Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist"

hype7 writes "Here's a provocative article; the VP of engineering of a Sequoia-backed startup in Silicon Valley makes the case that good engineering managers aren't just hard to find — that they basically don't exist. The crux of his argument? The best engineers get all the benefits of being leaders, but without needing to take on the rather painful duties of management. So they choose not to move up. Compare this to the engineers who aren't as strong, and use the opportunity to move up as a way to get their voice heard."

Comments

they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

So... the good engineering managers are leading by example and managing through informal means. They are out there but since they do not have titles they do not exist. Only a manager would think like this.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Austerity Empowers]

The engineers are leading projects, but no one is managing the resources.

I'm saying what I have seen to be true, but I can't imagine why anyone would go in to management to begin with in spite of some of the importance of the above statement. The biggest issue is taking responsibility for my boss (and so on up the chain). Bottom line: wall street can go fuck themselves, I won't represent that their shit doesn't stink, that it's a good idea, or even necessary. But once you have product and customers, they want to be large and in charge of the inevitable collapse they will bring, and they need that structure of managers to inflict their will.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[ackthpt]

Go back about 40 years ago, before CEOs gathered obscene salaries, bonuses, etc for doing sweet fanny adams, and you had generations of managers who rose up through the ranks and knew the work of their associates, as they once had done it themselves. They were gradually replaced by career managers who knew nothing about what the engineer was doing, but how to play the management game and crawl up the ladder. IMHO this is why so many companies are in such trouble all the time, they are run by people who do not understand what is actually going on.

There's a saying: Those who can't do, teach.

My variation on this is: Those who can't do, teach, but those who can't teach manage.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[James-NSC]

I'll second that observation. Ever since "manager" has become a career option in and of itself, it's attracted "those who can't do anything else and who don't produce anything of value". Prior to that being a self serving career path, managers were people who worked their way up the ranks and carried with them both the experience of being "worker bees" and the knowledge of what the pain points of the bees were. Once they became management, upper management benefited from their experience of being a worker, and the workers benefited from their experience of being "one of them" - everybody won. These days, you have managers (we have one where I work) who have never done anything else and as a result, bring absolutely nothing to the table.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can't do, teach,

So you are saying that Ron Rivest, inventor of RSA (the cryptosystem and the company) or Vaugh Pratt, co-founder of Sun microsystems or Rajeev Motwani co-founder of Google can't?

What you are really trying to say is that you attended a sucky college where teachers were not particularly sharp.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[khasim]

I'm saying what I have seen to be true, but I can't imagine why anyone would go in to management to begin with in spite of some of the importance of the above statement.

Different personality types. Some people love code more. Other people love interacting with people more.

Also, the manager usually gets paid more than their most expensive person being managed.

So what would drive someone who loves code to trade time coding for time attending management retreats? Aside from the money? And the prestige of management retreats?

Change the way you look at management and workers. Managers are supposed to be management because they understand BOTH sides (management and code) and can translate the requirements of either side to the other.

A programmer is NOT the larval form of a manager.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[ackthpt]

I'll second that observation. Ever since "manager" has become a career option in and of itself, it's attracted "those who can't do anything else and who don't produce anything of value". Prior to that being a self serving career path, managers were people who worked their way up the ranks and carried with them both the experience of being "worker bees" and the knowledge of what the pain points of the bees were. Once they became management, upper management benefited from their experience of being a worker, and the workers benefited from their experience of being "one of them" - everybody won. These days, you have managers (we have one where I work) who have never done anything else and as a result, bring absolutely nothing to the table.

I learned these lessons from my father, who was an engineer. His manager was a managing-engineer. The person above him had been a managing-engineer. Two presidents I knew the children of, they attended the public schools, had been engineers at one time. Now the top tier of the company is a bunch of pros who live off the wealth prior generations brought to the company.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Quirkz]

You don't think technology's pace has played a part in this? There's not only more tech and more complicated tech, so that it's hard for one person to know it all, particularly while also learning how to manage people, but it's also changing such that even if you were pretty technically sharp early in your career, by the time you've had a chance to rise to manager you're completely out of date, or quickly get there. I wonder if the environment is stacked against managers learning to be both good leaders and also keep up with tech in a way that used to be less true?

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've experienced working in both stable start-up (100+ , just got in the black) and big corporate (10,000 + staff) and see a distinct difference in how managers are picked. In the former, it was often the engineer leading by example - mentoring other staff, taking on the hard parts, etc - who would get the management opportunity first. It was almost common courtesy to ask if they were interested. The admin overhead was low, so many took the opportunity - and got to stay technical! Consequently we had strong staff across the board, could solve hard problems fast & profit rolled in.

Switch to a more corporate environment with folks who get labeled management because they snagged an Agile certification and what do you get? Slower delivery times, piecemeal systems & bugs galore. You also end up with your engineers doing the delegated admin work from the manager because that's what classic management would train you to do - delegate! Well...delegating admin complexities to your engineers = dumb. Disrupts their focus.

Academic managers like to say there is a difference between management and leading, primarily to justify not having to lead :). Leading can be dirty, gritty work - but more satisfying & bigger impact to the bottom line.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Consum3dByFire]

That doesn't follow. Someone without the formal position wouldn't be able to be a true manager due to a lack of recognized power. Perhaps a clearer way to state the main idea is that "engineers who (would) make good managers are not in formal management roles".

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[tomhath]

It's not clear what you base that on. I suspect what we see today has always been true. And CEO's have been very well paid for far longer than 40 years.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the ones with the titles are overpaid and over-perked for the glorified HR roles they perform.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Maxo-Texas]

True, in 1970, they were paid about 50x the average salary. That's highly paid!

Of course today, they are paid 350 to 535 times the average salary. That's obscene!

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[certain death]

+50 insightful!!

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Fubar420]

I've found that just because a manager likes interacting with people does not mean people enjoy interacting with them. A manager should be value-add to the organization -- being "good with people" isn't a skill if you're not actively paid to deal with people you can't fire.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[LDAPMAN]

Actually, I've seen many situations where the top person (or people) on a team make more than the manager. It's actually pretty common in tech.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

This isn't true at all, it's actually quite the opposite. The older line of thinking of organizations was to have a pyramid of managers, which gave line workers less autonomy. Today line workers are more empowered and organizations tend to be flattened in comparison.

Proof: http://www.nber.org/papers/w96...

In the early 1900's the highly bureaucratized management structures were largely a result of Max Weber's business principles, which started to fall out of favor in the 70's, and newer businesses try to avoid that system as much as they can. Some workers need to be micromanaged (yes, believe it or not most minimum wage workers can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, which is why they make minimum wage) but firms where you're paid a higher salary want to avoid that as best as they can so that their employees can maximize their potential.

And before you go "aha you sound like a manager" no, I'm not in management, not interested in it either. I'm not morally opposed to being a manager either, like some who post on slashdot are, rather I just don't think it's a very fun thing to do. I'm actually the type who prefers to simply be handed a problem and asked to solve it within the defined parameters. You do that with management (especially project management,) but a lot of times you're bogged down with accounting, and I hate accounting (and things like it, such as logistics.)

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[JoeMerchant]

If you're ever completely out of date, you're doing it wrong. Sure, you might not stay at the cutting edge of the latest fads, but the good new tools and techniques take 5 to 10 years to get established. If you're so out of touch that you can't pick up the buzz of something worthwhile after 5 years, and take the time to learn and master that yourself, how did you ever get through engineering school in the first place?

Also, if your company "needs" new tech that didn't exist five years ago, maybe you are too old for that game. There's plenty of worthwhile work out there that doesn't involve gambling on picking "the next big thing" before it happens.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[radarskiy]

"They are out there but since they do not have titles they do not exist."

No. Since they get away without having to do the dirty work of management, they are not managers.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. That's a stupid generalization. I think there are many who "can" who would teach, if it paid well enough. I have considered teaching, myself - when I'm done with the bullshit that is the corporate world.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's: Those that can't do, teach, those that can't teach become program directors (at funding agencies)

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

and thus we have a new variant of the "those that can't do, teach" adage that is at the heart of the education problem in the US - we don't value teachers. see:

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/11/275368362/pay-cuts-end-of-tenure-put-north-carolina-teachers-on-edge

and our own /.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/02/13/1640215/shark-tank-competition-used-to-select-education-tech

for exemplars.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're ever completely out of date, you're doing it wrong. Sure, you might not stay at the cutting edge of the latest fads, but the good new tools and techniques take 5 to 10 years to get established. If you're so out of touch that you can't pick up the buzz of something worthwhile after 5 years, and take the time to learn and master that yourself, how did you ever get through engineering school in the first place?

Also, if your company "needs" new tech that didn't exist five years ago, maybe you are too old for that game. There's plenty of worthwhile work out there that doesn't involve gambling on picking "the next big thing" before it happens.

And with youtube, white papers, and free MIT courses online, it doesn't take long to get back up to date, assuming that you had the skills to begin with.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[dcollins117]

Those who can't do, teach, but those who can't teach manage.

Well, that's better that keeping them doing actual engineering work where they can actively fuck things up. Someone has to attend meetings, let those who can't design worth a shit do it.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

The saying is an insult to teachers everywhere and unless you've been a teacher you should go sit yourself in the corner. Its like all lawyers are evil and all contractors are crooks. Stop tearing others down to make yourself feel better. And tons of managers have really difficult jobs and do great at it.

Admonishment aside, it is true that "management" has become a bit of a goal for parasites due to the ease which one can be a failure yet appear successful due to the excellent work of the team.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[jedidiah]

Teachers worthy of any respect are the exception rather than the norm. They are far more rare than competent technical managers.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[CrankyFool]

That probably came across somewhat cranky, but is entirely accurate.

I'm an engineering manager. Until a year ago, I was an engineer. I'm a decent engineer, though prone to quick-and-dirty hacks sometimes to solve problems rather than good long-term design. I got promoted to managing an infrastructure software engineering group (after the engineers in that group gave me the thumbs up) and in my first one-on-one meeting with each of my engineers I asked them "so what would you like me to be doing around here?"

And you know ... yes. It turns out that if meetings need to be attended, and we have a choice between a world-class engineer attending them and a manager attending them and then passing back whatever relevant information engineers want to know, my engineers seem to prefer that I attend those meetings (sometimes. Sometimes they just call their own meetings if they think they need to).

Generally, I consider my job to be "the stuff we need to do the engineers don't want to do" (e.g. recruiting). And I get paid less than about half my engineers (and I think my salary's a little below median for my group). Which is fair -- their impact on the organization is higher than mine.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in some countries, but we're not all as bad as USA

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I am infrastructure manger, I moved up from a senior engineer about a year ago. My situation is EXACTLY like yours. I have the same meetings and I have a few engineers that make a lot more than me. Maybe one difference. There was a gap in some core technologies when I moved up (VMware and SAN mainly) so I still do a lot of hands on with but that I am slowly getting away from that because we have been short handed but we have some new guys starting soon. My guys make the suggestions, they make most of the plans, they support their own areas, they determine when they can work from home and when to come into the office, how many days they need if they have to travel to a remote office etc. Basically, they are all supervisors. I help with planning, scheduling, and the interaction with other groups and often play devils advocate.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is along the lines of an argument I had with someone the other day regarding my chosen career path dual majoring in electronics and computer programming, they looked at me and were like "you're never going to get hired anywhere because they want entry level engineers and you come in with a broader education than the managers you are working for and instantly by default they want to make your career all about proving that you're not just a piece of paper." What they were basically getting at (so far as I could tell from their meandering argument) was that in the working world that unless I went for a career path that the prize of which was a management job, that I would never pay off my student loans and would always be in debt so bad that I would never escape the net worth of being in the poverty level. He was right to a certain degree, but not for the reasons he thought he was right about.

Someone like me has to have vision about what they want to do with what they have obtained an education in. My focus was robotics so I dual majored at the associate level in electronic engineering and computer programming with a view to solving both mechanical and computational problems, the greatest of which encompasses building adaptive, autonomous learning machines. To an employer, especially at the jobs that are advertised on dice and monster and the ladders, It is all pie in the sky stuff because they can't see any money in it for them. This is compounded by the fact that they can and do pay contractors (en masse) 1/4 or so the going rate for the work they are doing, without having to be bothered with pesky ideas like honoring agreements like sick days, vacations and least of all hiring and advancement.

I hate to sound bitter here, because I am definitely not but this is a pickle in the American technology job market, they keep saying that they want STEM professionals and that there are not enough graduating students to fill all the jobs that are available, but, when it comes time for them to invest they just don't. Part of it is the business meme of buy low and sell high, part of it is the carrot and the stick : essentially there is a school of thought with hiring managers that the way to manage is to 1- act like the persons skills are total crap, when they don't utilize or challenge the worker or pay him/her enough to survive so out of the gate it is nothing but constant stress and 2- When it comes time for advancement they play the Kevin Spacy esque game of "oh you were 2 minutes late this morning, is the clock wrong or were you actually late? Were you lying or is the clock lying? Oh So you are a liar!" Basically it is something that unless you go through a formal process with the ear of someone 2 management levels above them and catch them red-handed doing it like 10 times in a row is there any thought given to the idea that the manager has a batchelors degree in one subject and the person working for him has a masters and a bachelors and 2 associates degrees and a lot of awards, certifications and despite working extra hours constantly, demonstrating skills that saved several an executives ass when their hard drive went belly up and they had to have their data right then, to be able to pull "hard drive forensics" out of their hat on a moments notice and save their ass.. but in the end they don't thank you , give you a recommendation on linkedin or anything.

I had a pretty bad experience with a company called Allianz, they are a German insurance company, I went in and worked for them for 2 years contracted under IBM and it was supposed to be a 4 year contract and they were dangling the "contract to permanent hire" carrot. 2 years into the contract, a manager got promoted over the IT team and the first sweeping change he decided to make was to increase the mobile password policy on all the mobile phones to a ridiculously high level despite there were no data breaches or any indication of a problem. This resulted in 2 weeks solid of constant password reset calls from angry executives that were narro

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[__aaltlg1547]

You fail to understand what managers do. Let me make it plain for you.

Engineers build things with tools. Managers do the same thing, but their tools are more complex; their tools are people.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[kzadot]

That would probably be "leadership", which is slightly different from management, and possibly a potential replacement for what we recognise today as management.

Also good engineering managers won't often be, or need to be, good engineers themselves. Just because someone knows about electronics or programming, doesn't mean they know about things like risk management, team motivation, pricing of knowledge work, what the market wants, etc. And they are unlikely to be interested in much of the paperwork aspects, or the politics and the continual selling and marketing of ideas that needs to take place.

A good engineering manager is unlikely to (need to) be a good engineer. Fairly different personalities are required as well as skill sets.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[kzadot]

Managers don't need to know the details of what the engineers are doing, we have engineers for that. Especially for managers that are closer to the market or the customer, or other parts of the business.

It is fairly legitimate that those who can't "do" in the sense of the actual engineering work, are found in management roles. That is ok though. You could spin it around and say that those who can't manage end up "doing", which is fine too. Both types of role are required to successfully generate market value.

Anyway, it isn't usually engineers who are promoted to management roles, but product people such as business analysts in the software world, or experts in the actual domain like bankers or insurance experts. If we consider a company that makes say medical devices, it is more likely that doctors or people with a medical background will become the managers rather than the engineers who work on the products.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

but we're not all as bad as USA

And the US is much better than most. So what is your point besides tossing juvenile remarks?

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[funwithBSD]

This is why IBM has two lines of advancement: Technical, and Line Management.

Line Management does HR, resource management, business goals, budget, etc.

Technical line does technical work and leadership. Project Managers are not management of personnel, but of projects.

That at least, they get right.

Re: they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think...that was the longest post I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[jhol13]

In essense, good managers work for the engineers, bad managers work for upper management.

Re: they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes sorry about that, I wish even that it had the opportunity to be more fun based and was more technology jokes, but Apparently this is a raw nerve with me, and not just Shatner, despite all my star trek based humor.. (my favorite is my one about imagining the look on Yeoman Rand's face if she found Captain Kirks porn collection including the bonus track with all the Horta Bukkake.. Eewww!.. Surely this is the reason Rand was only in 5 episodes of TOS.. In the Motion picture she was the transporter officer but had more reasons to have PSTD there.. then she popped back up as a space dock bar until she saw the Enterprise pull up.. and she like ran the other way.. and then she was the communications officer on the Excelsior.. guess she hadn't found out about Sulu yet...)

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Evtim]

Slightly tangential, but your post would be just as correct if you replace "manager" with "politician". Career politicians are the death of our society.

On topic - I am a lucky bastard - at my work all the managers are nerds who either founded the company or arose from the file and rank. It's not that they don't make mistakes but 1. they know the work and 2. being nerds you can have a logical discussion based on facts with them.

Terry Pratchett is on our side too. When his hero-con master Moist looks for a printing company for his stamps it says [approximately] "Moist liked companies where you can go inside and actually speak with the person whose name is above the door. It means it's probably not run by crooks".

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[gweihir]

Matches my experience. Good managers in particular know when the hell to shut up and get out of the way of the engineers.

Of course, one critical skill of a good engineering manager is to recognize bad engineers. In particular in the software field, the majority is bad and a sizable fraction is very bad.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[VernonNemitz]

Perhaps the solution is to re-think the need to manage any engineer good enough to qualify as a leader. And I'll disagree with an earlier post about "managing the resources", because that task falls under "logistics", and any good engineer understands logistics.

So, concluding from the above, companies should hire good engineers and not hire managers.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[u38cg]

A common complaint and one that is absolute nonsense. Certainly a manager must understand his company's work, and more, but a a manager does not do the job of his underling and being able to do the job of his underling does not teach him how to be a manager. Indeed, management and programming are in some ways similar - a poorly understood profession that is difficult to evaluate except when the project ends in failure.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[jellomizer]

The assumption of this article is based on the idea that an engineer can continually grow within the company as an engineer and switching to management is only a sideway path towards promotion.

Sure I hear a lot of people going, if you are a really good engineer, you don't want to be a manager anyways, however there is reality of life. Engineering jobs are not what they use to be, the Pay isn't as great, less benefits, and getting raises will slow down after you get to a particular level. These Engineers have family's to feed, there are hobbies they want to maintain, they want to improve their lives over time. In essence live the American Dream.
However Government/Corporate/Education/Not For Profit for Union and Non-Union organizations, all tend to keep a job hierarchy structure. Position X gets paid through y+a, but manager of position X gets paid y+(a-b) through y+(a+c). The manager will normally get paid more then the people he is managing. and his manager will get paid more then him.
Very few organizations will allow an engineer to be making more than his manager or his director or his VP.

So after you say get a title of Sr. Engineer, you will get stuck at a particular pay grade, (you could look for a job elsewhere however Sr. Engineers there is a point where you will be making too much to move along, then you are stuck) Management unfortunately doesn't have those barriers, if you do your job well enough you can go from Manager, to Director to VP, to CTO/CIO to CEO. You may not prefer these jobs, but you are getting paid more.

I personally think the reality sucks. A good engineer who love to be an engineer should be granted promotional without limit, based on his work and value to the organization. And should be valued like the other big guys in the organization.

However there are a bunch of forces that caused this, and would require pain on all levels to fix. Do you as an engineer really want to quantify your value to your work so you can show that you need a promotion, how do you factor in positive traits like getting along with others, team work, and open to suggestions, if say in a brain storming session you came up with an incomplete idea, then an other engineer using your idea changed his train of thought and was able to come with a better design that could make the company billions. We could get paid like the CEO with stock options, however that is putting more risk on us to suffer threw the hard time and hoping for a greater reward in the future.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[mgscheue]

Teaching is wonderful in many ways but do be prepared for the bullshit that's the academic world, too.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I must be doing something wrong then... Three decades of adding millions to the bottom line to the company (yes) and I don't make more than the Manager.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Svartalf]

Then why are so damned many of them so piss-poor with that work? Not the Engineers...the Managers.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can do neither, manage.

Re: they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on your post you must be a manager or aspiring to be one. Thinking of the employees that you manage as "underlings" is a poor viewpoint and one that usually leads to all your good people finding new jobs. It's not your fault your project failed right? I mean, you had nothing but poor quality underlings to work with... wonder how that happened?

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[boristdog]

Actually, long ago the engineers were basically managers, and the folks that did the work were the mechanics.

My grandfather was a radioman for PAA back in the 30's-60's. That man could look at any vaccuum tube and tell you what it did and what was wrong with it. He could build complex circuits with discrete components just off the top of his head. He held several patents. But he had no college degree so he was a "mechanic" and his bosses were the engineers.

He used to talk about "engineers" the way we engineers now talk about "managers."

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a saying: Those who can't do, teach.

This is my one of my least favorite sayings and is completely untrue. If that were the case, we'd not have made as much progress as we have in this world. There have been millions of great teachers over the years.

Re: they exist but do not have titles?

[malloci]

I too work at a place where my management is promoted from the ranks of geeks. The problem? Geeks often don't make good managers. People skills are often lacking; they try to maintain that role of geek (which they were great at) and fail at the additional duties of managing.

I'm not saying it can't be done, and i agree that Having a manager that understands technical details can be great. Having one that understands how to really manage people is 100x more useful.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[S.O.B.]

I agree a manager doesn't need to do the job of his/her staff but for highly technical professions like IT and engineering a manager who is able to do the job or was able to do the job at one time is a better manager than one who has no understanding what his/her staff actually does.

I've had over 20 managers in my career and by far the best managers are ones that did my job for a large part of their career before they moved into management. The worst managers I've had are ones that either fast-tracked their way to management or were "professional" managers.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase you're looking for to appropriately flip out about is "Those who teach, can't do."

There's a difference between the two. Really.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[ackthpt]

Matches my experience. Good managers in particular know when the hell to shut up and get out of the way of the engineers.

Of course, one critical skill of a good engineering manager is to recognize bad engineers. In particular in the software field, the majority is bad and a sizable fraction is very bad.

This echoes my observation of eBay and some of the changes afoot at Google. At some point software development sails past Perfectly Function and becomes a bloated, confusing mess of ever changing interfaces, which frustrate end users.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[grunthos]

This didn't happen 40 years ago? You imagine a time that did not exist.

"The Peter Principle" was published in 1969.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

"My variation on this is: Those who can't do, teach, but those who can't teach manage."

Regardless of the variation, the premise is far from correct and misleading.

The brightest, most well rounded, remarkable and what I would consider 'capable' engineers/scientists I've known and worked for have moved through teaching, doing, and managing both in scientific and engineering domains. And it never was about capability or aptitude. Instead, it was about their interest, what experience they were hoping to take away for themselves and where they thought they could have the most positive impact on the overall endeavor. Being able to teach and guide engineers, architects and scientists as well as jump into the trenches when needed should be a requirement for all Chief, Principle or even Senior Engineers. It certainly has been nearly everywhere I've worked for the past 20 years.

Developing the ability to be a mentor/teacher IMHO is a bonafide job requirement for engineering/scientific professionals. I think it is the same for understanding all the aspects of business, management and finance as well.

I'm not saying there isn't truth in what you are saying. What I am saying is there just enough truth to be terribly misleading and could handicap you in your career to adopt such a ridiculously simplistic and erroneous perspective. I mean really? Isn't that where we as engineers/scientists are supposed to shine? Distinguishing reality from an easy answer?

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[gweihir]

Indeed. The root-cause are often highly intelligent people that are not smart at all. Somehow, they seem to think that demonstrating they can master complexity is the goal, while it only shows that they do not understand what the purpose of the thing they are building is.

My favorite quote with regard to this:
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." --Tony Hoare

The bad and very bad ones go for the second method every time. And yes, I can attest from personal experience that the first method takes far more experience, skill and time. It gets better though if you practice regularly.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Salgat]

I've found that the issue isn't always whether they understand what they manage, but that you have a person trained as an engineer that is now in a position to manage, something that requires management/social skills. That requires a whole different skill set (a good manager doesn't even always need to be technically minded, as long as he can provide his workers with the resources and motivation needed to be productive).

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[sh00z]

Matches my experience. Good managers in particular know when the hell to shut up and get out of the way of the engineers.

True, when the engineers are doing what they're supposed to do. Better managers are listening to the customer and re-directing the team when they either veer off course or the goal changes. And to be the buffer between the engineers who have to deal with the customer's moving target and the customer who doesn't understand the havoc he or she is wreaking.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Hognoxious]

Put it another way: do you choose the general by seeing which soldier is best at using a rifle?

Of course, ideally he should know the notions of what a rifle is...

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Hognoxious]

their tools are people.

In Britain calling someone a tool is an insult. However it doesn't mean you think they're a spanner.

Just to confuse things, calling someone a spanner is an insult too, though for a different reason.

Then again, Americans call spanners something else. Go figure.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Skreems]

That seems uncommon. At a lot of the major tech companies (Amazon and Microsoft for sure) managers make at least 20% more than the equivalent engineer, and often even more than that. Sort of shows you what they value.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost Centers and time managemnet effort recording spreadsheets are the cause of all misery.
Sometimes the companies ICT is centered around cost centres. Thus, co-operation is absent, as are the results.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[__aaltlg1547]

Do you have another word for something that you use to get work done that's not insulting?
Because this is literally what managers do with people.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[__aaltlg1547]

Because (1) it's difficult since people have minds of their own and (2) management training is inadequate and fad-ridden.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[Hognoxious]

Do you have another word for something that you use to get work done that's not insulting?

Don't think so. You wouldn't understand, what with you being only a wog and all that, but pretty much every word in English is a euphemism for private parts or bodily functions of some kind.

Because this is literally what managers do with people.

You're a hoot at parties, aren't you? Theoretically speaking, of course.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[sjames]

I'm betting an old card walloper can be a better software development manager than an MBA who can't find the reset button. Not all, of course. Some fall into the trap of wanting everything done exactly the way it was back in the day in spite of the many changes in the environment and relative costs. But if they can get over that there's a good chance things will go well.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[cwsumner]

Put it another way: do you choose the general by seeing which soldier is best at using a rifle?

Of course, ideally he should know the notions of what a rifle is...

Not necessarily "best", although some were/are.
But they should know at least enough to recognize that waving one around wildly, is not a good thing.
And maybe even be good enough to hit what they aim at, if it's close.
Visiting the troops and accidentily shooting one, is not going to inspire confidence!

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[cwsumner]

Teaching is wonderful in many ways but do be prepared for the bullshit that's the academic world, too.

My father is a college professor (retired). Under-score this one, twice!

Of course, there are a lot of community colleges and tech schools that are not so bad.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[__aaltlg1547]

Do you have another word for something that you use to get work done that's not insulting?

Don't think so. You wouldn't understand, what with you being only a wog and all that, but pretty much every word in English is a euphemism for private parts or bodily functions of some kind.

Because this is literally what managers do with people.

You're a hoot at parties, aren't you? Theoretically speaking, of course.

I'm not here to amuse you, except incidentally. I'm more interested in making you think.

not exactly

[bhcompy]

I'd say that is applicable to medium and large business, but in small business where the engineer is also the proprietor or partner, it's a different story.

Re:not exactly

[rmdingler]

I think you're onto something, even though the summary's premise is a bit of an over-generalization. It's a different level of care and concern when an individual has a stake in ownership and presumably profit sharing.

There is an inverse proportion of managers who place the company's well being above their own the larger that company becomes. Not everyone's give-a-shitter is broken at even the largest outfits, but an entrepreneurial engineer managing his/her own baby is properly incentivized.

It also strikes me that the most talented often come with quirks like doesn't play well with others.

Re:not exactly

[Grishnakh]

The most talented might have some other quirks, such as not enjoying endless meetings, pointless bureaucracy, idiotic politics, and this would render them unsuited for a job in management. Of course, the other managers rephrase this as "doesn't play well with others".

Re:not exactly

[rmdingler]

Indeed. The most talented hands-on guy probably feels like this is a total waste of his valuable time.

Truth be told, he is quite likely more valuable to the company not attending bs meetings, too.

But for whatever reason, corporate evolution has been nearly lockstep on this issue across trades and specialties: that political/social part of the company exists, even flourishes. Hopefully, they're really doing something proactive.

Re:not exactly

[Grishnakh]

It flourishes because it's all the MBAs are good at. They go to school to be managers, not engineers, and all they're good it is talking and going to meetings and playing politics, so they've put themselves in that position in corporations. The people in our society who are good at talking but not at doing anything productive have found they're good at BSing their way into management positions, saying they know how to lead and manage people, and that's how our corporate cultures have evolved. Good engineers can't get into that because they're not good at BSing and doing nothing productive and can't work well in that environment.

Re:not exactly

[Your.Master]

They go to school to be managers, not engineers

A very high proportion of MBAs have engineering undergraduate degrees, and for them, they did in fact go to school to be engineers (longer than they did to be a manager).

The people in our society who are good at talking but not at doing anything productive [...]

I hate to tell you this, but talking is productive. Or at least, it can be. In the same way that programming can be productive (but isn't necessarily).

Good engineers can't get into that because they're not good at BSing

Frankly, I don't think that's true. In fact I think your entire post is just you BSing. Which ironically means you in particular probably aren't very good at BSing, but that doesn't mean all engineer-kind is bad at BSing.

Why would skill in engineering be inversely correlated with skill at BSing?

Don't get me wrong, there are shitty shitty managers out there, and I won't venture to guess the proportion of shit-vs-non-shit.

Re:not exactly

[Garim]

Having spent a couple of years as a manager before going back to a technical position - that's not it. There is a lot of competition for resources in any large organization, and that's really what the MBA's do well. Think of it as a form of warfare. Technical superiority does nothing if you cannot sell your excellence. I've also learned to do this fairly competently, but as has been written elsewhere - it simply isn't all that fun. It's a lot of hard work to get the budgets right, to prepare presentations to defend your position, attack the opposition, etc.

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Acually, looking at the MBA programs over the years and what they teach and who's actually in them, there's not a "very high proportion" of Engineers in them. Most of them are actually Business Majors going for their next step in progression. Now, this is not to say that there's not a lot of Engineers going into MBA programs, far from it. This is saying you're pretty good at BSing.

I hate to tell you this, but while talking is productive, what typically goes on in meetings at dysfunctional places (and there's quite a few...) ISN'T. You delude yourself badly if you think that the bulk of that which people rail at is actually productive (There's a reason that a lot of the bad manager and meeting jokes are "funny"- because they're cruelly true.)

As for being an inversely proportionate skill...heh...it tends to be. The more intelligent you are, the less inclined to BS you're going to be unless you're afflicted with a Personality Disorder like Narcissistic or Antisocial. And, there's at least a 50-50 or 60-40 ratio of shit to non-shit managers out there.

Re:not exactly

[Grishnakh]

If upper management is so clueless that they need to be "sold", then it's really for the best that the company go under, or at least hire better executives. All this stuff simply isn't necessary. What is the company paying so much money to these executives for if they're not smart enough to discern the best ideas for themselves, and they need to be marketed to like any other dumb schmuck?

