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."
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."
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
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.)
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.
Lord Farquaad of course. He sent Shrek on the quest, married the woman he wanted, and did it will all the evil pointy-haired management techniques required by modern business.
His big mistake was failing to invest in appropriate levels of dragon defense.
Did you not watch the same movie I did?
"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*
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lord Farquaad of course. He sent Shrek on the quest, married the woman he wanted, and did it will all the evil pointy-haired management techniques required by modern business.
His big mistake was failing to invest in appropriate levels of dragon defense.
Wrong. Everything is correct in what you said, except identifying Farquuad as a leader; it shows your confusion between leadership and management. In a very terse statement, the difference is illustrated by:
* management - about doing things the right way (take care about the logistics of the process: time, resource, quality at the least)
* leadership - about doing the right things (if the course/actions are not perceived as right, the team will refuse to enlist their entire support).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
The reason leadership is important and why they might want to ask those questions is a lack of career development can be indicative of someone who doesn't apply themselves.
Evaluate the work that engineers do. If their work has been par or better, then they have earned it. If you suspect that they are lazy, so what? Are they doing the work, or not?
You might have problems with an employee for being incompetent or not caring about the real meaning of their work. Seeing that they switch to management is a funny way to make sure they are good, seeing that it's a different job than what they came in the door to do.
Ah, but donkey led the quest itself.
It's frequently an ass who takes the leadership position.
No, I'm just a former "team leader" and/or "development manager" in commercial software which retired into a senior dev position in a research joint (interesting and pays enough, also lets me enough time to do my stuff as well).
Otherwise, it even doesn't sounds militarish to me:
* Leadership - social influence by which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task (translation: from utterly lying to using a crowbar, I'll use anything to convince you to go where I'm telling you)
* management - coordinating the efforts of people to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively (translation: it's all in the synergy, baby. Of course, heaps of money might solve the problem... if it doesn't, you didn't spend enough; don't say I haven't told you this, my ass is covered)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Just as the GGP is wrong in saying management/leadership involves doing the right things, you are wrong in applying too many attributes to each.
A leader is a person in advance of others.
A manager is someone who directs others.
There is no quality of rightness, effectiveness, organization, goals, resources, support, commonality of purpose, efficiency, etc., properly attached to these words.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate