subscribe to the idea that the management ought to know what devs do, you also have to subscribe to the idea that they need to know what accounting does too.
There is a reason the higher the level in the company you go, the broader your knowledge must be. You need to know how all the pieces fit—how accounting can help development, how the IT staff can improve the workplace, how marketing can sell the damn thing, and how the lawyers can keep everybody out of jail.