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a bit of an exaggeration. In business, as in life, group productivity should be more productive than the sum of individual productivity. That's the whole point of an organization; You do things together to achieve a more ambitious goal.

Working together literally means DEALING WITH PEOPLE. No matter how many excellent engineers you have, the more of them you have the less likely you are to get good work out of the group if you don't know how to navigate their idiosyncrasies and lead them as a whole towards a common goal.
The last sentence can, in a slightly generalizing way, be called "playing politics". Politics are only a problem when efforts of individuals are exerted while vying for control rather than making use of their talents to help the group achieve its goals.

That's the difference between leadership, and no (or bad) management. A good leader will benefit greatly from what can be learned by taking management classes.

Re:not exactly

[Grishnakh]

That's not "playing politics". When someone uses that phrase in regards to corporations, they're talking about the goings-on at the higher levels in the organization, between the layers of upper and middle management. The engineers at the bottom aren't involved in "playing politics"; it's about the managers above them fighting with each other and stabbing each other in the back to get more influence and power in the organization.

Yes, workers do need some kind of leadership that's able to best use their strengths and deal with their weaknesses to make the group most effective as a whole. But various business divisions fighting with each other does not further that goal; just look at Microsoft, which is infamous for its divisions backstabbing each other at every turn.

Re:not exactly

[Hognoxious]

He's probably from Europe. You're probably from the US.

Many European MBA programs don't admit people without several years of work experience.

Re:not exactly

[Hognoxious]

When someone uses that phrase in regards to corporations, they're talking about the goings-on at the higher levels in the organization, between the layers of upper and middle management.

Garbage. Coders will get up to all manner of shenanigans over where the { and } should go.

Waitresses play politics to get the best tables; apparently they're the ones where there aren't any true Scotsmen - awful tippers and always asking for salt.

Dilbert

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't Scott Adams been saying something like this for ages?

Re:Dilbert

[ThePhilips]

No.

That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.

Re:Dilbert

[ColdWetDog]

He's not even the first. It's basically the Peter Principle. And he wasn't even the first.

Probably originally noted by the Sumarians when they tried to get the Zuggernauts higher than two stories.

He's really just whining and his rant shows you how out of touch these Silicon Valley guys really are. Companies like Boeing, Lockheed, the consortium that made the LHC - they work on engineering projects that would make a Silicon Valley company curl up in a little ball. You can argue that some of the megacorps are indeed getting to big to manage. Witness Boeing's stupid attempt to outsource pretty much the entire 787 in order to curry favor from various countries. As well as Lockheed's inability to get the F-35 going.

But those projects are several orders of magnitude larger than his. He just needs to learn something from the pros.

Re:Dilbert

[Anonymous Coward]

When the astronauts puss out and the cosmonauts go home for the day, who gets shit done? The muthafukin Zuggernauts that's who. When my boss hands me a project that I can't handle, I look at him and say "We are gonna need a Zuggernaut for this bro."

Re:Dilbert

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, the last project I worked on needed _TWO_ Zuggernauts.

Re:Dilbert

[gargleblast]

Probably originally noted by the Sumarians when they tried to get the Zuggernauts higher than two stories.

Too true. Supervillians rarely appeared more than twice in ancient middle-eastern comics.

Re:Dilbert

[xleeko]

When the astronauts puss out and the cosmonauts go home for the day, who gets shit done? The muthafukin Zuggernauts that's who. When my boss hands me a project that I can't handle, I look at him and say "We are gonna need a Zuggernaut for this bro."

My kingdom for some mod points ...

Re:Dilbert

[tragedy]

I'm pretty sure ColdWetDog meant to say Ziggurat. It's worth noting. however, that the Marvel character "The Juggernaut" is named for a term meaning an unstoppable force. That term is derived from the Hindu god Jagganath. One form of worship of Jagganath involves a giant rolling temple pulled through the streets on holidays. Such temple cars have been known to (or are at least said to) crush people underfoot and be fairly hard to stop once they've gotten moving. Anyway rolling religious displays aren't unique to Hinduism, they just happen to have some really big ones. Maybe the Sumerians had them too and that's what ColdWetDog was referring to. Probably just ziggurats though.

Also, most supervillains in ancient middle eastern comics only appeared once. Unless they fought the good guy to a standstill then became friends... Of course, now I'm trying to figure out if Gilgamesh counts as the supervillian or Enkidu on this one. Mythology has a lot of guys with superpowers, but they're traditionally heros even if they go on wild murder sprees every time they're in a bad mood, so it kind of breaks down. It is interesting that one of the oldest recorded stories in the world has the standard modern superhero greeting ritual (they meet and fight, then get along after).

Re:Dilbert

[Peter Simpson]

No.

That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.

Yeah. Now if you could just go ahead and make sure that your T.P.S. report has a cover sheet on it this week, that'd be greeeat.

Re:Dilbert

[ThePhilips]

That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.

Yeah. Now if you could just go ahead and make sure that your T.P.S. report has a cover sheet on it this week, that'd be greeeat.

Efficiency consultant: All right, Bill. Let me ask you this. How much time each week would you say you deal with these TPS reports?

Lumbergh: Yeah...

Re:Dilbert

[Hognoxious]

I thought he was talking about really big airships.

Re:Dilbert

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded him up. Can I have your kingdom now, please?

It's personality

[docwatson223]

The best engineers I've met in 20 years can't deal with people or their problems. The best managers I've met have enough engineering to know what's going on and when to get out of the way.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, the manager style that I like, is point the engineer at the appropriate problems, then unleash them.

Re: It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

you got it. engineers usually suck at just about everthing but engineering. including negotiation. that is why they usually get paid like shit.

Re:It's personality

[jgotts]

No, those aren't the best engineers. Those are terrible engineers, people who have done a great job memorizing their university textbooks and they probably got all A's and can tell you 100 useless computer science facts about trees.

The best software engineers were child prodigies who began programming as children, saw the forest for the trees at the university and didn't care much about their grades, people who have done hobbyist software work throughout their lives. These people can explain engineering to a child, admit when they make mistakes, and you can discuss with them any subject whatsoever. These people find what they need using Google, because they are great general problem solvers.

Re:It's personality

[Grishnakh]

The problem is probably that those managers you speak of are a small minority, and rather rare. They exist, sure, but they're not the norm by any means. Most engineering managers either don't know what's going on, or don't know when to get out of the way, or both.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

The best managers I've met have enough engineering to know what's going on and when to get out of the way.

Yup. I posted a similar comment just a week ago, but the best manager I ever had didn't micro manage. He wanted to be informed if shit was broke, even if that meant calling him at 4am, and he wanted an honest assessment of the problem & possible solutions, but he never, ever, micro-managed.

If I said "Nagios is alerting because the DNS server is flapping due to high load, but we don't know why yet." he'd say "Let me know when you have more information. Is there anything else we can do right now?" and not "Can we reticulate the flux capacitor and reverse the polarity?" like a fish flapping around gasping for air.

On the flip side if you ever bullshitted him, you'd be in for a world of hurt.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

Three traits define a "good" manager.
1) They observe and know what each member of their team is working on without being intrusive by setting clear and achievable goals,
2) They discover what their team needs to meet these goals and gets them the resources to accomplish them without needing to be asked,
3) They contribute their efforts when and where it is beneficial, and the rest of the time stay out of the way.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot
4) They have an [high level] understanding of the objective from a technical perspective to know what needs to be accomplished.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

The best software engineers were child prodigies who began programming as children, saw the forest for the trees at the university and didn't care much about their grades, people who have done hobbyist software work throughout their lives. These people can explain engineering to a child, admit when they make mistakes, and you can discuss with them any subject whatsoever. These people find what they need using Google, because they are great general problem solvers.

In programming you need to pay attention to the trees too, looking only at the forest isn't enough. Both abilities are important for success.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that the best engineers don't need no damned education because them thar book smarts ain't all they cracked up to be.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

Disagree.

1) Make clear the goals for their employees, and make sure they understand
2) Make sure their employees have the ability to meet their goals
3) Publically praise/punish for performance

Directly from Art of War. You said basically the same thing but more wordy and confusing. I like the simplified version, and it works for all management and so few of them understand how this works and how well it works.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also corporate structure. Sounds like Medallia is too old school to think that an engineering manager is a step "up" for many engineers; most good engineers I've met this would be a step down.

I worked at a company that had a group of engineers that it took me awhile to figure out. It was all these old crusty guys who were just brilliant in their particular field, and their boss was a 30 year old ex-Navy Engineer; still good but she was nowhere near the experience of those guys. She sat in a cubicle, and they all had offices. I later realized, while she was their manager per se, her role was to facilitate their work and coordinate it amongst each other and within the larger projects in the company. Most importantly and uniquely, her role as manager was a separate advancement track in the company from an engineer.

You want a good engineering manager? Someone with project management experience with some basic engineering knowledge. So they know how to communicate to other functions true schedules and metrics, and they facilitate and enhance the work being done by the good engineers. Separately, let the engineers have their own, separate career advancement track. That way you're keeping people doing what they want to do anyways.

Management isn't always a step up from a operator role, and having good skills as an operator does not equate to having good skills as a manager.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

Manger-engineers need not be the best engineers. They only need to be confident enough in the field that they can tell a bull shitter from an engineer. They also need to able to say no it will take 3 weeks to implement that apparently minor change not 24 hours like an idiot who never understood how to plug in a toaster. In short they need great people skills and an understanding of engineering.

Re: It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

kill yourself, troll

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

He's saying that the best engineers are capable of learning by themselves and don't need the external validation of formal institutions (which doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a degree).

Re:It's personality

[jedidiah]

The problem with that is that you miss key parts of the curriculum because it never occured to you to study those things. This anti-intellectual attitude that drives you to ingore the "irrelevant academic crap" will cause the "self educated" to miss key parts of the discipline.

Your self-help vocational program is probably not nearly broad or deep enough.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

They were only the best engineers because you perceived the smoke screen they were putting up as incredible intelligence. Odds are it was just smoke screen.

The best engineers are like the best people. They are easily identified because they are good at a lot of things, having decided to really get to the bottom of "one thing at a time" and learn the material. If you have engineers that can't repeat that process for multiple fields and life requirements, you don't have the best engineers; you have savant engineers.

Savants are incredible within their narrow range; however, when conditions change in a manner that challenges them outside of their domain, they become unstable and difficult. They'll blame customers for not understanding them. They'll slap on adapter after adapter to leverage a solution not designed for extension. They'll become heros by solving problems that should have never existed.

People often cite knowledge of college material as a benefit (or detriment) but that's just because that's all that will be visible. You can't notice what's not there. The people complaining about book knowledge are typically mis-voicing their issues with lack of knoweledge of anything else.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

No, those aren't the best engineers

False equivalency, Best Engineer is not the same as Best Engineering Manager. Being good at solving engineering problems is not the same as being able to lead or manage people;

The best software engineers were child prodigies who began programming as children, saw the forest for the trees at the university and didn't care much about their grades, people who have done hobbyist software work throughout their lives.

Sometimes. And sometimes they fail to make the jump to break bad habits formed, convinced their way is best.

These people can explain engineering to a child,

Nope. Maybe some can, but being good at engineering doesn't mean you can teach it, or are good with children

admit when they make mistakes,

I'll give you this, I've seen too many very smart engineers fail this, this might be the break between very good and great

and you can discuss with them any subject whatsoever.

No. Being well read has nothing to do with being a great engineer

These people find what they need using Google, because they are great general problem solvers.

Yeah, if your problem can be solved using Google, its not much of a problem.

Re:It's personality

[kzadot]

Heh I agreed with the first bit. But I thought the second bit was going somewhere else.

The best engineers are self managing, communicative, get on well with others, have a customer focus, understand the market and the domain and have an understanding of how knowledge work flows through a product development system. They understand risks and can make decisions. They don't get bogged down in the details of the latest tech toy, and are able to deliver, constantly what the customer wants with high quality.

Good engineers can still fall short in one or two areas, that is why we need managers.

Re: It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of those who started at the age of 7. And I agree with you. While I was much better than university guys, I had a lot of holes in my knowledge. Then I started working with another, who knew what I did not. We were a perfect team. Then management broke us down.

Re:It's personality

[Zenin]

From my own purely anecdotal experience, being a high school drop out who has become a highly qualified senior level software engineer who easily commands compensation to match, I'd say that's pretty much correct.

To pour more salt in the wound, in my 20ish years of software development experience I've found that those with actual Computer Science degrees rarely are any good at actually developing software, no matter how much experience they have. The best engineers have all come from some other discipline; sociology, biology, music or such. The only binding factor I've found is that nearly every good engineer plays (or did play extensively in the past) a musical instrument. Only maybe 1 in 10 didn't get deeply into music at some point and about half still actively play.

Those that are strong mathematicians also tend to be horrid software developers (despite, on average, being much smarter than most good software developers). I chock that up to strong math correlating with weak personal skills as well as a tendency to prefer code look like a formula and not a document (variable names like "a" and "b", instead of employees and groups for example). And also the reality that 99% of software that needs writing isn't about slick algorithms, rather it's about modeling arbitrary business rules as a flow chart of if/then/else gates.

Re:It's personality

[gweihir]

Sorry, but those are terrible engineers. They may be good "technicians", but an engineer must be able to understand context, document his work and the rationales and be able to communicate with both engineers and users. Of course, a good engineer must also be a good technician.

Sadly, there are not many good engineers in the IT field. Many fail just as you describe, and most are not even good technicians.

Re:It's personality

[Hognoxious]

Perhaps if you'd stuck with your education, you'd have learned how to write properly, rather than long, long, long, lists of sort of related things, comma spliced, into almost a stream of consciousness, kind of run on sentence, type of thing.

Re:It's personality

[Anonymous Coward]

I was recently interviewed at a company run by two MIT graduates, the 'Elite' of the elite, it is exactly as you described, it's all attitude and feeling of grandiosity. I'm not a college graduate and started programming as a hobby and have actually done great work. I'm currently looking for a job, needless to say they turned me down almost right away, I could feel the rejection as it almost materialized itself. And yes they test you on all these bs facts and academic nonsense that has nothing to do how well you can solve problems. People look at them as brilliant and on people like us as wannabees. I've heard numerous times how salient people such as Einstein allegedly said something about the stupidity in people, I can't say I disagree with those views much.

Bigfoot, pretty funny

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one 'office and career' blog post I actually enjoyed for a change. I think I agree, there are basic mismatches that militate against any IT company having good management except for some short happy stretches.

I know one

[n1ywb]

I have met exactly one excellent engineering manager. Of course he was a licensed professional civil and HVAC engineer, and he didn't know anything about software engineering, but it turned out that didn't matter, because he was awesome at project management, documentation, using the right amount of process, and he really "got" engineers and engineering in general, and trusted us on the technical stuff. Then he got unceremoniously shitcanned by a blowhard asshat VP who didn't want to hear what he was saying, who himself proceeded to jump ship a year later. *sigh*.

Re:I know one

[Trepidity]

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.

Re:I know one

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the CEO at my work. He doesn't give a fuck about how anything is done, and as a result less than 50% of our equipment still works, and all of it is older than 10 years - some of it dates back to the 70s.

If we were authorised to have it fixed, it would cost money, and that would push the budget over, and then he would look bad and wouldn't get a promotion. The easiest thing to do is just blame the staff to the board, when things break, and say "I can do the same job in 10 minutes."

Sadly, the business is going down the gurgler, even though a million or so (including a huge taxpayer's grant) was paid to bring us up to date. He'll be promoted long before the place goes under, and the next guy who comes in will take a look at the place and realise he's been set up.

The old CEO will have taken a step up to the General Manager's position, and start demanding to know why everything's broken, and why fixing equipment has become such a priority. He'll then blame the new CEO, who'll either end up resigning, or being fired.

There's no talent for management, only matching the books up. That's what you get for hiring an MBA with a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) - someone who thinks he knows it all, and thinks he worked hard to get where he is, when really, nepotism is the rule of the day for him. Employment laws don't even apply to him - a quick visit from the local labour law enforcement team would sort him out. Unfortunately, I would be the one fingered for that, since I recently called attention to a few breaches, so I would be the one who's services are no longer required.

The business (going to be vague here) is in an industry where creativity is absolutely required, and yet this year is going to be just the same as the previous, with our emails and copyright notices having just one single change: the "3" at the end of the date becomes a "4".

The guy needs fired before he destroys the whole business.

Re:I know one

[Maltheus]

Yep. Best manger I ever had (by far) got demoted for some mysterious reason. Worst manager got promoted for her obvious lies.

Re:I know one

[khasim]

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.

"Not a team player."

But which team and what game is never directly stated.

The "team" is not the people you manage. It is the other managers and the executives. You burn "worker bees" to protect the people on the real team.

And that is the game. Protect the careers of the managers and executives. That's why there are management meetings and executive retreats and golf games. So you will be able to bond with the people who will be protecting you and who will expect your protection in exchange.

Re:I know one

[sacbhale]

I have seen this in three multiple previous jobs.

The manager was awesome and everyone on the team loved him. The product the team produced became a hit and all the career managers in the organization wanted that on their list of successes. They played political games (re-org) and stole the project from under the good manager. The team withered away and all the best people left under the new leadership. The product carried on the previous momentum for a while and then joined a whole list of other mediocre products the company produced.

Re:I know one

[Anonymous Coward]

You worked on the Windows team at Microsoft?

Re:I know one

[Eddy_D]

Sounds real familiar... happen at my work too. Even to the point of being shaking on software/firmware knowledge.

Re:I know one

[trout007]

I'm lucky enough to have an excellent engineering manager right now. When he got hired most of us were thinking "Oh great here is another manager:" He came in and said "You guys do great work. My job is to make it easier for you to do your job." We didn't believe him at first but he has proven himself. He came up with a project management database that helped us get our crap together. Instead of jobs falling through the cracks we now have it documented. He was flexible with what we had to fill in. When we complained a field was taking too long to fill in he got rid of it. It has really helped with upper management because when they come around to ask what do we work on we have thousands of records of every little task we do and for whom.

Re:I know one

[Anonymous Coward]

After working with one of the managers FROM Microsoft in my current company...there's a lot of people that play political games there in that Company (Unfortunately, we got one of them...sigh...)

It's no surprise to me the crap results they've been getting in Windows and elsewhere for years. It comes from that bullshit.

Re:I know one

[Daniel Hoffmann]

To me it looks like your team just needed a Issue tracker rather than a manager.

Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but good positions for engineering managers dont exist.
Source: I have an MSc and an MBA. I've heard that those are rare qualifications. What I have found: there are NO positions that want both. It's either one or the other, but never both. Business and technical are always very firewalled from each other in job postings. There are not positions that want both skill sets.

Re:Uh huh

[hemanman]

Correct, I know what you mean, having the same credentials myself.

However, having both is what enables you to enable your team to work pure magic in projects, a shame it is invisible to all but the ones that take the credit for it, when you yourself is looking the other way being stuck with some technical detail.

Being technical, which requires quite a bit of IQ, also comes with a high sense of right and wrong, that makes you somewhat backstabbing impaired, and every time you get screwed over you loose a little bit of willpower to try again.

That's why you don't see any good engineering managers, they just gave up at some point along the road.

-H

Re:Uh huh

[n1ywb]

This has sadly been my experience as well, in medium to large commercial orgs. I remember once I was given the choice, and shown a chart, with two career tracks, management and engineering. The management track went through through the usual layer cake. The engineering chart went Engineer -> CTO. Of course there can only be one CTO, and he wasn't going anywhere, so basically it was their way of preventing engineers from ever getting promotions. But they did offer me management track. I'm not sure if I should have been flattered or offended.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Most times businesses don't care for a Business degree... they want you to learn their business and apply your technical skills to it. Your right, the MBA isn't as cherished as it should be. After my cohorts got theirs and didn't get anything for it, I decided to bypass that. Thank goodness for no more school.

Re:Uh huh

[rwa2]

When I worked at Boeing about a decade ago, they actually had two tracks... Levels 1 - 6. Above level 5, you had to pick between the management or technical track, which would target what kind of training you'd get. And above that they had executive leadership tiers along both tracks.

The technical path also had a "technical fellowship" that would meet for conference presentations each year. I went to one once and it was pretty awesome, kinda like a live edition of a Popular Science magazine.

Haven't really experienced anything else quite like it at other engineering companies I've worked for since, though :/ Then again, most of Boeing was heavy into "technical management" and PPT engineering at the time too, so it's not like they were really the ones doing the detailed engineering work.

Re:Uh huh

[Maxo-Texas]

At Sysco they always talked about a technical track but never supported it.
In the end they laid off 90% of the employees* and replaced them with Infosys indians working some kinda of scammy "L" visa business where they got paid indian wages while living in the US for 6 months.

* After working them 60 to 72 hours a week for 2 years with implied promises of great jobs after the big push.

I hear the same thing happened at Shell.

If you company starts asking for 60-72 hour weeks and starts using Infosys, I'd leave. Many of those who waited until the end still don't have jobs.

Re:Uh huh

[atom1c]

So you spent money and went to school. Some business (not-for-profit or otherwise) returned the favor by printing out 2 sheets of paper with "Master" on them.

Truth be told, your on-paper qualifications mean absolutely nothing to most -- especially HR departments. For the longest time, and this personal opinion seems to have lasted the test of time, persons with more degrees are actually *less* competent to do real-world work. Why? Because instead of sweating it out on the lower floors of an engineering factory to think independently and innovatively, they were cuddled with their frappucinos and $500 hardcover textbook on a couch with 5 different highlighters hoping to absorb the same 'experience.'

However, I do not agree with the OP at all. From my own multiple decades of experience, the good engineering managers exist and don't tend to quit; rather, they are kept and eventually promoted to more vital positions within their firms as the realities of the engineering challenges change. In other words, they adapt to the needs of the organization and eventually move out of the 'engineering manager' role... instead, they become things like Director of this and Vice President of that.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but good positions for engineering managers dont exist.

Sure they do. I'm hiring right now.

Source: I have an MSc and an MBA. I've heard that those are rare qualifications.

They aren't. Get over yourself. If you aren't being hired take a long look in the mirror and reevaluate. It's not them, it's you.

Re:Uh huh

[kzadot]

Well that is ok. Good engineers probably shouldn't try switching to a management career. A lot of people are under the assumption that engineering manager is a promotion, and builds on the skills of, engineers. Not true. It is or should be a very different job.

You don't want managers with a strong technical background in most cases, or they end up neglecting their management duties and start poking their nose in and micromanaging the engineers.

Managers should probably rather have a background in something else like psychology, or the business domain, or finance or statistics or something.

Re:Uh huh

[kzadot]

I always thought this 2 track thing was typical. Most consulting companies have 2 tracks like you mentioned. Sometimes I see 3 tracks. The technical as you mentioned, and the management role split into 2 tracks. Those with an external focus who do sales and marketing, company strategy and product design who know the business domain, the customer, the market and the products really well (I guess a project manager track), and those with a more internal focus that look after the company and employees and understand team work, motivation, pricing, training, employment law, contracts, internal culture etc, (the line management track I guess).

All very different skills, and very different focus areas. Often requiring quite different personalities too.

hierarchical org fail

[bzipitidoo]

Managing needs a fundamental rethink. Lot of managers act like kings or generals, not partners or guides or communicators. And that's doing an injustice to good kings, who understood that they could not be slave-driving dictators. Engineers should have the authority to fire managers. Vote the bad managers out.

The West prides themselves on being fair democracies. Yet corporations are still handled with medieval traditions. Most are even passed on to heirs, under the odd medieval notion that, like entire kingdoms, a company can belong to an individual bloodline.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[phantomfive]

Managing needs a fundamental rethink. Lot of managers act like kings or generals, not partners or guides or communicators. And that's doing an injustice to good kings, who understood that they could not be slave-driving dictators. Engineers should have the authority to fire managers. Vote the bad managers out.

That's what the sales teams think, except they want the ability to fire engineers. Every group thinks they are the most important, including managers.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why it is good to lead instead of manage like a boss (your kings or generals analogy). Servant leadership will get you much farther. There are a large amount of folks who let the power go to their head and shout commands. The best ones are the quiet ones who know the subject matter and gain a following that leads toward the goal. These are the people that are the buffer between the boss and the workers and get things done. The sad part is - these people are never recognized the way they should be (make them an actual manager).

Back to the subject matter part - I have not yet met one Project Manager who is good at their job who doesn't have a fairly solid background on what they are managing. The bad part is - we have a ton of people that don't have the experience, or the interest, in the actual work and think they can manage anything... leads me to believe that a PMP isn't worth much (except for boosting your ego and making you think you can manage everything successfully).

Re:hierarchical org fail

[Anonymous Coward]

The West prides themselves on being fair democracies. Yet corporations are still handled with medieval traditions. Most are even passed on to heirs, under the odd medieval notion that, like entire kingdoms, a company can belong to an individual bloodline.

The purpose of the state is to please the population, whereas the purpose of a corporation is to please the owner(s).

Re:hierarchical org fail

[c0lo]

The West prides themselves on being fair democracies.

This is what they want you to believe. In fact, they are at most managed democracies

Yet corporations are still handled with medieval traditions.

The possible evolution: inverted totalitarism.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[kzadot]

I agree. There are movements around to try and change things. There have been since the 60s. Managers resist them for fear of losing power.

Engineers laugh at them, don't understand them, or don't care. They see them as some new management fad, ignore it, and go on suffering under the current bullshit system.

If engineers don't care, nothing will change, and they only have themselves to blame.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[kzadot]

Including engineers. But I think they are right. The people that actually create the value are the most important. Ideally they could do this without managers, but most companies are a long way from that. Managers are less important, and probably should be seen more as servants than bosses of the engineers, but they are still required, at least for the meantime in most companies.

I am really excited by some radical companies that are experimenting with not having managers. It does require especially good engineers willing and able to take on some of the management responsibilities though.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[phantomfive]

Including engineers. But I think they are right.

Let me guess, you are an engineer?

Re:hierarchical org fail

[kzadot]

I have a background in software development, and am disgusted by the situation engineers have to face in most companies today. I have tried to move into management specifically to create the type of company where managers serve engineers, free them from the bullshit and allow the engineers to create cool products that delight the customers. Apart from that I believe managers should mostly get out of the way.

One day, should I ever discover a company that doesn't try to destroy the souls of its engineers, I hope to move back into a technical role and actually create cool products that delight customers again.

But I don't expect to ever see that day. I will die a manager, but at least one that tried to make a difference.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[phantomfive]

lol at least you gain points for living your idealism.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[Anonymous Coward]

And you lose 'em for being an ass and trying (and largely failing, mind...) to act intellectual. You're part of the problem and you should bow out. Seriously.

(Hint for you: Goethe's trying to tell you something there and you're acting out the epitome of the former in that phrase right now...)

Re:hierarchical org fail

[Anonymous Coward]

What you seem to be missing here is a key difference.

Companies are owned by somebody. The job of a company is to do what that owner wants - not what some engineer thinks is best, not what is best for society. What the owners want. Managers exist to ensure that happens. Want a paycheck? Get over it.

Re:hierarchical org fail

[phantomfive]

(Hint for you: Goethe's trying to tell you something there and you're acting out the epitome of the former in that phrase right now...)

I neither desire to be a politician nor a leader.

Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

Peter Principle

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[phantomfive]

No, it's different. The Peter Principle says, "you will be promoted until your job is too hard for you to do well."
This guy is saying that good engineers would rather not be promoted, even though they could do the job well.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This is just stating true engineers don't have an interest in managing. In fact it can become painful for them as it smooths out the technical portion of what they know and makes it so you have to deal with the difficult part - PEOPLE. People don't fit into an equation.

What you are looking at is promoting people past where they are capable of handling things. The likelihood is that those people who are not good at engineering are likely less technical and can give it up more easily. They are also the ones who can grasp and embrace the political side better.

I moved from a highly skilled position into more and more less skilled, but more management position over the course of my career. It has taken me 20 years to work my way through, but I now have a good understanding of everything that I need to manage. The biggest thing I work toward is making sure my staff is not overloaded (been there), making sure I am following the correct processes (learned over years), and being able to make quick and confident decisions (again, learned over the years). Things move along pretty good in my office - all deadlines are met unless an external team causes us to miss our schedule. The only real problem that I have is that my team thinks they are getting robbed of OT when I hire a consultant to cut the peaks off the workload spikes. But at least they stay sane...

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Grishnakh]

I seriously doubt this. Good engineers just aren't cut out for management: they have no interest in bullshitting, sitting in endless meetings, playing corporate politics, etc. Just because you're good at designing and building things doesn't mean you can deal with people well, and a manager needs to do the latter.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[PPH]

No. Its the Dilbert Principle.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt this. Good engineers just aren't cut out for management: they have no interest in bullshitting, sitting in endless meetings, playing corporate politics, etc. Just because you're good at designing and building things doesn't mean you can deal with people well, and a manager needs to do the latter.

Read what you just wrote. Did you really want to equate "bullshitting, sitting in endless meetings, playing corporate politics, etc." and "deal with people well"? That's the problem right there. We've set up a system where this kind of nonsense is considered doubleplusgood. It has nothing to do with good people skills and everything to do with becoming a sellout and manipulating a corrupt system to your own ends via social engineering.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[phantomfive]

Some people are good at programming and working with people. It happens, believe it or not. And it can be done without bullshitting or sitting in endless meetings.......

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Read it again, or use the Wikipedia summary:

> The Peter Principle is a management theory which suggests that organizations risk filling management roles with people who are incompetent if they promote those who are performing well at their current role, rather than those who have proven abilities at the intended role

Because you would suck at a role one level up does not mean you would suck at a role 2 or 3 levels up, or that the higher ranked role is automatically "harder". It's different skills for different tasks.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's different. The Peter Principle says, "you will be promoted until your job is too hard for you to do well."

This guy is saying that good engineers would rather not be promoted, even though they could do the job well.

In other words leaving people who are less competent to be promoted instead. It's a variation or one cause of the Peter Principle.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[jedidiah]

No. It still requires bullshitting and sitting in endless meetings. That's just crap that someone who is cut out for management can actually deal with (and do so effectively).

The whole point of society is so that people can specialize and do what they do best rather than being some deluded jack-of-all-trades that could just be his own boss anyways.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[phantomfive]

It still requires bullshitting and sitting in endless meetings.

You're doing it wrong.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Grishnakh,

That is kind of a pet peeve of mine, the misconception that engineers, IT professionals and Sciency people in general, are bad at dealing with people. It makes for hilarious sitcoms like Big Bank Theory, but it is a stereotype that does not always match reality.

  ( quoting Nate Silver, "All the data points and generalizations are a waste of time, unless they lead to actionable intelligence." The assumption that an engineer is bad at dealing with people is pop culture fluff. Nothing more. I can state that it can possibly be viewed, much like Astrology, to be on some levels a subtile form of vague yet mildly positive suggestion, causing people to assign personality meaning to their career or clique.. or stereotype.. in which case the meme is a subtile form of socially reinforced mind control, and other than that is utter pseudoscientific horseshit. You know how those manager types are... unable to be reasoned with if they disagree with you, and despite repeated verifiable proof to the contrary.. By the way, that last sentence, was something we in the industry refer to as sarcasm..)

It gets more annoying when you have a manager that plays the Bully boss game on you, IE: tasking you with something but denying you the authority to complete some critical milestone along the way, and then turning around and using that to bad mouth you, saying you gave him attitude or that you got pissy when he gave you constructive criticism and then they play the whole "Well you know engineers they are so bad with people, that is why they got locked in their lockers and couldn't get dates in high school..." not in so many words but, it is silly that something like that is not entirely unlike saying..

"Well it is unfortunate Mr LaForge and I had a disagreement, but you know how those blind black people are, bad at dealing with people. Hell, his best friend is an android for god sakes! Why doesn't he have real friends like the rest of us successful people? What is wrong with him?" all the while LaForge is like "YOU MEAN I'M NOT WHITE?!?!?! Actually I thought I was rainbow acid trip visual colored like everyone else, except Data, with his white aura..I welcome our glowing white android overlords, and am way ahead of all of you in accepting the new galactic order!" NGO! I digress..

it really is the same type of "Character Assassination" that when you bring it to a boil for 20 minutes or so condenses down to one thing: unfair discrimination on the part of the manager with a twist of jealousy.

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle

[Grishnakh]

You make an excellent point, but when all the people with power in an organization or worse an entire society are corrupt and lack any kind of ethics, what else can you do? Either you have to join them and be like them, or get out and do something else that doesn't involve them.

And have we really "set up a system", or is it simply that we humans are really much more horrible, evil creatures than we think we are, and this system is a natural product of our innate qualities?

why go into management?

[golfnomad]

the highly skilled engineer loves his job, the challenge that it gives him technically and the satisfaction of finding the solution and having it implemented. so go into management where it's all politics, meetings and knowing that those who were once your peers are now your staff. Who could resist such a plum job. I tried it once, never again I'd rather have a bottle in from of me that a frontal lobotomy.....

Re:why go into management?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that people don't scale well. Once a project/team gets to 10 or so, somebody has to take charge. Unless that's the max size you're looking to be, there's going to reach a point where a second layer is needed. And somebody has to handle interactions with S&M, support and whatever other groups are present.

You can say that the engineers will "just do it", but you need people who are actually a bit outgoing, have empathy and understand that there are more to delivering product than bits. Just because you don't know of one doesn't mean they're not there. There's training materials and source documents for those interested in seeing things happen that they can't do with a squad.

Re:why go into management?

[n1ywb]

There's a bottle in front of you right now, judging from your last sentence.

Re:why go into management?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've reached the point of my career where I've been asked if I'd be interested I am in management or business development. But I always decline because I frankly love the technical aspects of my job, and I can't imagine a day where I'm not coding or soldering or solving some customer issue. I've been a project lead on some major new products, but even then I didn't have to deal with too much bureaucracy, pointless meetings, politics, and had no hiring or firing responsibilities.

Luckily there is a technical track in my company so I can still "move up" without having to have people under me, but I completely understand why engineers don't want to be managers.

Thankfully I do have an awesome boss though who used to be our co-worker until he decided he did want to become a manager. But because of his background he understands when it's best just to get out the way, and fights for us whenever upper management decides to do something crazy.

Rare, but extant

[JazzHarper]

I was in design engineering for 30 years and had about ten managers over the course of my career. One of them was excellent. Of course, he got promoted...

Re:Rare, but extant

[n1ywb]

At least he didn't get fired.

Re:Rare, but extant

[bughunter]

Agreed. They are rare animals but they do exist. I had the benefit of working 15 years for a medium sized company with a culture of training and promoting the best engineers into management. Not all of them wanted or accepted promotions beyond department manager, but the VPs of Engineering, QA. Operations and Program Managment, and the General Manager all started their careers as engineers or scientists. The company paid for advanced degrees in Engineering and Management for anyone who wanted them (and kept good grades). Those who showed talent were promoted into management AND still got to hunt elephants.

But I didn't recognize how unusual that culture was until after leaving that company. My current employer is a small company micromanaged by two brilliant engineers who are horrible, horrible managers.

Give the technical leads assistants.

[ErroneousBee]

Give the technical leads assistants to manage the scheduling, report writing and staff management. That way you get the same work but without the managers salary. You can also try using the right tools. Too many managers use spreadsheets to do project management.

Re:Give the technical leads assistants.

[n1ywb]

I've worked as an engineer in a partnership with a project management guy and I've found it to be highly effective.

Re:Give the technical leads assistants.

[Carewolf]

Yes. I was about to say the same thing. An engineering team does not need a manager, they need a secretary. Someone to organize, journalize and report. The best managers I have met act like the teams secretary or assistant, but many seems to get their role in the team confused, and it seems a waste to pay them more than an average company secretary.

Re:Give the technical leads assistants.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. So this engineering team doesn't need raises or new assignments? Or need conflicts managed with internal or external entities? Or requires any points of escalation to get more visibility on a challenge? Of course, I suppose they could just implement standards that award every engineer equally regardless of talent and assign projects based on who is available at the time as oppose to expertise. Couple that with an approach that makes an engineer responsible when they can't get an answer out of someone because neither the engineer or the someone has a manager. Sounds like a great place to work.

Re:Give the technical leads assistants.

[Carewolf]

Engineers only get raises when they change companies. For the rest there are a typically team leads, as mentioned in the article, they just don't want to handle the paperwork of management.

Re:Give the technical leads assistants.

[ErroneousBee]

If your company has an adversarial internal structure, then clearly you need advocate (aka manager) to play the politics.

If that's the company structure, then you are stuck with political decisions being made without reference to the engineering reality. That's how you get big failures like RBS and the continual cycle of outsourcing->collapse->insourcing.

I looked up where this dude works.

[jcr]

I'm not at all surprised that he's not able to recruit good engineering managers to work on yet another waste of venture money. It's not a company that develops anything new or different.

-jcr

Re:I looked up where this dude works.

[Nethead]

Hey! Was that on-topic? What a way to kill a rant.

Re:I looked up where this dude works.

[kaiser423]

Here Here. This guy doesn't think that they exist because he isn't around any. I work with some amazing engineering managers day in and day out. In fact, I'd say that my organization (Fortune 500) company has done a good job of growing them from their engineering pool and has a huge backlog of people with the necessary skills. You're not going to find a grizzled program manager at some light-weight venture-capital company. But you will find them in the DoD, NASA, GE, Boeing, ULA, Ford, Toyota, Samsung, Raytheon and all of their first, second and third tier suppliers. You know, in businesses that have been around long enough that having good engineering managers becomes important enough to need them....

Re:I looked up where this dude works.

[jcr]

For my part, I've met an awful lot of great engineering managers, in companies ranging from five-man startups to the Fortune 1 (Apple).

-jcr

Re:This is why Republicans rule this country

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially that black Republican in charge now, amiright?

I see his point

[rilister]

Having worked as an engineer and a manager in Silicon Valley, I see his point. But I've also worked in Germany, and it's interesting to see how many senior business leaders in Germany are engineers. I personally think that as a culture we (American engineers) devalue and even laugh at leadership skills. We think they're irrelevant to being a good engineer: call it Dilbertism.

Culturally, German engineers (in comparison) see leadership of people and teams as one of their natural requirements. Engineers are reknowned for their high-handedness and taking lead in any given situation. I remember trying being in an informal situation setting a large number of tables for a party: when I started suggesting a plan, two german language students started saying "look at the engineer, taking over as usual".

So, again, as an ex-engineer, I think our mutually reinforced disparagement of managers is part of the problem. Leadership is something we should be naturally good at, and all engineers offended by Juan's assertion should take it as a challenge, not an insult.

Re:I see his point

[darkwing_bmf]

I don't know. Our managers, good or bad, are tasked with some pretty mind numbing things like tracking progress on things that are hard to measure and endless days of nothing but meetings. Why would anyone want that job?

Re:I see his point

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear in mind that in the US a lot of so-called 'Engineers' are nothing of the sort, it is just a meaningless label used to describe their job.

In the US look at the qualifications for a Professional Engineering designation. That is a real engineer.

Re:I see his point

[unimacs]

This is exactly right. I see many folks in IT and other disciplines devaluing the roles that other people play in a company.

I work in an organization that might resemble that of the OP's. We have plenty of engineers but have few good managers.

The problem isn't so much that the good engineers aren't stepping up in terms of taking on management roles. The problem is that the organization would rather hire an engineer who may have some leadership skills than hire a good leader who understands engineering.

Re:I see his point

[kzadot]

I am not so sure I agree with this 100%. I see what you mean, and agree that engineers might make good "technical project managers" or team leaders. But I have seen engineers in senior management roles destroy companies by thinking like engineers. It required people with a good understanding of things like finance, the market, and the customer to come in and save the situation.

Re:I see his point

[Anonymous Coward]

I see your point, and I agree, I am the AC that had the long winded post about working at Allianz contracted through IBM. The German executives that I worked for and with were people that I would have loved to have worked with more at that company. The moral of my long winded post is probably off topic a little, but is essentially that the moral is that there should be an Amendment to the 7 deadly sins that adds an 8th sin, which is that Abuse of authority for personal gain at the expense of those less fortunate or successful than yourself is an unforgivable sin and should be severely punished on sight. It sucks how once you have been in such a situation that it really ruins the industry for you. I have had other jobs since Allianz but it seems like there is always a manager that will step up and make mountains out of molehills and cannot be reasoned with, and these guys seem like they are above and beyond accountability, The Brit manager that I spoke of that slandered me, I come to find out got promoted. I think he should be not only fired but blacklisted. I don't say that lightly, perhaps it is a character flaw of mine that I reach out and try to understand other people's problems and viewpoints, and above all try to see the good in people, but since the Brit took over, people have lost their jobs (other than me) that were doing an exceptional job, and he has created problems and then turned around and probably made some lame ass argument like "See what I did there? I saved the company X amount of dollars per year ( and the X is some function like [ (yearly pay of the techs who have quit under his watch) + (The sum of the cost of all the PC's that were not bough by procurement before the end of the fiscal year that year) - the yearly income of the fresh out of high school tech currently working there] ) Wouldn't it be nice if the CEO and CIO of Allianz read slashdot and came on here and were like "Guten taag!" I would love that.

They do in fact exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Good engineering managers do exist. I have had the pleasure to work with 2 of them. They are based out of Bloomfield CT and they are extremely talented engineers and awesome managers. They work in the R&D department for a very large laser company. One is the president of Engineering the other manages Specialty products. Working for these guys was the best working experience in my life and I regret having left the company for a more lucrative opportunity.

Clickbait

[technomom]

Impossible? No. Very difficult to get both people management and engineering skills in the same person? Yup. That's true, but that's why you take care of that person when you find them.

Re:Clickbait

[Eskarel]

I've never been convinced that you actually need your manager to have direct technical skills, certainly not extensive ones. They need enough knowledge to spot bullshit, but if a manager has really good people and leadership skills then the technical people who work for them will take care of the technical.

The issue of course is that people with really great people and leadership skills don't stay long in middle management. Middle management is basically the realm of horror. Any technical skills people in there have atrophy because they spend all day not being technical and if they had good management skills they'd have gotten out.

Correction...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Managers Just "Don't Exist"

What is hilarious is, his employer

[hsmith]

The first thing on their website is:

currently hiring: Director of Engineering

Sounds like a great place to work with blowhard like him there.

My view

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a division of nothing but IT/IS guys (and girls) and our manager is a brilliant programmer. He's also a terrible boss. You want to be a good boss to your IS/IT/Engineering gang, here's how you do it: (1) Trust them to make the right decisions. This part alone is 90% of being a good manager. If you trust your employees, then number (2) won't even come up (2) Don't be a micro-manager. If you hired good people, give them a task, and sit back and let them do it. Quit getting in the way, it just breeds resentment or apathy. (3) Praise them in public, chastise them in private. If they do good, announce it loudly to everyone you work with, and everyone in the company. Show them you like what they did, and they will feel good about where they work. If they screw up, *gently* chastise them in private. Don't berate them, or belittle them, tell them what they need to do to fix things, and then let them fix it and go on. Don't keep bringing up their past mistakes. (4) Don't bog them down with pointless meetings and/or stupid paperwork. You hired idea people, don't kill their enjoyment of being creative by giving them scut work, take that upon yourself. (5) Look at the big picture. That's your job. Let them worry about how it's being built, you worry about the end result and where it fits in the company. (6) Back your team. Fight for them. If they need something (more resources for example) go get it, don't question them endlessly or needlessly about why, it's your job to ensure they have the tools to do their jobs. If questions are raised by other teams/managers about what they are doing or what they need (X) for, find out from them in private, but state it publicly. It's not hard to be a good manager, but too many people seem to be unable to do so. (posting anon since my boss reads this site)

Oh snap

[Neruocomp]

Where is my popcorn?

Buddy System

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who is a fairly competent technical person who was recently passed by for two management promotions, the problem isn't that I can't or won't do the job, it's that the existing asshat managers have buddies they'd rather promote instead.

And it's not that I don't have experience as a technical manager (I do), it's that the people promoted and hired are both friends (or at least kindred spirits) of the hiring manager.

As the saying goes, it's not what you know it's who.

Maybe they just aren't paying enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm Google pays a Senior Software Engineer an average of $150,361 and a Technical Program Manager an average of $127,295.

Why would a really good engineer want to take on all the burdens of management for less money than they can make as a software engineer?

I am sure a lot of other companies are the same.

Re:Maybe they just aren't paying enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

One has to be careful about "manager" titles.. A program manager is often more of a business development type, or someone who keeps a lot of projects going in the same general direction.

Program managers often have no 'hire/fire' authority, which is really the defining characteristic of a manager (especially in legal terms. it's one of the sure fire things to make you exempt under the manager exemption). In a matrixed organization this is particularly true: program and project managers don't have administrative responsibility for things like HR issues; line or organization managers do.

not to say that PMs don't have a lot of the pain of line managers: reporting budgets, schedules, status, etc. Making decisions about funds allocation, etc.

They exist. I work for one right now.

[Sarusa]

I work for one of them. I've worked for two others previously.

Current boss likes being able to have his fingers in all the design pies, which he can do because he doesn't have to code any more. That could be a disaster if he were a micromanaging ego driven tool who wanted to own everything, but he knows what he doesn't know and defers to the area experts/leaders. He comes up with very good ideas or ties it together with another part of the project, so he's also contributing.

He spends the other half of the time doing all those horrible managery things the rest of us don't want to do. And for that he makes more money.

Everyone wins!

Of course this /requires/ someone who can manage his time and his ego effectively to work well, but they do exist.

Re:They exist. I work for one right now.

[Beeftopia]

I worked for one. This fellow was extremely smart, gregarious, and just naturally comfortable leading people. ALSO, he was the one who handled the really tough problems, along with the lead programmer. Interesting thing about the lead programmer versus this manager - both extremely smart but two very different personality types.

Kind of right...

[RocketScientist]

People go into engineering to engineer. Not to tell other people how to do it. Let me explain my day:

Meetings: 2 hours, minimum, per day. Every meeting starts 2-10 minutes late, depending on the most senior person in the meeting. The more senior, the more they impress by being late to the meeting to demonstrate their importance. "Sorry I'm late, had to stop in the bathroom, fill up my coffee, and blah blah blah don't care". Anything discussed in the meeting could have been done in a 5 minute conversation or 10 minute email composition, but nobody "has time" to read email and comment, because they're in meetings all the time.

HR Crap: Wanna hire someone? That's at least 40 hours of solid work to pile through the paperwork, which by the way changed completely since the last time you did it, WHY ARE YOU DOING IT THE OLD WAY YOU MORON! Doing annual objectives. Doing semi-annual reviews. Approving timesheets. Approving expense reports. Sitting in on interviews for other teams so they have enough feedback to fill out their paperwork, so they return the favor when you need it. Touchy-feely manager training. Sexual harassment training. Diversity training. Interviewing training. Training training (not kidding).

Stupid Management Stuff: Talking to every single person on the team, asking about their kids, their favorite sports team, whatever. Every day. 1 hour/day or so. No, I don't care, but *I* get reviewed on that stuff as well. Dealing with making sure people are happy so you don't have to spend the 40 hours of interviewing and HR crap to hire someone else.

Bureaucratic Crap: Buying things (Budget approval, another approval to actually buy the thing, approval to install it, and security team approval to actually get access to it). Borrowing things. Getting office space, computers, and computer upgrades for the team. Putting in tickets when phones don't work, when people need security access to new systems. Acquiring software is the WORST, I work for a multi-million dollar corporation that has sales people expense accounts for a week over $20k, and it's taken me 8 weeks to get a $10k software acquisition approved.

Building things: fill out forms to make something. Spend a lot of time reviewing forms and approving them. Don't spend any time actually doing things, that might be fun, you have to delegate that onto your team. You might get some design work in, but you should leave that to your Architect, aren't you late for a meeting?

Mentoring: The only fun part of my job that's left. 2 hours per day. Max.

All of this and what do you get? Better pay? Nope, I got a guy working for me making the same money. An office. Well, yeah, sure...untilNO. YOU HAVE TO BE SENIOR MANAGER TO GET AN OFFICE. Until then, a cube like everyone else. Respect of peers? LOL.

Honestly, being a manager is a shitty, shitty, shitty job. It simultaneously doesn't pay enough and can't pay enough, so it doesn't even try. You don't get to do fun stuff anymore, and you get yelled at if you try. I got roped into it because everyone else took a step back faster when they were looking for volunteers.

Why yes, I am sending out resumes. Why do you ask?

Honestly, the best thing to do in IT once you hit a certain level is ask yourself "Do I want to be a manager". If the answer is no, you essentially have to quit and go be a consultant.

Re:Kind of right...

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like you work for NASA, or a contractor sucking on NASA's teat. I don't think every place is quite so bad though.

Re:Kind of right...

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with everything you said, especially the last sentence.

I am currently consulting. I still have to sit through a lot of BS meetings, but it feels better when I think of how
much money I make per meeting. I just bought a nice chainsaw this morning (ice storm) and I'll pay for it
by video conferencing through a single meeting this afternoon. :)

Re:Kind of right...

[hibiki_r]

2 hours of meetings per day, minimum? I've worked at places where that's the bare minimum for programmers! 30 hours of meetings a week seems closer to the average.

Re:Kind of right...

[dbIII]

Sexual harassment training

That's the problem with you Americans, you need training for everything. Australian managers on the other hand do plenty of sexual harassment without needing any sort of training.

Re:Kind of right...

[mtippett]

Firstly, I bow to your low 5 digit user number. You are an old hand...

I won't bite at all the points that are worth biting.

The mentoring part is the leadership part of management. When I have an engineer in my team go "wow, I've never done it that way" or "that was inspiring" it is all worth it. For reference, the two quotes were for "techniques for estimation" and "requirements analysis".

The managers role is to get the team as efficient and effective as possible. This means taking experience (from in the ranks) and finding ways to apply it to make their life easier and more effective.

Re:Kind of right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. This. Exactly fucking this.

Do I work with you?

Your job sounds ... exactly like my job.

In regards to pay, I would add the management has a "higher ceiling" for pay. That is, at my organization, there are a dozen or so Senior Managers, Directors, VPs and C-level folks making seriously good money. There are probably only three or four (if that) people who actually do work who are anywhere near the same pay scale. And I use the term "do work" loosely. These are primarily "architecture" folks, who, for the most part, spend their days playing with new toys and telling everyone else *how* to do stuff the "right way" with no respect for the fact that we usually just need to GET SHIT DONE.

Of course, my organization also scores about a 1.5 on the Joel Test (meaningless here, though, because /. is pretty anti-Spolsky) so I shouldn't be surprised.

Re:Kind of right...

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone that does the 'acquire software for you' process, it is a right PITA.

* check for existing products that have same functionality

* evaluate new product against security requirements

* evaluate against technical and enterprise architecture

* evaluate against legislation for information management (especially if storing personal data)

If it's somehow approved after all of that, then we have financial procurement directives that may require a contract be created with a previously accredited supplier. This can take months, an in extreme cases over a year.

Once all that is completed, signed off by the correct roles with the right levels of procurement and financial delegation, then we have the standard process for raising a purchase order via our outsourced provider, taking delivery, and arranging installation.

Don't forget that a $10k procurement of software generates - in my country - a half million dollar+ risk of fines plus jail time if you are non-compliant. Sorting that out takes time to mitigate the risk.
Fun times.

Re:Kind of right...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was at Dell, one of the senior engineers showed me his Outlook calendar. His entire day was filled with meetings, mostly double booked, and in several place triple booked. Much of his time was spent deciding which meeting not to go to on any given day.

Actual work? Had to do that at home.

Re:Kind of right...

[RocketScientist]

Firstly, I bow to your low 5 digit user number. You are an old hand...

Nope, I'm just old. My hands are the same age as the rest of me.

Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the picture of the poster, I know what the problem is.

Good engineering managers pretty much all have gray hair.

As everyone here knows, people with gray hair don't exist in Silicon Valley.

It's just clickbait, and it worked.

*PLONK*

Re:This is why Republicans rule this country

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about the US President, because he is not black despite what you racist Republicans call him. He is half black, and he is 100% Republican since the only thing he has done is perpetuate Bush's policies and enact RomneyCare nationally. As we've all seen, he isn't the most competent person. He is just the most persuasive and loud one so he is, by definition, a Republican like this article describes.

Re:This is why Republicans rule this country

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people I've heard call him black are racists. He is not. Do you really think there'd be a black woman named Stanley. You're showing your true racist colors by calling him black.

No

[The Cat]

America no longer values leadership. America values drama.

There is a significant and growing crowd (which took their inspiration from assholes on the Internet) that takes personal offense at the very utterance of a declarative sentence. They are the self-proclaimed arbiters who stand ready to disprove anything given enough grist for their narcissist logic mill.

They are the people who start every sentence with "actually" or "yeah, but." They insist on consensus and then sabotage it. They litigate everything, right down to the flavor of the donuts. They like to refer to themselves as skeptics, but in reality they are just asses.

These people make real leadership impossible.

Re:No

[geekoid]

"..that takes personal offense at the very utterance of a declarative sentence."
Yeah. we should let me move on and make decisions with bad information. Nothing says good engineering better then bad data!

None of which has anything to do with litigation or the type of donuts.

You are the ass.

Re:No

[The Cat]

QED

(There's one in every thread)

Alpha geeks

[DaveAtFraud]

In any technical project requiring more than a few people a small number of the people assigned will gradually emerge as the technical leads, the alpha geeks. This isn't by designation. It's a meritocracy in action. Even though there is no official process, the results are fairly objective. Lower levels of management retain some vestiges of requiring technical competence but, the higher you go, the more the results of who gets promoted are governed by how well an individual shmoozes, kisses fanny, acts as their own PR and other subjective qualities. It is very difficult for higher management to differentiate between an easy project and a competent manager or a hard project and an incompetent manager.

If the above situation isn't enough to keep good engineers from becoming engineering managers, the reward you get for moving to the management track is technical obsolescence. The only thing you become qualified to do is be a manager. In larger companies the only thing you may be qualified to do is be a manager at that company since the bulk of you time is consumed by navigating the arcane bureaucracy that you are part of.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Alpha geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

In any technical project requiring more than a few people a small number of the people assigned will gradually emerge as the technical leads, the alpha geeks.

This is usually just the loudest of the overconfident idiots.

Bullshit

[organgtool]

I know of several managers who were excellent engineers before they were promoted and have made excellent managers as well. This guy is just projecting his own personal view onto the rest of the world. His argument that good engineers won't accept a promotion is complete bullshit since there are many good engineers who would enjoy the increased pay and/or power. In general, money and power are the ultimate motivators, even if it isn't the case for this author.

Re:Bullshit

[BBF_BBF]

Spoken like a true Manager, and not a true Engineer.

Some Engineers actually LOVE doing Engineering things, and will forgo a "promotion" to a higher paying or more powerful job so they can stay technical. It's a quirk that, in my experience, Engineers tend to have more than say people who get Business degrees. For those types of Engineers, being able to direct a project in a way they technically prefer *is* the Power they're looking for.

It's just something that a non-techie just can't grasp because it's so much out of their own frame of reference.

That's why in the good old days of IBM and HP, they had a technical track that would allow the top Engineers/Scientists to get promoted, and paid well, WHILE staying involved with the technical aspects of projects, so as not to *lose* their technical skills by making them management types.

Re:Bullshit

[organgtool]

Spoken like a true Manager, and not a true Engineer.

I happen to be one of the engineers who would rather continue with engineering than take a promotion to manager, but I'm not naive enough to think that every other good engineer would make the same decision as me.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true Manager, and not a true Engineer.

I happen to be one of the engineers who would rather continue with engineering than take a promotion to manager, but I'm not naive enough to think that every other good engineer would make the same decision as me.

No, you have a great great job.
Most of us who love engineering, find it impossible to love our work (extreme time pressure, a 600% workload, often having to abandon/throw away things you love... kinda kills any enthusiasm for the next thing management tells you to do).

Management comes as a relief, and you can enjoy coding on your free time.

I am what I am.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an ENGINEER: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works;
I am not an ADMINISTRATOR: a person who manages an organization, or one who inflicts punishment.

Those are dictionary definitions.

And I AM an ABET degreed and PE registered Engineer.

(Shrug) I've worked for at least two.

[dpbsmith]

Medium-sized company, small groups, but nevertheless excellent managers. And, incidentally, willing and able to pitch in and do some of the work occasionally. One of the interesting things is that both of the excellent managers always chose to use the slowest, oldest, hand-me-down PCs.

I've also... ONCE in my career... gone to engineering planning meetings led by the VP of R&D, who insisted on doing everything in detail with Microsoft Project, and... you'll never believe this, never... actually used the tool to get a picture of the overall project and the critical paths. Someone would say something like "So, according to the chart, we're going to be three weeks late here," and he might say "Well, that's when marketing says they want it, but they don't really need it and I'm pretty sure I can push that back."

Or he would stare at another part and say, "Well, this looks like the critical path, and why is it going to take eight weeks to get this lens made?" And the optical engineer would say "That's what XYZ in Rochester is quoting us." And the VP would say "Hmmm... is there any way to get that faster?" "Well, we could get it in five weeks if we placed an expedited order but that's very expensive." "How expensive?" "It will cost $22,000 instead of $8,000." Pause. VP says "Well, it looks to me like we'd better do that, then."

Re:(Shrug) I've worked for at least two.

[serviscope_minor]

Not to do down MS project (I've never used it personally), but you may have me the only person on the planet who actually knows how to use it properly. Mostly (like excel) it seems to be subject to the most unfathomable abuse.

Putz's Law

[Moof123]

Good book, and one of the central tenets is that in a technical organization there will be a competence inversion. Good engineers will defy the Peter Principle by way of "Creative Incompetence", such that excellent technical leaders will stay at the bottom levels due to bad personalities, poor hygene, and similar.

Excellent book, but expect to be depressed as you see the behaviors it talks about in your own organization.

Wrong

[geekoid]

I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.
I've know a lot of really bad ones as well.

Managing includes a set of soft skills, as well as not being passive aggressive. So you need those skills as well as engineering understanding.

Re:Wrong

[dacut]

I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.

Obviously you meant "good" here, but it made me pause: is there a correlation between food and good managers? I've been reading more than a handful of materials (e.g. Peopleware ) which have mentioned eating together as a helping to build strong teams (arguably the most important job of a manager). A number of companies have caught on, from the big (like Google) to startups (one of my favorites, The Omni Group here in Seattle even has a full-time kitchen staff who are listed by name on their about us page).

Obviously, it's not a catch-all solution; heck, I suspect it's more correlation (that is, the managers who get their teams to eat together are more likely to care about their teams) than causation. But still gave me a pause.

this is a terrible argument

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that the best engineers are happy to sit around taking direction forever is silly. I've found that it is necessary to take on management duties if I want to work on my projects rather than someone else's projects.

I've worked for some really good managers. In each case, those guys were leading teams doing things they were passionate about and had deep experience with, and they were given wide latitude to manage the project and people as they saw fit.

lack of ownership

[submain]

As said in TFA, engineers usually don't want to "move up" in the company, but my experience tells me that a good portion of us day dream about making an app that will make them millionaires. For me, that is a inherent sense of entrepreneurship.

Simply put: why are you going to take in more responsibility to enrich someone else while you can work on your own projects during your spare time and hit the jackpot?

Of course, that mindset might not be realistic: the cruel reality is that most of us will never become millionaires. But if corporations were willing to change the "take this fixed amount of money and I'll try the hardest I can to suck the life out of you" to "you and your team own this project, and your compensation will contain part of that project's profits", then maybe more engineers would be willing to manage.

Re:lack of ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put: why are you going to take in more responsibility to enrich someone else while you can work on your own projects during your spare time and hit the jackpot?

Probably because most of us sign contracts assigning all work and patents to our employers. This tends to be the case for contractors, as well as employees.

Most companies won't go after us if we do FOSS work (as long as we don't use their code, or compete with the company). Some actually encourage it.

However, if you hit the jackpot, expect a visit from the lawyerpult.

Re:lack of ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because most of us sign contracts assigning all work and patents to our employers.

Sorry if you're the 1 idiot who signed something like that. The rest of us never would.

Re:lack of ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a "French Fry Preparation Engineer" at a Fortune 100 franchise? Because, around these parts, every. single. company. has these contracts. It's sometimes possible to negotiate them to give you a bit more latitude, but not much. Contractors can usually get the company to loosen the grip a bit.

I've been a (very good) Software Engineering manager for a long time. I've hired (and fired) a lot of folks. I'm still an active production coder; which is one reason that I do so well.

You must still be in college. I guess the real world is gonna be a bit of a nasty shock.

And Sequoia back this startup?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked for some very very competent managers who kept the teams focused and were very technical. Granted there are alot of managers who aren't very good. Sounds like this guy working for the startup isn't very good.

Counter Examples

[kellymcdonald78]

Tom Kelly, Werner Von Braun, Sergei Korolev and Kelly Johnson.

They do exist!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you haven't met one doesn't mean they don't exist. Good engineering managers are just very difficult to find. I happen to know one who works in IC design in Silicon Valley. He's technically excellent, worked his way up the ladder through hard work over decades (starting at Fairchild), and knows how to manage people. He's tough, straight forward, and demanding, including of himself. When he negotiated and changed companies, his engineering colleagues moved with him.

Good E M =/= M good at E

[Culture20]

Management is a different skill than engineering. If less than stellar engineers move into management, their skill in engineering should have no bearing on whether they can manage engineers. If they try to micromanage, that makes them bad managers.

They do exist and flourish

[Virtucon]

In organizations where they're not burdened with a lot of Bullshit and Bureaucracy. They're not found however in organizations that have leadership that's based in Finance or the MBA world of idiocy.

Re:They do exist and flourish

[atom1c]

I concur with your observation 1000%.

I've worked for good engineering managers

[david.emery]

I've had the good fortune to work for several good managers, either as direct supervisors or as senior managers, up to the Corporate VP level. That includes people in small companies, in Fortune 500 companies, and even active duty Army officers.

What I've observed is that the top levels of management DO NOT want to listen to what the good engineering managers try to tell them, about topics like staff training and retention, schedules or resources (e.g. hardware/capital expenditures.) Instead, the CxO level people promote those who tell them what they want to hear. It's not universal, but many of the good managers I've had are products of deliberate leadership/management training, rather than being promoted from 'nerd' to 'boss' and left to figure it out on their own. Part of that training is how to talk to the CxO level and how to make arguments in terms of corporate business case, objectives, etc.

The only good news is that at least in this millennium, the number of top managers/CxOs who actually know something about software, has increased. They're still a minority, but you may well find a VP who understands that software isn't "that crappy stuff that always makes our systems late, so we'll 'fix' it by throwing more cheap bodies at it." (I got really tired of the engineering VPs whose experience was in hardware, and whose ideas of software systems engineering was framed by "that FORTRAN course I took in college...")

One interesting model that was popular in the early '90s may deserve another look. Some research labs* split managerial duties, separating technical leadership from administration. Where some organizations got into trouble with that model was not treating both classes of managers as equals. The technical leaders too often got marginalized, because the administrators were the ones that talked about the kinds of stuff CEO/CFO wanted to discuss. It takes a tremendous investment at the CxO level to institute a program that recognizes and grows technical leadership as distinct from, frankly, beancounting.

* It runs in my mind that DEC's Western Research Labs was one of the organizations that implemented this approach successfully.

Those who can't do the job will rule the job.

[mrmeval]

Pournelle's Iron Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy

I'm fairly sure that is a facet of that law. You have a less than stellar engineer who goes into management to cover his sins with real engineers flesh. They do tend to keep an organization alive. It would be helpful if there were a clandestine organization that assasinated upper level beurocrats in both government and quazi government entities but that's never going to happen.

managing *is* engrg, just with different tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical managers promoted from the engineering pool often have trouble "leaving the bench behind" and letting the managed do their thing. They often become micromanagers, excessively involved in the detail work, which isn't good for either side.

The key transition is learning that instead of using compilers or soldering irons as your tools, you're now using *people* as your tools to build bigger more complex systems. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone *wants* to do that.

The other thing that managers need to be able to do is to "read a calendar" and adjust the work accordingly. How many developers do you know that say "just give me the spec and I'll crank out the code". Well, if you get that spec, and you tell the manager it's going to take 4 months, and the manager has a commitment to deliver in 3, something's got to give. Good managers are good at eliciting what sort of descope or increased risk is going to get that. Poor managers (or poor devs) can't do that. Poor managers and head down devs are a VERY bad combination.

Yes, many companies fell into the MBA trap of "it's just management, and as long as there are metrics, we can manage by the numbers". But I think that is more rare these days (although it will take some time to purge the ranks of those "generic managers"). But an engineer, who can read a calendar, and has had some management training (be it MBA or otherwise) can be a huge asset. But they're rare, and isn't that the point of the article.

Moving up?

[Chelloveck]

Maybe the author should consider that engineering and managing are different skill sets. A person can be good at one of them without being good at the other. Or can enjoy one without enjoying the other.

I'm not sure why it's always considered "moving up" to go from engineering to management. Ideally they're two separate but equally important roles in the creation of a product.

Functional vs. Project mangers

[Anonymous Coward]

Management has always been a high paying escape from engineering, whether the manager was a good engineer or not. I also blame PMI and CMM for blowing a lot of smoke in upper management's faces.

*All* the benefits?

[Afty0r]

The best engineers get all the benefits of being leaders

*All* the benefits?

I don't think so, I think it's just inertia. Our industry pays middle management comparatively poorly. In software engineering / web development which is my line of work, manager get paid barely more than senior engineers. Now I'm not one of those people who feels it's wrong to have an engineer making more than his boss (I've managed people earning more than me before, they were all awesome) but if you want the best people to step up and take a lot more pain you need to pay them a lot more.

In most other industries managers earn significantly more than their reports. Take a look at retail, at sales and many other professions. Someone in retail in the UK earning £16k/annum on a checkout line will have a manager who earns around double that - 30k or so. Same for customer services.

So, take a software engineer earning 55k/annum in London - his manager probably earns around 65k-70k, and has a MUCH more stressful and less enjoyable job, and almost certainly longer hours. His pro-rata take home is probably only around 5% better.

So how about we pay our Development Managers 100k? I bet you'd have a few more of the stronger candidates stepping up to the plate.

Yours sincerely, a (fairly, IMHO) good Development Manager in London - considering taking a step down or sideways because the money just doesn't justify the extra hassle...

Re:*All* the benefits?

[mtippett]

Both are leaders.

Managers are Organizational Leaders.
"Senior"/"Staff" Engineers/Architects are Technical Leaders.

Different focus, but similar soft leadership skills. They are peered, and should have a similar work load and a similar amount of hassle...

Re:*All* the benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you're completely wrong.

Paying Engineering managers that much more won't get more highly qualified people to step up; it will just get more ambitious assholes stepping up.

Just like paying CEO's 400 times what the average worker makes doesn't get a better CEO.

And step down, if you can't handle the hassle, you can't handle the hassle. You think money is going to change that but it won't. More money will just lock you into a lifestyle where you can't afford to quit. And if you think money will make it more worth the hassle, you're doing nothing more then deluding yourself.

Re:*All* the benefits?

[kzadot]

I think it is terrible that managers get paid more than engineers. It is mostly because their ass is on the line when things go wrong I think.

I would much rather see situations where the people that actually create the product get paid the most, and those in a supporting role, like managers get paid less.

The only problem is, this would mean that the engineers would have to take on the responsibility, make the hard decisions, and accept the consequences when things go wrong.

Or maybe that isn't a problem. Maybe that is how it should be.

Why have a tree hierarchy? Why not a graph?

[TiggertheMad]

A number of software companies are designed around the flat org structure, which is an interesting way of running things. Another idea is a rock-paper-scissors approach where no group has ultimate authority.

Re:Why have a tree hierarchy? Why not a graph?

[phantomfive]

That sort of thing is easy when the company is small. Once you have more than 20 or 30 developers, it starts getting hard. Fred Brooks also discussed that topic (at least, a very similar topic).

If you can find a way to make it scale, then let us know :)

Re:Why have a tree hierarchy? Why not a graph?

[Zenin]

I don't know...it seems to work pretty well for Valve who's scaled it up to about 300 last I looked.

Granted, not everyone is fit for such a culture, and there are plenty of "It ain't all chocolate and roses at Valve!" stories to attest to that. But lets face it, most humans really are happiest following, what's left is happiest leading. The percentage of humans who can be happy in a peer culture, especially when those peers are all high achievers, is honestly so small it's not much more than statistical noise.

So to that sense you're right: Few companies are able to scale with a flat model simply because the available pool of suitable talent for such an organization is so incredibly small. Couple that intrinsic soft cap on scale with the fact that "bad seeds" can do a very disproportionate amount of harm to such organization structures...and the larger your organization, the higher the likelihood that a bad seed will slip in. So that creates another soft-cap: As the organization scales, so must the strictness of the screening process for new highers. Eventually it'll just choke itself off, unable to grow.

That choke point however, I'd argue is dramatically higher than you've suggested.

Re:Why have a tree hierarchy? Why not a graph?

[phantomfive]

Valve is essentially a benevolent dictatorship run by Gabe. It still has structure, but the structure isn't as formally specified as in other companies.

Re:Why have a tree hierarchy? Why not a graph?

[Anonymous Coward]

If ran right, most businesses can be described the same way, phantomfive... Most companies hope for Valve's results but typically don't get it.

As for why not a graph? Most companies are not comprised of people that can DO a matrix/graph type business. It requires a certain mindset...which is sadly lacking in most businesses...and has been for many, many years.

*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

If you do not understand the corporate business objectives, you cannot be good technical leader because you don't know which problems need to be solved. IOW, you don't have to be a beancounter to understand whether a bean is worth counting.

If you can't explain your solutions in terms of the business objectives, then you are not providing technical leadership since all of your recommendations boil down to saying "because reasons."

Technical leaders are the people who identify a technical problem, recognize that it actually is a problem in the context of the business objectives, identify a solution and bring both to the team's attention. Being a technical leader ain't some knighthood that needs to be bestowed by the Queen (like being a manager does) -- if you want to be a technical leader, and are good enough to be one, just go do it.

Re:*sigh*

[david.emery]

True, but if your company's product is, for example, software - and that software company is being run by someone with a legal, financial, hardware, operations, or non-software engineering background, the problem is much more difficult. And that's what I'm seeing. First the engineers need to be able to think in terms of business objectives (one of the best courses I ever had was a grad course in "engineering economics"). But second, the management community (starting with the business schools) need to figure out how to train CxOs that actually -understand the business they're in-.

For the last 30+ years, I've been in the large scale systems business. Most, but not all of that has been on projects for the US DoD. I've been appalled by the number of senior executives, military/government, large industry, small industry, who fundamentally don't understand software-intensive systems. As my earlier post said, their software experience is encapsulated in some small-scale programming task, rather than in large scale software engineering. On the one hand, they expect software to perform miracles because "it's software, you can change it," while on the other hand they refuse to invest in software. For the former, the best quote is from a former co-worker, "The software engineer is the system engineer of last resort."

I'm reminded of a system I once reviewed where they had a 'software problem'. But it turned out they had a -networking problem-. They were trying to move large volumes of images over a 10BaseT ethernet connection, and wondered why they weren't getting system throughput. Their ethernet was usually well over 50% loaded and couldn't handle the data. But they expected the software to 'fix' this.

absolute BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Could not disagree more with the author. Most of the engineers I know have serious interpersonal skills issues and this guy sounds like them. Get over yourself. You sit at a keyboard and type all day.

Re:absolute BS

[Anonymous Coward]

That kind of person is irrelevant to this article. They typically won't be offered promotion, anyway. (though I've seen one case where they were, and it was a disaster)

Re:Wall Street FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

Wall Street plays a huge role in humanity, Finance Engineering will solve a lot of problems

Of course there are good engineering managers.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

But all the manage to do is to stay engineers without being promoted or outsourced.

Two thoughts on this from inside the bubble:

[Anonymous Coward]

Engineers should think of managers like gardeners: they plant seeds (hire talent), provide sun & water (get their team the resources they need), & sell the crops once they've been harvested (promote team deliverables & make sure they're marketed). They don't actually grow or have intrinsic value, but they make good engineering possible.

Second executives should notice many middle managers are empire builders: their goal is to have as many people reporting to them as possible, often trying to take over other empires to expand. More often then not this does nothing for their company or employees they manage. I have no idea why this destructive behavior is so transparent from the bottom up, but difficult to recognize from the top.

Re:Two thoughts on this from inside the bubble:

[dlingman]

Engineers should think of managers like gardeners: they plant seeds (hire talent), provide sun & water (get their team the resources they need), & sell the crops once they've been harvested (promote team deliverables & make sure they're marketed). They don't actually grow or have intrinsic value, but they make good engineering possible.

You forgot "and supply an endless supply of bullshit that they think will result in nourishment"

Nailed it!

[jddeluxe]

"The best engineers get all the benefits of being leaders, but without needing to take on the rather painful duties of management. So they choose not to move up. Compare this to the engineers who aren't as strong, and use the opportunity to move up as a way to get their voice heard."

Truest thing I've ever read on /.

Experience trumps education

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. "book smarts ain't all they cracked up to be."

If you ask but get no answer, change the question

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article, and posted there, but let me post here too.

This may be the dumbest article I've read this year (plenty of time, but still a stand-out). It doesn't do a good job of explain what an "engineering manager" is. It doesn't consider how to create them by mentoring, training, or different recruitment strategies. The author just wants to go out and buy one. If you want a perfect house, you build it, you don't expect them ready-made, "off the peg". Recruit for potential, and put in the work to get what you want.

Much worse, the author fails to think outside the box. My advice is: "If you have a problem which has no answer, ask a different question".

IMHO, the company or author may be dysfunctional. The old joke is "the definition of madness is to keep beating your head against the wall, and expect it to stop hurting". An organisation, repeatedly asking for the perfect "engineering manager", and never finding one is dysfunctional.

The cause of that failure may be many reasons. It may be they don't exist.
It may be the good engineering managers do a good job of figuring out whether a company is worth working for, and that company is so dysfunctional they stay away.
It may be good engineering managers start their own companies.
It may be they are so well respected and rewarded, they don't need to move.
It may be that the only way to get what you need is to mentor, train and promote from within because an outsiders won't understand the business, people, technology or processes, they won't cut it inside that company.
It may be the author is aiming too high, and all the people who could do what he wants, because they are already doing it, wouldn't take the demotion.
etc.

A better summary than "they don't exist" is "they won't come and work here"

I am an engineer, and have lead large groups, responsible for the technical integrity of several thousand peoples work. I have worked with some fantastic managers. I may have been able to do things they could not do, however, they could do things that I could not.
We worked together to do the best for our company, our people and our products. We spent late evenings, early mornings and long journeys, discussing how to do the right thing. Then tried hard to do it. Often I have been 'at the top' and the buck stopped with me, and not those people managers. However, without those people, we would not have been successful.

If you need stand-out talent to handle people management, but can't find anyone with stand-out engineering ability too, in one person, figure out how to organise yourself to use two or more people. Good organisation design, with clear, helpful, appropriate roles and responsibilities is not trivial, but IMHO it is better to fix that than whine about asking the wrong question, "please hire me a perfect engineering manager", and getting no answer.

We should not *need* to explain such obvious stuff repeatedly, but I am certain we will.

You don't need to quit

[drew_eckhardt]

>Honestly, the best thing to do in IT once you hit a certain level is ask yourself "Do I want to be a manager". If the answer is no, you essentially have to quit and go be a consultant.

Hardly, you just have to work someplace you're appreciated. Such organizations have engineering roles up to the VP level.

Principal Engineer is usually equivalent to a director, Distinguished Engineer VP, and Fellow somewhat higher.

Consider Microsoft - Principal Engineer is level 65-67 position like a director. Distinguished Engineer is a level 70 position like VP. Technical Fellow is level 80.

Such positions involve leadership but not people management and handle bigger technical problems than the ones companies delegate to consultants.

I've seen plenty

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen plenty of good engineering managers.

on the other hand, I have trouble coming up with a VP of engineering or IT who wasn't a worthless asshole who wasn't a complete drain on both the company and society in general.

And this guy sounds like one of them.

Shocking: engineers respond to incentives!

[radarskiy]

If you got to make the cool decisions about what work to do and didn't have to stuff that sucks like handle bad performers and did have to take the smack talk dished out about managers, why would you become a manager?

In _The Mythical Man Month_ Fred Brooks suggests that management track be paid less than the technical track of the same notional level to counteract the perceived status of being "the boss". Clearly we need to go the other way and pay the management track more to overcome the stigma of being "pointy-haired".

