Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is Development Leadership Overvalued?
gspec writes "I am an engineer with about 14 years experience in the industry. Lately I have been interviewing with a few companies hoping to land a better position. In almost all those interviews, I was asked these types of question: 'Have you been a leader in a project?' or 'Why after these many years, you are not in a management? Do you lack leadership skills?' Sometimes these questions discourage me and make me feel like an underachiever. I found an article in which the author talked about exactly this, and I agree with him. I think in this modern society, especially in the U.S., we overvalue the leaders and undervalue the followers to the point that we forget that leaders cannot do any good if they do not have good followers."
Leadership doesn't always equal management...Watch Shrek - who is the leader?
Suit: Bono, Unforgettable Fire was excellent. We're promoting you to regional manager.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Is Development Leadership Overvalued?
The law of headlines says the answer is always "no".
Someone has to herd cats (er... developers). You may prefer not to go into management, but someone does need to do it. Even if some developers think that project can complete itself organically with no managerial coordination.
It's totally reasonable for a company to have every employee in a management position within a few years, while unpaid interns do all the actual work. What could possibly go wrong with this model?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The primary responsibility for a manager is to get your projects done on time. Say something to that effect and that you consider yourself a manager of yourself who knows how to coordinate with others, etc, and you will have no problem with that kind of question. Above all sound confident in however you answer.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Do you lack leadership skills?
Tell them the truth:
Your team will die for you, but your former employer frowned on the level of necessary casualties.
Some people are Indians, Some people are Chiefs. I tried my hand at being a Chief, But I came to the realization that not only did I enjoy being an Indian, I'm a damm good Indian! (And there is nothing wrong with that)
Sigs are for losers
...they want to know why, after all this time, someone hasn't already trusted you to take management's side against the rank/file in the past. Trusting you to do things you might not have had the stomach for earlier in your career, etc.
An example is being an editor - defined as the guy that walks down the hill after a battle, shooting the wounded and keeping your mouth shut about it.
So, yes, it is an important step to get behind you as early in your career as possible.
I think it's nearly impossible to over-value great leadership. I think the problem is that some tend to over-value the people in leadership positions (regardless of their actual leadership skills.)
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Being a good programmer/engineer/admin/etc.. does not indicate that you will be a good leader. It is two separate skills, and two separate ways of thinking. The military has had "leadership" schools for a very long time for just this reason, and most private sector companies do also. It is much harder to lead a squad of riflemen than it is to be a riflemen. Driving and motivating others requires different psychology than driving and motivating yourself.
The question I think you are trying to get answered is "How do you prove leadership abilities when you have not been assigned such a job title?" In this case, play on what you have done. Lead team meetings in the managers absence, set up training courses for our level 1 people, built wiki pages for new products and worked with engineers to ensure support, etc... If you have done nothing like those, I would doubt your abilities to lead too.
I have been in the business for 25+ years, much of that being a team lead role. To the people that ask me why I have not been a manager, the answer is simple. I love the technical work more than I love the political skills required to be a good manager. I love writing the tools and pulling out numbers much more than I like to present them to the audience. It's fun for me to teach people, not fun for me to be responsible for them.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
>> Why after these many years, you are not in a management? Do you lack leadership skills?'
That sounds more like what you might hear from your parents around the Thanksgiving table.
>> Have you been a leader in a project?
That sounds more likely. Every top programmer I know, regardless of social ability, has had the ability to answer "yes" to this. Even if they were the kind to back away from formal management responsibilities, a guy who's been coding for 14 years should have had a couple of experiences where he just stepped up as said, "look, I don't want to run the team permanently, but either you follow my lead on X or we'll all fail" by now. (If they haven't, no, I don't want them on my team.)
....is a gift...given by those that choose to follow.
That is how I would answer their question.
My strengths are in development, not managing people. I'm a good team player, but I'd rather play Short Stop than be the team manager/coach. I've not found the right team leader that wasn't really "manager with poor pay" to accept, or I would have more team leader on my resume. In practice, I'm "team leader" in almost every job. I'm good at my job, and others come to me for help/support.
The problem isn't your resume or experience, but your interviewing skills.
Learn to love Alaska
As a software engineer with 30 years under my belt, I'd answer "I find doing the work and solving the problems far more rewarding than managing a team". Being the software lead is fine; I've found that being management doesn't do it for me.
"I haven't taken a leadership position because I don't want to. I like being a developer, not a manager, and I want to stay as close as I can to the work."
It's not a bad thing to assume that, in 14 years of work, you would acquire skills that you'd be able to pass on to others. You'd naturally assume a mentorship position, with leadership organically flowing out of mentorship. But that doesn't have to happen, and as long as you convince the interviewer that a lack of desire for leadership doesn't have to correlate with a lack of desire for work, you should be OK.
It's a hostile question, sure, but those come with the territory in looking for a job. As with most other hostile questions, the best way to disarm it is to politely disagree with the inherent assumption.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Not being unsympathetic, but if after 14 years experience in industry you've never held a position of responsibility, then there is probably a reason for it.
Look into that - which you can do better than any of us here - and reflect upon it.
Then you can explain it well in the next interview...
The problem seems to be that you're looking for a "better position" - good - but maybe without realising that these days everyone is told to hire "potential" as well as immediate competence.
Right or wrong? I don't know, but that's the way it is. :)
Will be hard to get out of your rut without making some kind of effort...
You could perhaps get involved with a non work-related activity which shows leadership & responsability; coaching kids football, military reserves...
Or do a part-time MBA
*ducks*
Good project leadership is invaluable. What IS overvalued is assuming that whether you've had the title or not qualifies you for a leadership role.
I've run across many great project managers who weren't technically the leader on the project, and just as many "leaders" who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag. Sadly, neither is usually visible within a one hour interview. Especially in this day and age of debating titles and buzzwords rather than actually just talking to people
Where I work, a government scientific organisation, you can be promoted according to either skill or responsibility, at least to a point. So there are instances of someone supervising half a dozen people, several of whom are employed at the same level as the supervisor. The management path is a bit easier though, and promotion on skill alone pretty much tops out at the level equivalent to supervising half a dozen people.
A friend who works at a large company said that they had two promotion paths too: management or technical skill.
I agree. Not just in development or even the business community, but in most any organization, leadership has become a buzzword and is somewhat overvalued.
The conventional wisdom is probably based on the notion that a team composed of a good leader and mediocre followers will do better than a team composed of a mediocre follower and a few mediocre followers plus one great follower. Thus, if you're looking for someone who will contribute a lot to the organization, leadership skills are considered more valuable. To some extent, this is true. Almost everyone can relate to having a frustrating experience with a manager who did not know how to best utilize his resources, and those experiences probably reinforce this belief.
On the other hand, this can be taken too far to the point that most of what interviewers are looking for is leadership qualities, especially if the person they are looking for is older. This age bias is especially common in the software development industry, possibly because people just tend to associate programming with being something young white males do. (See http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/017239/silicon-valleys-dirty-little-secret-age-bias)
My organization pays some people who are considered to be "technical experts" as much as the middle-to-upper managers, but proving yourself as a "technical expert" is a lot harder and rarer than getting a job as a manager. There is no formula for balancing technical expertise vs. leadership expertise, but most organizations right now could do with less focus on leadership and more on just good old-fashioned competence.
As Scotty told Geordi, "Don't ever let them promote you. Engineering is where it's at, baby." Or, something like that. I'm an embedded systems engineer with 10 years in the field, and I have absolutely no desire to ever move "up" into management. Sure, I've been the lead on projects, but I always want to have a hand in the development.
Those who can't do, manage.
sig: sauer
Unskilled labor has the greatest disparity between the value, and the cost, of labor and management.
Skilled labor, like data entry or bricklaying, has a somewhat lower disparity.
Specialized labor, like software engineering or acting, compensation ratio runs from something like 10X one way to about 10X the other way.
Many companies in software engineering have high end software engineers who also understand business managing their software engineers, in which case the manager is usually paid more. Some have high end business people running the developers, and the manager gets paid more. A lot, though, have project managers who are actually doing the management of the programmers, and they get paid less.
It is still common in software engineering, in the project manager case, for there to be a high end software engineer or business person as the formal manager. That person gets paid more and is above the software engineer in the org chart, but the day-to-day task management is done by the project manager.
So, in short, if you want to get paid more than your tactical effective manager, go work someplace that has project managers.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
nobody likes to take orders from a short guy, and everybody gladly follows a tall statuesque manager, even if he has no idea what he's doing. seen it.
Most, if not all, of what I say here are bound to be truisms. It is possible that, when strung together, they may become something more. Here are my observations at the midpoint of my highly technical engineering career:
1) Management/leadership are distinctly different skills than engineering skills. Being a good engineer may be necessary to be a good manager of engineers, but it is in no way sufficient.
2) In much the same way as "a knack for numbers" is only the first step to being a good engineer, "a feel for people and organizations," is only the first step to being a good manager. These are all skills to be honed and bodies of knowledge to be learned and understood and, when necessary, extended.
3) Not everyone can be a team lead. This should be transparently obvious just based on numbers, and yet some people forget it. Even at the middle and the end of your career, unless you are the sole survivor of a high-churn environment, not everyone in your cohort can be a leader. It just isn't possible.
4) Corporate cultures vary on this point. It has been my experience that truly large corporations actually occupy both sides of the curve-- some have no advancement track that does not end in management of some sort, while some recognize the virtue of having deep technical experts on par with, but not equivalent to, management.
5) That said, I find immense value in engineers, at the mid-point of their career, taking a minor team leader role-- under guidance and supervision from an experienced team leader-- for two reasons. First, it might fit them better than expected. Second, even if it doesn't, there are some insights into management you can only absorb by doing it. Even if you hate it, it may make you a better member of a team afterward.
The right distinction is between people who do something and people who don't do anything. Managers can be terrible leaders and do nothing but have "responsibility". A good coder can lead by what he creates in software and ideas. Often managers and architects just don't do anything other than sit between the executive function and developers and translate. But in a dev organization think about productivity in a day if no managers showed up vs. one if which no developers showed up.
It takes talent and/or training to lead a technical team, let alone larger groups. That's a skill that some companies are desperately searching for.
It's worth taking some training and trying the leadership/management track. If you're not good at it, or not happy at it, that should be OK. The problem, though, is that in many companies these days, experience as a developer is not valued. There's the view that developers/engineers are "plug replaceable resources" that they can get for lowest price.
If you're a senior tech person (and you're good at it,) you'll want to find companies that value experience. (Hint, if they do 'buzzword matching' on your resume for this year's "hot technologies" and that's all they ask about in an interview, it's probably not a god thing...) Or, you're going to have to establish a value proposition some other way, e.g. expanding to other kinds of engineering/roles within the company, sales/marketing/field engineering, etc.
Unfortunately, it's not a good world out there those with technical expertise and not much else on their resumes. (And a lot of the sh*tty software we have to put up with reflects the lack of experience by those that developed it....)
In some places some of the mangers are the dilbert principle PHB's. Other places have the peter principle where you can take good tech people move them to managers rolls where they fail at in or spend to much time on the tech side.
Also some tech people want to do the tech work and not want to push papers all day long.
Our company, and I'm sure many others, have two tracks of equal 'level': engineering and manager. So as an engineer, you can be junior, regular, senior, principal or lead. Once above this level, which is already pretty high, is a Director. Manager track is junior manager, regular, senior, Director, VP, etc.. So it's very possible to be a principal engineer, but 'higher on the ladder' than another manager. I'm sure many other companies also value their engineers and other technical people as much as they do managers.
There are a couple key reasons for overvalueing management
1 Management key job is to make you do your job for the least amount of pay. This tends to make them avoid rockstars.
2 Management don't like indians being paid more than them. It happens but if you listen to their conversations behind the scenes they bitch madly about this behind the scenes.
3 Management overvalue themselves because they are managers.
Your response should be ....... people like me your managers can manage larger teams allowing for a flatter management structure with larger teams.
1 I don't enjoy management, I enjoy development etc
2 With self motivated
... it's the BULLSHIT we value.
Get a line of reasons why you are so good in your current job that no one wants to promote you because you'll then have to leave the job you're doing, and watch the job offers come flying in...
The problem isn't leadership, necessarily. The problem is who is attracted to leadership roles.
It's a job that pays more, for less actual work, doesn't require keeping up to date on the latest and greatest tech, and is transferable to basically every sector. You can manage an IT shop or a machine shop, without any knowledge of coding/scripting or how to operate a CNC Machine. And if things go wrong, deadlines slip, code comes out half baked... you can shuffle around the blame on poor workers below you, and upper management above you.
Management also stresses politicking and shmoozing over any quantifiable skills or abilities. Are you a good manager? Bad? Who knows? A good Indian can make a terrible Chief look good, and vice versa. And if that terrible Indian got the job because his/her parent works for the company in an even higher management role, well ...
Management also attracts corruption. Or perhaps it's just the power that corrupts, but either way I've seen more than my fair share of managers direct purchases of hardware X over Y because they have a family member who works for company X. Or simply because a friend uses that brand. Regardless of any tangible reasons, technical or monetarial. I'm sure we've all seen the nepotism rampant in certain fields, and in certain companies specifically. (anecdotal : there's a rather large chip manufacturer here in San Diego that will remain nameless, but might have a football stadium named after them : during new-hire orientation, they out and out asked "how many people here have a friend, family member, spouse, etc working for the company that got them this job," to which nearly the entire room raised their hands)
All this adds up to managerial roles that reward lazy, corrupt, blame-shifting, individuals. Not in spite of these traits, but directly due to them. And we wonder why sometimes management roles seem overvalued.
This signature is false.
You're misunderstanding the question about leadership.
What they're actually asking you is 'Can you work overtime for free whilst delivering a steady 120% of output and wipping (i.e. "leading") our 5 other underpaid junior developers to do the same?' The talking down about 'lack of leadership' is an attempt to make you insecure and coax you into doing another extra few years of goodwill of being paid as a regular but doing the extra "leadership" work for free and be thankfull for the opportunity, even though you're experienced enough to know better, i.e. that it will lead nowhere other than into your next burnout.
I basically get the same stuff too in recent years - I'm 43 now, so everybody knows I'm old enough not to be bullshitted with crappy pay and goodwill promises anymore. It's a carefull balance of using my experience to my negotiation advantage and not scaring the employer away. (more details on that at the bottom) ...") or attempting to keep a straight face whilst noting that I don't have an academic rank (Note: I *do* have 27 years of programming experience and 10+ successful project in my field).
Allthough my portfolio and my recommendations are so pimped out that they dare not ask me about lack of leadership experience directly, they try to put me down/cheap me out using other means, such as rather addressing me with informaly (in German) than formaly - which basically mount to 10 000 Euros/year less in salary ("We're all buddies here and we've got foosball tables too
I've recently moved on to tell people right away that I want to work part-time (1/2 or 3/4ths of an occupation) for the equivalent pay, thus curbing stupid questions about "leading" (50+hrs/week for 40hrs pay). You get a little less money, have way more free time and don't have to put up with stupid questions, outrageous expectations, shitty production pipelines, dumb PMs, asshole co-workers, pointy-haired bosses or tickets that come in 20 minutes before closing hours.
In my last interview ws the first time I actually flat out told the employer that I'm not interested in foosball tables or party events and that I simply want to come to work, do my work, get paid, maybe bring in my experience if it is requested and mutually benefitial and otherwise go about my life. And low and behold, right now it looks as though I'm going to join the team. A team of fifteen, with aprox. 5-7 regular devs and no versioning in place and a lead who's nice but is so backwards I would let within 10 yards of any project ... gee, am I glad that that is not my problem.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yeah right. Where would apple be without steve jobs?
The question has nothing to do about leadership and everything to do about age discrimination. What they're getting at is they won't hire you for typical skills (Java, C#) because they can get someone else younger and cheaper. They would be willing to pay more for a manager, but guess what, they're not actually hiring any managers because they only promote from within.
The way to beat age discrimination is to do all of the following:
As a manager, you tend to get very little inside info into what your miscreants are up to because you're dealing with administrative bullshit. I'm managed. Not fun. I've actually demoted myself from management so I I could go back into the code base.
Yup, I am in the same boat. Management didn't work for me, it seemed like a thankless job with little pay or benefit advantage. The politics are rough as well, not to say that politics in development aren't rough as well. I try and be as agnostic as possible, I write code better than anyone else. Give me a project and a deadline; walk away and trust me to deliver, that's what you're paying me for... I don't care about politics, that's what your getting paid for.
I have not yet been promoted to my full level of incompetence.
Leaders are needed but above manager, I think they are over compensated these days.
By almost 100%.
Hopefully when the employment situation tightens up in 2016 on wards, the shoe will shift to the employees.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The key disparity here is that you are assuming being a "leader" on a project means you were a project manager or officially managing others in some formal fashion. I don't think that is what any of these interviewers were asking. You don't have to be in an official leadership role to lead. It could be as simple as leading by example, or it could mean that others look to you for guidance or direction. Did you ever take any extra initiative to accomplish something new or particularly challenging that no one else had that guts to take on?
Now if they really were asking about formal leadership roles (i.e. Manager), then you should have given a similar explanation to what you posted in your question (except maybe without the whole, "I like being a follower", part). You get more satisfaction from solving engineering challenges hands-on than you do being a manager. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, some may worry that because you desire to stay in relatively the same place for a long time, that you will still want regular pay increases beyond cost of living adjustments, which means you will be very expensive relative to your peers. This may be OK assuming you can justify your larger salary and by justify, I mean prove on a regular basis. But this then brings me back to my first point about leadership vs. managing. Your greater level of experience should translate into you being a leader amongst your peers and explains why you have been asked such questions during interviews.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
I don't think there is anything wrong with asking that question. Asking someone "why after all these years aren't you in a leadership role" is an excellent question for catching someone off-guard and seeing how they handle what could be considered a difficult situation. How the question is answered can also provide a lot of good information about the candidate.
If they get defensive, or seem insulted by the question, that can tell you something about how they would react to feedback. If they strongly state, "I enjoy being in the trenches, getting the difficult work done and my hands dirty in the process", that also says a lot about the person. A "good follower", as you put it, is going to handle these sorts of questions with style and grace. Because a "good follower" should be ready and prepared to be challenged, to accept feedback both good and bad and to get through difficult situations without breaking down.
I have asked plenty of questions during interviews that are likely to elicit an emotional reaction, because you want to see how the person responds. The interviewer has a few hours, sometimes less, to make a decision to be stuck with someone for possibly years. And the interview-ee has had time to prepare and compose themselves, hiding the faults that are likely to surface after hiring.
Consider having an excellent answer to that sort of question as being a prime opportunity to set yourself apart from the rest of the people being interviewed, rather than the opposite.
Sometimes I've asked these questions in order to make sure the interviewee is interviewing for the right job. That is he/she does not expect to be put into a management role and is fine with doing actual work.
The best teams that I have ever seen were almost leaderless. Typically the "leader" was someone much higher up in management who would be given regular presentations and they would then be the sanity check to make sure the project wasn't going off course.
Often the key programmers were damn good and while not project managing would apply project management skills in discussions where features were prioritized etc.
Typically the worst teams had a very structured and detailed leadership org-chart. Junior programmers, Senior programmers, project lead, project manager etc.
Often the managers in these situations had become managers through 3 routes. One was seniority, where they had just put in a bunch of years and then one day they were managers. Were those good years or bad years, nobody seemed to care, did they have a knack for leadership, nobody seemed to care. The second route was they were horrible horrible programmers and just moved into management as a way to not get fired as terrible programmers. And the third were refugees from other departments. They would close the call center and suddenly the call center manager was in charge of development. These last managers were usually the worst. The skills that served them well were usually all political and cunning. Thus they saw all smart programmers as a threat. Some programmer might actually want to manage, would take a course from the PMI and were fired in 3 seconds.
As I said, the best managers were often barely managers at all. They knew exactly what they wanted and that was the bulk of their management style. They would repeatedly ask, "Are we making progress to what I want?" Then they would look at everything, cut through the technobabble and either be happy or not. But the key here is that they knew Exactly what they wanted. This is only a shade different from the aloof manager who sort of knew what they wanted. Those projects turned into a pile of sick in the first week. The goalposts would move daily with feature requests being a classic game of buzzword bingo.
I witnessed a moment that would be hard to replicate; a project had failed around 5 times over as many years. So the head of marketing temporarily took over the development department of around 20 programmers. He said, "You can form into teams of any size and you don't have to have anyone on your team you don't want. Also there is no seniority. So if the two newest guys want to form a team then fine. But whichever group makes me happy before September(5 months) will form the core of a new programming department and I will lavish a bonus on you that will make my top salesmen jealous. Also if I hear any complaining you can clear out your desk. And again, your goal is to impress me. Not anyone else in this company. If someone tells you that you are doing it wrong tell me and I will tell them to clear out their desks."
A team of 4 guys (all with Junior programmer titles) won in just over a week. My favorite complaints from the largest group of soon to be ex-employees (9 were fired) was that there wasn't any documentation, the wrong language was used, and that their coding wasn't to company standards.
So to answer the original question. Often the worst companies are looking for someone to pigeonhole into their complicated org-chart; while the best companies are looking for someone who will fit into their squad. Most companies are crap at development BTW and don't seem to care.
But don't count on managers to understand that. Leaders who happen also to be managers will, though.
Leadership is about being able to obtain power to make the decision, the art of making the decision, and either through admiration or intimidation getting others to follow your in that decision. Is it about getting yourself to the forefront of a large band of lemmings and being able to, if you so choose, getting them to follow your straight off the cliff.
Whether your decisions are good or not is fucking irrelevant.
Managers are a much derided group today. The reason is the way American managers are trained and developed. Poorly. And with little recognition that the skill set is something that you can't develop working as a line employee. Yet it really is critical to the success of an organization.
Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine illustrates an example of good management.
Gregory Peck's role in 12 O'Clock High is also a good example of effective management.
Leadership, on the other hand is much over-rated.
If by "development leadership" you mean people with 'manager' or 'leader' in their job title, then it is vastly overvalued (and overpaid) relative to the actual value it adds to the endeavour.
If in contrast you mean true leadership in the sense of motivating and inspiring those under your authority, then I guess I can't offer an opinion because I have never experienced actual leadership in any development job I have held.
First, there are a subset of Managers that can't understand why anyone wouldn't want to be a Manager. They think that everyone with any amount of experience wants to climb the corperate ladder. After all, that's what they want / did. In their mind if you don't have that goal, then there is something wrong with you. If that's the case, you don't want to work for those types of people anyway.
Second, you mentioned you have 14 years of experience and are looking for a better position. Typically better positions typically require a higher skill set, including leadership skills - not necessarily management skills - there is a difference. If you want someone else to tell you what to do and set your goals, then you are going to top out eventually, and there won't be a "better position" out there for you. Management is leading other people. You can develop leadership skills by leading yourself. Do you wait to be told what to do, or do you take the lead and do what needs to be done on a project without being told that it needs to be done? How active are you in the projects you are on? Do you only highlight problems, or do you highlight problems and give potiential solutions / options? Mentoring younger people is another leadership skill too.
Don't sell yourself short. Think about what you do on a day to day basis, and honestly evaluate yourself. Don't be afraid to promote yourself. However, if you look at yourself, and don't see any basic self leadership skills, then chances are you won't get a better position anywhere else.
After close to fifteen years of experience, it is a reasonable expectation that a competent developer has enough experience to contribute to a team effort. IT is very much a technical trade. There is an expectation of a master / apprentice style of relationship between senior team members and their junior counterparts. It is strange to have fifteen years of experience and not having demonstrated some quantifiable leadership traits.
You are at the point in your career where you are going to hit a salary cap if you do not want to step up and be a bigger contributor to the teams you are a part of. I know guys in that position and they are comfortable there. They are making six figure salaries and are okay with the trade off between a smaller paycheck and not having to deal with all of the project management and personnel / mentorship expectations that come along with leading teams.
Leaders are over valued because there are so few of them. Good leaders are hard to come by. There are plenty of people in leadership positions who should not be there. There is an old saying, "The person who wants the power the most, is the last person who should be trusted with it." There are plenty of people with degrees in "management" who do not have experience with the work the team they are managing is doing. In IT, those people are deadly. They have no idea what it takes to really get the job done, because they have never done it, do not know how to do it, and do not have any interest in learning how to do it.
Look at yourself. You do not have, or do not seem inclined to manifest, leadership attributes. There are a lot of people like you. A lot of followers who want others to lead. I just hope you are not the kind of follower who complains about other leaders, without being willing to be a leader yourself.
I moved into a management position after thirteen years in the trenches. I now have a staff of three (and growing). I provide guidance and advice to the CIO, and to IT staffs at Fortune 50 corporations. At this point in my career, my experience and ability to articulate in why the company needs to pursue a given IT initiative is significantly more valuable than my ability to push buttons, develop scripts and deploy a specific technology. My ability to vet vendors and see through the smoke and mirrors because I have enough successful implementations under my belt is more valuable than my ability to implement a given technology.
Management sucks and it requires some specific skills to deal with the levels of suck inherent in management. There are so many "leaders" who cannot even meet deadlines, or develop project plans, or articulate what their team spent the last week doing, and what they will be doing for the next week. There are plenty of leaders who say YES to everything because they cannot understand risk or do not know how to define the scope of a project.
Given your nearlly fifteen years of development experience, if I were looking to hire you, I would expect that you have been on enough teams to know what works and what does not. I would expect you to be able to run a team. I would expect you to be able to setup a source code repository. I would expect you to be able to manage an SDLC. In short, I would expect that you can do more than just crank out good code. What else are you bringing to the table? What good habits are you going to impart into the rest of the team? If your answer is, "I am going to show them how to sit in a cube, do their jobs and not contribute beyond that." the odds are I am going to pass you over for someone else who wants to be a senior level employee.
I was once told that a good leader empowers their employees, and then gets out of the way and lets them do their jobs. Can you help the people who you work with be better at what they do? If you can, grow a pair of balls and step up to the table. If you cannot, accept it and focus on what you are good at.
If you have 14 years experience, and are in a reasonably strong job market, you should know what you want in a position and what you have to offer. Just because you are asked questions about leadership skills doesn't mean they are a requirement for the position, but companies want to know what they are getting when they take someone on. If you have a valuable skill they need they will probably want to build a role around you, and while you may want to be hands one providing technical leadership but not supervising a team, someone else with the same skills may want to delegate much of their less challenging tasks.The interview should be a two way conversation - if you dont like a particular line of questions ask if they are core to the role.
If you are looking for a senior position though you will need to be a leader in some way, this may be thought leadership or more direct,
They're asking 'have you lead a project' and 'why aren't you in management' so they're probably looking for 'project managers'
This is an awful dead end to find yourself in, so be glad you avoid it, as you'll spend your time in plannng meetings, getting frustrated when progress falls behind the plan (because it wasn't done realistically) and then getting stick for that from the senior management.
You need to find some 'senior developer' roles that really are for senior developers with a proven track record that can mentor a team, empart valuable experience to less experienced developers, deliver good quality by avoiding all the bad decisions you've seen others make during your career and appreciating what really worked well and lobbying effectively to implement those things in your new place.
After that you can step up to 'technical architect' level that focuses on infrastructure, methodology as well as development and strategic technology choices, but beware : this kind of role varies even more wildly in what it really entails from company to company. With the long development experience you have, if you really care about the context within which you develop, a focus on quality issues and have managed to remain enthusiastic about using new technology to develop better systems more efficiently you should do fine.
You also need to really develop an ability to 'let go' and appreciate that the work that more junior developers produce may be 'inferior' to the way you would have done it, but is a 'good enough' solution. Then you can discuss this with them and help to start guiding them along the path you have already travelled.
Most software managers are reduced to babysitting developers. Usually they are not technical enough to make architecture or design decisions. Most technical leaders who are capable of making architecture and design decisions do not want to manage/babysit anyone or attend countless meetings. Why these two roles seem to be combined into one position is beyond my understanding. Hire a babysitter that stays out of technical discussions. Then hire a strong technical leader to make design decisions a stay out of the babysitting. I have only seen this in place once and it worked.
Given the high demand for developer talent: Experience still takes the cake. Unless you are applying for a Lead role, interviews like these should raise a red flag about the company culture. I've worked at a number of companies whose infrastructure has gone off the rails due to executive pissing contests. Usually it takes an outside consultancy to come in and lay down the law (enforce all the things the lower staff have been expressing a need for for years). If their focus is leadership, maybe it's a sign that things have gotten a bit muddled and they're hoping a new sheriff might level the town.
That said: Leadership, in my opinion, is the ability to drive a team toward a common goal while unblocking members of technical obstacles. It isn't overvalued as much as it is diluted by people who lack the initiative to keep abreast of technology. In other words: A good leader can deal with bureaucracy in a professional manner AND grab a keyboard to assist a team member in resolving an unexpected and elusive task blocker. Furthermore, a good leader contributes a significant amount of time to bringing others on the team up to speed.
I've known a few very talented developers who lack social skills entirely. They work in their silos producing undocumented artifacts, and lash out at others (including clients) during meetings. Technical prowess is important, but so is a healthy workplace. I'd rather be short staffed than have a genius sociopath in my company.
they try to put me down/cheap me out using other means, such as rather addressing me with informaly (in German) than formaly
they try to put me down/cheap me out using other means, such as addressing me with "casual perks" (in German) than "formal compensation"
The rest was pretty good english.
At large corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and others, there are always two tracks: management and individual contributor. You can reach the same levels of seniority and pay in either track. At the top of the management track, you can excel to be a director and then VP, etc. At the top of the individual contributor track, you can reach principal engineer, then distinguished engineer, etc.
Everything new is well forgotten old. Try to read Murphy's laws, Peter's principle, etc... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
"We overvalue the leaders and undervalue the followers to the point that we forget that leaders cannot do any good if they are not also good followers."
In my experience, the best leaders are the ones who want to lead the least. They make the tough decisions, then get the hell out of everyone's way and get back to work getting the job done.
It kind of goes back to what someone said earlier in the comments.. the best chiefs are found amongst the indians.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Managers and Leaders are two different things. Managers are defined by their roles and Leaders relates to a skill. So a Manager can be a very bad leader and samely a code developer can be a very good potential good leader. The main issue is we tend to mixup managers and leaders. Anyway, the current industry pattern which is also driven by the society, is to reward who frontend with the higher manamegment. This is all about accountability. Management needs someone (single person) to blame and those who can answer all their questions and stupidity. Most of time the presentations of CEO or CTO are prepared by someone who is much lower in the ranks but they don't get any rewards but the newspaper headlines praise all for the CEO. This is the harsh reality..
The question "why aren't you in management? do you not have any management skills?" I can honestly say, I tried that, spent a few years at it, and I don't like what it does to me. You know Merrill's personality types? I'm a Driver - Driver. I tend to pound the table. I deliver ultimatums, and follow through with them. In short, as a manager, I'm an asshole. Make no mistake, I will get things done, but in a surprisingly short amount of time everyone will hate my guts, including me. So tried that, didn't like it. I'm happy being an individual contributor.
It's worked so far.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Does not mean you are an uninvolved manager. The problem may be that you have held the role but not nominally so. Some organizations don't bother being explicit about it if things are healthy enough that the role is naturally fulfilled.
Either you are the place you are coming from is broken. Team lead in a decent place isn't some do-nothing person who just orders around the people doing the real work. I have, however, seen *many* places work that way. If you are in such a context and a truly good technical person, you may be perplexed by an interviewer emphasizing leadership as an aspect of a technical position.
In a healthy context, team lead is a role you'll naturally assume at some point or another. A good technical team lead is still very much directly contributing and tracking technology, but have the added responsibility of coordinating the efforts of others. You cannot meaningfully coordinate without the techincal knowledge and direct involvement in the effort.
To be good in this industry, like others, you must know both how to lead *and* how to follow and when it is appropriate to do which.
I'm sure everyone has already said it but leadership is not management. Leadership is the act of leading, it requires actions not a title.
On a hockey team, the leader is the captain. He leads by example, his teammates respect him. The GM does not tell the hockey players what to do, he manages their pay and who gets fired when the team does poorly.
In engineering, management is not leadership, it is management. The leaders are the guys who when they speak, everyone shuts up. The leaders are the guys who the team goes to for answers. The leaders are the ones who have the trust of the management.
If you are interviewing at a place that doesn't know the difference between management and leadership, and god forbid actually has a management person leading engineers, run. Run away. You don't want to work there. I have worked at places where management people lead engineers. The manager was trying to explain how hard it is to be an engineer to other managers and he said "they write thousands and thousands of lines of code with 10 logic statements on each line just to solve simple problems". That guy was an idiot, he was a management person trying to pretend that he had any technical leadership skills at all. That always fails. Other management people like it because they all speak the same language and they don't have to interface with the awkward engineers, but in the end you cant have management leading technical talent.
People try to make this complex but it is very simple. This is how I always answer this kind of question.
If you put me in management all you get is a poor manager. In my small experience I am an OK leader, so why would you waste my talents doing management?
I am a good leader because I am a good follower. You say storm the trenches, and there is time for comment, I will tell you exactly how your approach will fail, when and the cost. Then I will do my best to succeed anyway. Meanwhile segregating the parts of the project that will work as much as possible so when we do fail (and we will) there is some place to start over from ... I have done this on three major projects so far and if I had not on at least one there would not be a company where there is one now...
I mentor. Almost no one else does - really. I have never had a mentor, none of my co-workers have ever had one - except those juniors that I have mentored. Enough said.
I set a high, unattainable, personal standard but don't expect others to meet it. I encourage anyone I mentor to build on what I can provide to exceed me. My IQ is a little over 100 and my EQ sucks. I have yet to mentor anyone that cannot exceed me.
I give praise where it is due and attribute other's work diligently. Generous, honest praise is worth a lot.
I am available to help anyone that needs it but at some point I will point out those who are doing work that they are not capable of doing. I have had to do this a fair amount. This includes reporting people for harassing others in the workplace when it was appropriate. (see high personal standard above)
I will not lie to you - ever. I WILL point out when the emperor has no clothes and where he can get a nice suit. You had better get used to it. It isn't worth my time or the stress it will cause me to do otherwise. (This one drives people nuts).
Hrm, this probably explains why I have a hard time getting work. The two small companies I have worked for in my 15 year career have both strangely done very well, however. Wonder if there is a correlation somewhere ...
More leaders = more entertainment.
You are correct. Project leadership is overrated. Coders code. Those who can't code manage. A good manager is worth his weight in gold. Unfortunately, nine out of ten managers suck ass.
"Well, do you want an average manager or a world class programmer?"
Quite seriously, I don't understand that "need" to get into some sort of "management" position. We have a few programmers who reach the 50s soon, one of them reached it. None of them would be good managers if you ask me, yet they probably have a higher salary that most of our middle management idiots, and with good reason I may add.
Put people into jobs they're good at. Why should I stuff someone who excels at understanding problems and breaking them down into portions that can easily be converted to code into a management position where they will most likely drown between paperwork and "social stuff"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Countless studies as early as sixties. A good one from Sloan School can be found with searching.
Management side will always be more highly compensated because I has more dollars theoretically at risk, more opportunity to get the company in legal trouble, etc. ultimately, in all public companies, finance runs the show, and line managers have a larger direct effect on the bottom line
With leadership aptitude you can multiply contributions from people around you.
Without leadership skills your contribution to the bottom line is limited to what you can do personally.
When hiring an expensive senior engineer I want one with leadership skills. If I can't get that I'd rather have a less senior engineer likely to do as well or better as an individual contributor (because the work is more novel to them and likely to have them operating at a more optimal psychological arousal level) who I'm more likely to mentor into a leader than some one in industry long enough without signs of showing aptitude or motivation to lead.
As others have noted, leadership and people management are different things. I don't expect engineers to be managers or vise-versa.
*Shrug* No. I don't like telling people what to do, and I suspect I'm not good at it. NB this doesn't mean I lack social skills. I can work with people; I just don't want to lead them.
Surely it's not hard to explain? It's how most people feel, after all.
The question you have to resolve is what do you consider a better position? If it is becoming a C-level executive (I always giggle at the C word), then you need to follow the management track, understand Machiavelli and practise fake smiles and insincerity.
If you want more interesting or independent work, the interviewer asking you those questions has told you all you need to know about their company. Smile, say thank you, take a doughnut and leave.
Try to remember, you are a valuable prize to any company. You have to believe that, or you should not be in the room.
Most managerial tasks are what your parents would recognize as secretarial. The majority of the time is taking dictation (minutes), scheduling (daytimer), and handling bureaucratic processes (paperwork). Few have any meaningful say in direction, strategy, tactics or even furnishings.
High tech management is also littered with folks who could or would not translate their education into effective development roles. Since they understand the terminology, and have at least a vague understanding of the process, they are better suited to the role than some dolt with a Sigma six black-belt.
I think he meant not using the formal Sie (Think "Sir") but the informal (Du? 20 years since I took German). Anyway, it's the difference between calling you buddy or Sir, and he's saying how they address you adds up to what you take home.
Leadership tends to equal management in smaller companies, whereas management & lead gets segregated in for larger organizations.
And looking at management, I definitely believe good management is highly underrated & highly misunderstood.
My current company is going through growing pains, and Ive seen teams flounder because of poor technical managers:
1. A QA manager Id worked with has oodles of domain and technical knowledge, great communication skills, and comes off as a nice person; but doesnt have the skills to protect his workers from political BS and weed out non-performers. He was replaced with someone that has far less domain know-how, but is a great manager.
2. The development manager (manages all of the technical teams) and also highly technical felt it was ok to go directly to his underlings and bug them with questions & swipe them for the latest & greatest high-visibility project. Very uncomfortable when your boss boss feel this is ok, but I think it sunk in for him that this gums up the works. Sadly the rest of the company still has this start-up mentality.
My former job was in a much more established company, and I was blessed to work for a fantastic technical manager...for a while:
1. Protected workers from politics & provided a good sense of priority & direction.
2. Had a vast domain knowledge--business & technical--so it never hurt to go ask him questions.
3. Kept the technology cutting-edge when appropriate, but let the workers have a big say on the matter.
4. Things were constantly done under budget.
5. Knew how to set appropriate expecations.
6. He was very much of a straight-shooter.
7. He chose his lieutenants well, at least on a technical level.
Yet he was fired after a very drawn out process, because he was out-politicked & out-schmoozed by someone (non-technical) who wanted to take his position. It was horrible to see the process. I stuck around for a couple of years after he left (I eventually quit), and it was the biggest mistake of my life.
I know there are ./ workers who can relay the value of a good manager, even those who dont have the technical know-how.
Leaders that I talk to say things like "I set priorities", "I am not qualified to evaluate technical work" and such. I have been working for the last 24 years in a number of fields, and all my experience is yelling at me saying "someone who is technically illiterate is not qualified to lead technical people" because while they are able to detect bullship, they are incapable of the insights that lead to greatness. There is a demotivational poster that says "none of us is as stupid as all of us" and technically illiterate managers of technical people make that true, in my personal experience. You aren't technically illiterate. You also aren't not a leader. There are many (many) breeds of leadership. If they are asking if you had a job-title then you can answer that. If they are asking about building consensus, acting from vision, motivating stakeholders - everyone does that to some extent and the more experience and talent you bring to the table, the more you do that no matter what title HR attaches to your pay-stub.
Good leadership is important. But when the team "lead" doesn't even understand the language you program in and only has that role because his buddy is the manager, it sucks. So when someone tells me they have leadership experience I take it with a grain of salt.
I am a developer with 20+ yrs experience developing various systems in a what ever language the problem calls for. I like the hands on challenges that are presented to me by being a polyglot dev. I know one day I will slowly become obsolete in the eyes of some young manager, but with me goes all my knowledge about the front line. Both are needed though to some extent.
See we live in a society where we are taught to be successful means to advance to some corporate level. We forget that some of us are truly nerds and like staying in the corporate garage per se tinkering and learning it has nothing to do with being management. You can be a good leader and not be the leader( ie. creating techniques and standards that others use, knowledge transfers, etc. )
Just look at the terminology we use in most software companies (including the game industry):
"Managers" are people who, well, manage people.
"Team leads" are people who lead teams.
Sometimes the same person has both roles, but the company I work for assigns these roles to different people with impunity when it makes sense to do so. We end up with managers who manage all the people on several teams, and teams whose members actually belong to different management chains. The team members get technical direction from their team leads. The managers do paper-pushing and make sure food is delivered at dinner time and a decide how much raise or bonus everyone gets, and a thousand other things. The managers decide what goals the project should try to achieve. The team leads direct the tasks that have to get done in order to actually achieve those goals.
point that we forget that leaders cannot do any good if they do not have good followers.
Hence why they want good leaders... cause the company you're interviewing with obviously has incompetent management and is bound to fail. A good leader knows he needs to build a team, and a team with good members, skill-wise and culture-wise. Most teams out there are just plain dysfunctional. And that's why business love military guys as managers--they can built a team out of anyone (in most cases).
FYI, 98% of companies out there suck, and likely will fail (or be bought). Hence why businesses always looks for leader/management skills: there's plenty to choose from, but few succeed. Where as there's plenty of guru hotshot workers, that are consistent, even down to the expert guy putting up the cable TV.
People prefer to take orders from guys with good hair...
They rent white people like that in China
Do you lack leadership skills?
Yes.
There's nothing wrong with that. If all lead, who follows? Or, with more brass tacks, if all wear suits, who works?
German has formal and informal version of the word "you" (with different verb endings). Not using the formal form during a job interview would stand out as an attempt to be casual, or possibly an insult. One generally uses the informal form only with friends or children.
1/3 or less of the way through your career and you are speaking like an old fart bemoaning the "good old days". Companies have personalities and certainly there are companies with the personality you describe. These companies probably have CEOs closer to your age. There are also plenty of companies with philosophies that are a probably a better match for you. You are wasting your time and theirs if you are interviewing with the wrong companies. We have this thing called the internet these days ... use it. I have had roles from dev to CTO in this industry in the last 34 years at over a dozen organizations. I prefer technical engineering work with an R&D slant (or CEO). I am very good at this and have been the highest paid non-executive in multiple companies as a result and have always made more than my manager for the last 15 years.
A room full of leaders means never getting to consensus, analysis paralysis, and an agreement to have another meeting... tl,dr: The good ideas won't be heard.
And companies are like raids. You've got your tank (CEO/General Manager), your healers (middle/front line management) and your DPS (worker bees). You don't want your best DPS trying to tank, even though he probably can a little, because he'll suck at it, he won't like it, and your raid will suffer because of it. Same thing with companies. You don't want to promote your most talented people to management positions because they're making you the best money where they are getting stuff done. Maybe pay them more if they're worth it, or offer other incentives (more vacation, free coffee, shorter days), but there's no shame in doing a job and doing it well for 40 years and then retiring.
Not having version control is everybody's problem :(
The categories of leader and follower do not together include all people. I consider myself a producer ( a maker of things ), and the hierarchical considerations are superfluous.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This guy,
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10410?gko=8932f&tid=27782251&pg=all
calls non-mgmt the 'value zone'
if i can teach my daughter development leadership as a five year old, then no it's not overvalued. if anything her management skills are improving at an exponential rate and by the time she graduates college she'll ..... oh who am i kidding i know nothing of the future that far ahead.
I once had to work in a team where everybody wanted to take the lead of the group. It sucked. It made all of the team members frustrated. It didn't help productivity either.
It was an HR management failure - failure to build a working team, to pick the right people to form a team.
So be careful when an employer is looking for a leader type. Are they looking for one in a leadership position or just as a regular team member? Do they seem to understand that an effective team cannot have many leaders?
To reply to the question though: Leadership is not really overvalued, but it's very often misused and misunderstood and its rather the just-doing-my-job type of person that is undervalued.
No. Now get back to work, you goddamn code monkeys.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
When looking for a development position with little to no leadership responsibility I would be hesitant before hiring someone with 14 years of experience.
Many such developers are simply incompetent, they have been around for ever and haven't risen to the top for good reason.
many developers do not want to manage but find themselves leading in their own way, becoming an architect or a very hands on team leader of a small team.
A different problem with experienced developers is ego and strong opinions. There are normally many good ways of doing something, an experienced developer is more likely to continue arguing for too long.
If I published a position asking 2-5 years of experience I wouldn't disqualify on the spot someone with 14, but it is definitely a red warning light.
and specially in a very dumb interview, with a stupid IT manager that had to have also a rookie indian guy assisting asking very basic IT questions the very stupid question "where do you want to be in 5 years time" hey, if they had the trouble to read my CV, they would understand, I already was at the top of the career, I am 40+, don't have nothing to prove to anybody anymore. They didnt pass the interview. It was good they didn't call me back anyway.
Do you have good ideas? Okay. If you have good ideas and good understanding, can you be more effective for the company as a whole as an individual contributor or a leader of six or seven decent implementors/learners?
- If you can push ideas, techniques, and wisdom into other team members, you can make your whole team more effective.
- Formalization/recognition of this helps to grease organizational uptake (though this can admittedly break down). Still, making you a team lead is putting faith in your judgment. This is not necessarily the same as making you a manager, but there is some crossover.
- If you weren't the leader because you actively declined the position, congratulations, you just demonstrated an unwillingness to be leveraged.
I'm not a manager, and I prefer when ideas trump rank, but get real. Companies want people who can help them cultivate teams and act as rudders. They're looking for people they can leverage to make their whole team better.
And, yes, "leverage" is a douchy management word these days, but anyone should get what I mean here. You may not sure that it is right, but people who lift teams up are hard to find.
That said, if you're the silent type, lead with code. Create examples of competence, and see them ask the way through, even if that means finding advocates to help you. There are ways to demonstrate value and improve your resume that don't require taking on leadership positions.
listen to your elders. that's why it's called seniorosity for a reason. listen first, doubt later.
a leader is a teacher. like being a parent. handing knowledge down thru time? 2 cents stuff.
a manager is a like the person organizing a bunch of kids in day-care, keeping them from eating each other >: D
Indeed there are many more types of people than managers and "followers". Managers most of the time have an extremely shallow knowledge of ANY field.
So, think of yourself as one of these (not exhaustive )"experienced engineer", "security expert", "experienced database designer", "requirements analyst", "software quality expert", "seasoned IC validation expert", "mechanical engineer with years of eelctronics temperature control engineering expertise".
Develop those skills instead of taking he default route of "social skills" and "project management". I don't say those are not helpful, but strong companies need a cadre of strong experts and specialists. You can take a technical leadership position without being a formal manager, you can drive the archictecture of your company's products, you can do innovative things which even move your entire industry forward. Disregard the MBA bullshit of "you can be easily replaced by a new guy". In most cases, companies hurt themselves dramatically, when they let go of their seasoned experts. Smart, successful, growing companies don't do that. At least not that often. And no, don't tell me IBM is still smart. They were once.
If a company cannot make use of an excellent expert outside management, change your employer. Great companies value strong personalities and respect their weaknesses, instead of forcibly trying to change people.
Very often a capable manager (a person who knows how to work people) will select the most experiened guy and let him make the technology decisions, which the manager will then enforce/direct the team to realize. Great leaders know what they don't know themselves and where they need to go for advice. No need for any formal job titles to do that.
"Managers are a dime a dozen. You'll never run out of managers. I have highly specialized skills in software design and construction that few people have. I've spent my career emphasizing my strengths."
Tell those interviewers that you've intentionally decided not to be a "people manager," because you are an outstanding individual contributor, passionate about the technology.
On the flip side, leadership skills (as opposed to people-management skills) are indeed important to software developers. You have to know how and when to:
- Push back against questionable requirements from a client (tactfully)
- Advocate your point of view
- Not wilt in the face of authority
- Rally the other members of your dev team around an idea
- Speak your mind in the middle of a heated meeting
I assume by better jobs you mean more lucrative jobs? If so what is in the job spec, do the roles require any leadership skills? If you offer the same skills you did fourteen years ago why should you be paid more? Sure the types of technology change but essentially similar fundamental engineering skills form the basis of them. After three to five years of experience I would start expecting an engineer to be a good follower (or better). After fourteen unless you are offering better than a good follower why should you get a better job? By now you are probably perceived as an expensive follower, they will ultimately settle for a lower cost good follower.
I'd start thinking about how you can demonstrably become an exceptional follower or a leader, and check the job specs again do they mention leadership?
Tell your interviewer if you provide leadership in technology directions: evaluating, and accepting or rejecting novel artifacts into products is an example. Setting coding standards, adopting new technology releases or taking initiative to organize work for the whole team are other examples. Show by examples how you are a person whose contributions reached others in your business and market segment.
Manager is generally just a position on an org chart, someone who writes up performance evaluations and generally get paid more because they are "responsible" somehow for the people and stuff under them.
Leaders are people that inspire you to succeed and produce. People that just naturally instill others to follow. Leadership is a skill, not a position on an org chart.
It would be nice if all managers were also leaders, but unfortunately, far too often that is not the case. Good managers must be good leaders. (Truly good managers are also good organizers, but that's a separate topic). As a side note, people can be "leaders" without being good managers (note that organizer aspect).
I've always hated being a manager and avoid such jobs, mainly due to all the paperwork and dealing with people issues that come with it. That said, I am often looked at as a leader in my areas of expertise, mainly because I am willing to share my knowledge to help others succeed, and take responsibility for getting things done and done right.
So just because you are not a "manager" does not mean you are not a "leader". That should be your thinking during interviews like this.
The sheer use of quotation marks in that article made me wince....
[quote] I was born in Denmark. I have lived in about a dozen different countries during my 45 years, and one of the things I have learned is that every society has its own "personality," largely based on what that country's citizens consider to be "important" to their way of life. In all truth, I suppose that nobody has the "right" answer, just "their" answer.
Some of the most consistent parts of the "environmental" education taught in the U.S. are the qualities/traits I will describe as "Leadership" and "Competitive Success." [/quote]
I job hop alot... longest I have ever stayed in one place is 2 years and that was once in my 15 years. I have never had a problem replacing jobs. Then again I live in northern virginia which is an IT hub. I am a DBA. I do both operations support and architecture/design(which I prefer). I have never had my level of experience held against me. The market for DBAs may be different. People rarely want grizzled 40-50 year old veteran DBAs. Might be partially because one mistake and we have an outage. So it might be a different mindset.
Funny thing is I also have an MBA. I have had other DBAs hold this against me interviews because they were concerned I might want to go into management.
I think the DBA mentality is different. Its not uncommon to have DBAs in there 40s with all developers that are younger. I think this is in part because if I make 1 mistake production can go down. We don't get a test team. So people want grizzled old farts. When we get younger guys we don't let them touch production. I am 38 and I am not exactly old for a DBA.
As far as project leadership goes... if you have been doing this for 10 years and do not know how to be an informal leader on your team, your not worth the kind of salary it costs to hire you. If the company thinks 'leadership' = management, its a crappy place to work. These are just 'jobs you take for the check until a better job comes along and you can quit'. These are jobs where you should strategically try to do things that improve your skill set so you can make yourself more marketable and not care about the company. These are 'hump and dump' companies.
When you go into management you become tied to a company. Your value to that company may increase because you get important corporate knowledge, but your skills to other companies decrease. Companies rarely hire managers with less than 10 years experience because with less than that they can promote from with in. So if you go into management you reset the clock on your experience and your technical skills fade away.
As a job hopper, I make a hell of alot more money staying technical than as a manager. I have had interviews where I talk to HR first and they specifically tell me not to discuss the proposed salary with the manager since I will make more than the manager. When I was contracting I had a VP at Fannie Mae tell me 'you can have my office if I can have your contract'. Why the hell would I go into management for a pay cut? Note, at companies that think management = leadership don't reward for being technical. Again, these are 'hump and dump' companies. Use em and lose em. Soak any useful skills from them and then kick them to the curb.
Special note: I live in the Washington DC area. This is an IT hub. Also, it is almost all contracting. So there is a ton of staff up to get more billable bodies and then lay everyone off. So companies are used to people like me (though I admit, I have had people ask about my job hopping). If someone asks why you left you give one of two answers mainly 'you are moving jobs to india' (no one asks if they are moving my job to India) or if its for the government 'funding for my project got cut and I found a project closer to home than the company had elsewhere' (traffic is bad in this area so people get it). This works like a charm. I have also had very short term jobs that I hopped on. Dont even put on my resume and claim 'between projects' since I dont want to explain it.
And low and behold, right now it looks as though I'm going to join the team. A team of fifteen, with aprox. 5-7 regular devs and no versioning in place and a lead who's nice but is so backwards I would let within 10 yards of any project ... gee, am I glad that that is not my problem.
That's setting off warning bells in my head. No version control in place, you are reading the lead as "nice, but backwards" and wouldn't be comfortable with him on your project. If you are seeing that management is knowingly allowing problems to brew with no action to correct them, don't expect things to be different once you're hired...
I think leadership is one of those bullshit HR myths that they believe they need in every candidate.
Its the same HR myth as needing a developer that has 10 years experience in C#, Java, C and Python. I mean would you actually want a job that required that haphazard collection of skills? No, so why do HR staff love throwing in every language they have ever heard of as a job requirement?.
You can't have a team full of leaders, nothing will get accomplished.
If you are looking for a team lead position, then look for a leader. If looking for a strong developer look at years of demonstrated experience and forget about bullshit buzzwords and HR myths.
And there is nothing wrong with being a "follower" in so much as assuming if you are not a leader you must be a follower. There are definitely different levels of participation of the non-leaders in a team. I don't just do what I am told or feel I have no impact on the decisions made. If I don't agree with something I will make my voice heard, and I have often been told by my team leads that without my feedback they could not do their job as well as they do. I don't want the added burden of having to manage a team, but I am also not sitting around waiting to be told to do something without question or involvement in the process.
It's a shame HR will never understand how important it is to have someone passionate about their job rather then having some bullshit title in their past work experience.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The truth is there is a huge shortage of engineers with more than a decade of experience that can offer project management experience and when they're looking for experienced engineers that's who they want. There's nothing wrong with followers but what makes you any more competitive than the other follower fresh out of college? That you're a little better at following instructions? Why should I pay you more for that?
But when I interview, I *always* say "if you have a tech track and a management track, I'm on the tech track". Takes care of all of it. I think I have said, if pushed, that I could see myself as team lead (and sorta-kinda was once or twice).
And as for the value of upper management, or even mid-level managers who know *zip* about what they're managing, check out any Dilbert....
mark
Did "anybody" else "notice" the extremely "excessive" use of "quotes" in the "linked" arti"cle"?
Unlike in Capitalism, Globalization demands you to be an Highly Skilled Wage Slave to get a job
Casteism