Good is just rare in comparison to average

[emmjayell]

This applies to managers, engineers and engineers that have taken management roles.

Relevant book-quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Leo timed his entrance carefully, waiting until Van Atta had been holed up in his Habitat office nearly the first two hours of the shift. The project chief would be starting to think about his coffee break by now, and reaching the degree of frustration that always attended the first attack on a new problem, in this case dismantling the Habitat. Leo could picture the entangled stage of his planning precisely; he'd gone through it himself about eight hours previously, locked in his own quarters, brainstorming on his computer console after a brief pause to render his programs inaccessible to snoops. [...]

Van Atta frowned at him from the clutter of printouts, his computer vid scintillating multi-screened and colorful with assorted Habitat schematics. "Now what, Leo? I'm busy. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

And those who can't teach, Leo finished silently, go into administration. He maintained his usual bland smile, not letting the edged thought show by any careless gleam or reflection.

--"Falling Free" (1987) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Re:Relevant book-quote

[tragedy]

It's worth noting for anyone who hasn't read the book that Van Atta had been one of Leo's engineering trainees who he recommended for a management training program because he thought he'd be dangerous as an engineer. The end result was Van Atta working as Leo's boss and in charge of a large space installation housing a large number of children and young adults (who for reasons I won't go into here were effectively not legally protected people) whose welfare he completely ignores in favor of the bottom line and his own career.

Best mangers: People skills, detail attention

[Theovon]

I currently work as a CS professor, but I still do some tele-consulting for a company I used to work for full time. Because I do tops 8 hours/week, I now consult under someone who used to be my subordinate while I was there. That may sound awkward, but it isn’t. My supervisor has a CS degree but his engineering skills aren’t rockstar, so he gravitated to organization and leadership roles, and that was precisely the best thing for him. I find him very easy to work with because he is technical enough that I can communicate with him, he listens to what I say, and because he manages me at exactly whatever level I need for any given task. If I’m having trouble keeping track of what I need to do (because it’s easy to lose track when I work for him once a week and have a whole other day job to do), he’s right on top of it. If I have a really clear idea of what I need to do, he gives me space and is available to answer questions, discuss strategy, etc. I’m used to being the babysitter, keeping junior engineers and grad students from getting off track. This guy does that for me, but he does it in a way that isn’t awkward at all; in fact, he makes me feel respected for the work I do. (Incidentally, he also directs an engineer that used to be an owner of said company before it was sold, and they have a very good working relationship as well.)

My point is that the technical skill of the manager is only somewhat important. Even more important is people skill and the ability to keep track of all the high and low-level details necessary to keep employees on track. You don’t have to know all the implementation details in order to maintain a clear vision of what everyone is trying to accomplish and help them get the resources to do it. In the most successful companies, “managers” spend little time “directing.” Instead, they primarily work to serve the needs of their subordinates, insulating them from company politics and ensuring that the engineers have all the tools and support they need to work effectively without distraction.

its all in what interests you

[ILongForDarkness]

I really like technical challenges. But I also like to help others and do bigger picture strategy. As you start mentoring more and more people you end up with a choice at somepoint because both demand a lot of time: put helping the rest of the team with architectural and training type tasks (and using connections across departments to pull in resources you need) or being that guy who codes for 10hr stints of genius coding without washroom breaks. Both are interesting to me but I think at sometime I'll for the most part hang up my compiler and do more management type stuff because I actually enjoy helping people or even bouncing ideas off them and have them come back with a better idea. You can only be the go to guy for so many parts of a project before you spend all your time doing design and code reviews anyways, it becomes next to impossible to make forward progress on your own tasks with interruptions every 10min. Might as well make the interruptions the job.

Oh really?

[dcollins117]

Off the top of my head I can think of more than a dozen excellent engineering managers. I know a lot of lousy ones, too. But to say that there are no good engineering managers is just plain stupid.

They do, but only because at a certain point...

[Assmasher]

...you've basically done it all.

For example, I've done 3D graphics, Virtual Reality, 3D modeling, Internet Banking, Hospital/Medical middleware, parallelization scalable computing, computer vision, physical secuity, research (photogammetry), consulting, 3D game engines, HIPAA compliant client/server systems, mobile, AKF cube scalability big data, et cetera...

At a point like this it become more interesting to be invovled in the team building/manager/mentoring side of things while still getting to take on the really hairy jobs. It's why I love what I do.

In my honest opinion, quality software engineers, who never ever end up leading teams for the majority of their time, tend to be such control freaks that they can't let go. Now, that's not always the case, but in my experience it has been the general case. I, myself, am a control freak about the code; however, I have learned (like many an NHL or NBA coach) that there is great satisfaction in leading a new generation to solve problems in ways that appeal to you - all while maintaining the "oh, sh**, the old man is going to implement this feature, it must be hairy..." mystique. LOL.

It's the main reason I've been writing software for almost 25 years and I still LOVE doing it.

          WTH

Re:They do, but only because at a certain point...

[Assmasher]

Ooh, I am inebriated tonight...

Manager declares himself incompetent!

[uncqual]

So, he's a manager (VP Engineering) and it appears he thinks he's not a very good engineering manager (since such beasts don't exist in his view). So why does he think anyone would care about the views of an inferior engineering manager on what constitutes a good engineering manager? Very odd argument he has here!

And, he's not correct. Good engineering managers are hard to find, just as good engineers are. But, to assume that the only reason someone would go into management is because they can't cut it as an engineer is naive. It's not unusual for people to be very good at something but actually prefer to do something else (which they may also be very good at). I, for example, am very good at a wide variety of menial tasks (washing windows, vacuuming and the like) because I am careful, through, and have high standards for doing a job well - however I avoid doing them whenever possible because I really prefer to do other things that I'm also good at.

Re:Manager declares himself incompetent!

[sunderland56]

So, he's a manager (VP Engineering) and it appears he thinks he's not a very good engineering manager.

He's also currently trying to hire a director of engineering, to work under him. So, he is simultaneously saying "managers are incompetent" and "would you like a job as a manager?"

what kind of engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Professional Engineers, or guys who work on computers/networks/storage/virtualization yada yada?

Sounds like...

[nine-times]

Didn't RTFA, but this sounds like the theory of an engineer who's on an ego trip. "Good engineering managers don't exist because I like engineering and I'm a shitty manager. Doing a better job than me is impossible, because I'm brilliant."

Sorry, no. Good managers are a rarity. Just in general, ignoring the "engineering" part of it, management is a difficult skillset to master, and most people in the position don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. But let's take another step back. Most jobs have a difficult skillset to master, and most people don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. Most engineers suck at their jobs. They just don't have enough understanding to notice that they're bad at their jobs. It's not really unique to a specific kind of job.

comparison

[l3v1]

"Compare this to the engineers who aren't as strong, and use the opportunity to move up as a way to get their voice heard."

No need to go very far, most of us experience this every day. And suffer the consequences. Also, these people are often good survivors as well, masters in shifting the blame and pointing fingers when they cause trouble, never admitting their fault. Like the best politicians.

Re:comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

two easy solutions to the "Doesn't understand they are bad at their job" and the difficulty of the skill set to master is irrelevant if the performance metrics, deliverables, methods of measuring performance and if/then rules of reporting are either not clearly defined or not followed by the manager or the engineer, the Manager creates more prolonged and harder to notice problems for the company, especially if the entities that the manager reports to are mesmerized by them and are treated like they are beyond accountability for too long. These managers tend to get so out of control, they can and frequently do open the company up to legal issues, a revolving door for engineers and other workers and as several people have stated they almost never admit they are the problem, or that they could be. This is why we judge the value of performance metrics and deliverables based on pre-defined and agreed upon standards, so that its not just one guy swinging his weight around and telling you it's an earthquake.

Misleading title

[alexandrujuncu]

This article is misleading because it assumes some facts that are wrong (from my point): "The best engineering managers are the best engineers". On the contrary, I think that the best engineers, usually, shouldn't go to be managers.. they should be 'architects'. Great managers have to be good (not the best) engineers , but great managers.

Engineer pushing 50 here

[Anonymous Coward]

I"m an engineer pushing 50. I'm slowly -very slowly indeed- turning into a manager. I spent almost 40 years in learning how to program well and how to design systems well. As always I'm nearly there but not yet quite. Slowly I realize that I can motivate young people. Lately I have learned how to put the prowess of our team into a business strategy perspective. With that capability I can now convince management into taking the right direction. I sometimes very reluctantly use the new learned skill to block idiots in their path. For me, becoming a manager isn't a goal of its own but merely a next step on the road and I'll still remain an engineer at heart. Reading Michael Porter sort of put one of the last piece in place. Get proficient in that what you do and learn how to prevent idiots from destroying all the fun and profitability in your outfit. And retire a happy man/woman.

The Peter Principal

[tubs]

This sounds more like the Peter Principal effect, people are being promoted on their pas performance, rather than on what they will do. You're a good engineer, you'll make a good manager ...

Good engineer does not equal good manager

[Geeky]

It may be true that good engineers don't have to become managers because they get the benefits (usually financial) while being able to remain technical.

However, bad engineers don't make bad managers. The best boss I ever had worked his way up from programming. He was a completely hopeless programmer, but he recognised good talent and was a fantastic man manager. He sought out a quality team to work for him, and insulated us completely from the politics coming down from above. If anyone in the team cocked up, he'd never place blame in public, just discuss it one to one. He trusted the team, and we trusted him.

Management is just such a different skill set it can't really be compared.

Re:Good engineer does not equal good manager

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked for an awesome Enginering Manager.

Good Engineer, Good Manager.

Technically proficient, knew what he knew, knew what he didn't, enough of a BS detector to know where his underlings stood.

Good manager, hired good people, provided the resources, and kept senior management from bothering the working Engineers.

Former military make best managers

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a former military NCO like a master sergeant who has a technical background but is used to being an NCO, and you'll get a good technical manager.

But ... today's career managers can't stand them because they shoot straight and tell the truth.

mangeneering

[Anonymous Coward]

We already get plenty of practice being managers! Make a DC 35 Fort save and roll initiative!

dual ladder

[Anonymous Coward]

This dual ladder was promulgated at, among other places, Bell Labs in the post WWII era. It has been soundly debunked as a valid approach in numerous studies dating back to the 60s. Sloan School has a great report which I can't remember, but you could probably find it.

Here's the problem.
Status and wages are driven in virtually all companies by "how many people you direct" or "how much money is at risk". It has nothing to do with how much work you do, how hard that work is, or what the revenue derived from your work is. It's more about "potential downside" than "demonstrated upside". Getting promoted requires "demonstrated upside", because that makes the folks doing the promoting feel comfortable that you won't screw up and cause an actual loss.

So, as a technical individual contributor, you'll get a nice office, but because you're not telling people what to do or exposing the company to risk, you'll never get the salary, and you'll cap out promotion wise at some grand title like "principal" or "fellow" or "chief engineer" (but not chief in the sense of C-level executives like CIO, COO, etc).. If you're happy with that, then great. You pretty much get to work on what you want to work on, you'll have a comfortable life, etc. You probably also wont have an incentive bonus plan tied to your work, company performance, etc. And that's where the real money is.

The other thing is that mobility in the "manager" side of the ladder is much greater than in the "technical" side. Odds are that if you're at the top of the tech ladder, you've got a lot of specialized knowledge that nobody else at your company has, but that is generally useful only to your company. That is, if you're a fellow at XYZ corp, it's unlikely you could make a lateral move to fellow at ABC corp. But if you are a manager, particularly a skilled engineering manager, you could easily move from XYZ to ABC, because while management skills aren't perfectly generic in the MBA nirvana sense, there are a lot of commonaliities across all businesses. We all use T-accounts, have similar HR issues, etc.

That means that there is a continuous flow in and out of the company from the management side, which opens up the possibility of "promoting from within". On the technical side, there are typically some quotas or a billet system that limits the number of people at a given level (particularly at the top). So until some other fellow dies or retires(If ever), no matter how talented you are, you're not going to move up. Most tech companies do NOT recruit top of the stack technical talent away: by the time you're there, you're probably pretty happy working there, so you're not looking to move, so it's hard to tempt you. There's also often an informal agreement among companies to not poach at that level (viz the class action suit in Silicon Valley). But executives find it easier to move between companies. And incentive compensation can make it very attractive to jump.

Re:Wall Street FTW

[Svartalf]

Finance "Engineering"? Seriously? I can see why you posted that Anon Coward. I wouldn't want that associated with myself- ever...

False. I have an entire reporting chain full.

[Anonymous Coward]

My entire reporting chain is full of managers who are engineers, and for the most part (there are minor exceptions here and there) they are exceptionally good managers.

Maybe we're unique (in which case one more reason to love my job), but they *do* exist, and generally, tend to be the better managers I've ever had.

(FYI, if you wonder what this wonderful place is, I work in SRE at Google. My SVP? Urs Hoelzle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle)

no good managers to see, says an engineer

[umghhh]

That is typical view of any human, only my job matters and managing and coordinating things or even doing technical work outside of mine area is of lesser importance and thus also done by people of lesser skill and capability. That is engineers' version of the speck in your brother's eye.

The good and bad managers

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some situations I've run across.

The good:

1. The manager had a PHD. He could communicate exceptionally well. He understood the technical aspects of the project. He dealt with each team member fairly. If there were issues, he would have a talk and iron it out. If you could not perform, you would be let go.

The bad:

1. Manager could not figure out technical issues. Once issue figured out then you were prepped for departure.

2. Manager would cycle through consultants. Some slots were reserved for others if company got in trouble. Once goal is achieved then move into next wash cycle.

3. Manager needed a sacrificial lamb for project gone awry with other senior engineer.

4. Manager could not let any of his team members write a line of code without massive personal review. No trust in team.

Your lucky if its working out. But in most cases, the engineer gets the shaft.

I hate being told I don't exist.

[ScrappyTheObscure]

I work on the east coast and I am (I admit) a manager, though I write code about half the time. I completely understand the class of people this guy is talking about. The power hungry incompetent douches exist. No doubt. But there ARE those of us who are not project managers, but dev staff managers whose job is
a. figuring out who should be on which project so that people learn from each other and good work gets done
b. making sure that when a programmer comes up with a really good process or tool it gets propagated to the rest of the teams.
c. making sure that people who need mentoring because they're on a problem outside their expertise get it even when they're too stubborn to ask for it
d. making sure that when programmers have expressed an estimate of the complexity of a problem, the over-eager PM who is probably NOT a software person doesn't over-reach and try to push some bullshit schedule.
e. defending my team against idiotic business requirements and pseudo-experts.
f. fighting for budget, headcount and training
g. really working at finding ways of making our distributed team collaborate more effectively.

Maybe in the rarified air of San Francisco there are so many fantastic programmers capable of concentrating on both the big picture and the small that all of these things get done magically and in a self organizing way by the 1st among equals in the dev staff. Maybe. But I believe in the service I give my team. I took a hit to stop writing code so much because it needed to be done at the time, we didn't want an outsider who was apt to be douchey and I'm good with the people involved. The extra money doesn't mean that much and god knows I hate the sense that every programmer who doesn't know me assumes I'm an idiot until they've worked with me. I wouldn't do what I'm doing if I didn't believe it actually made my team a better place.

So thanks, a LOT for making it harder for real dev managers to exist, by declaring we don't.
We all appreciate your eye rolling world weary lack of belief.

Mutually exclusive

[NewYork]

Writing software and selling software require mutually exclusive skills

Re: I looked up where this dude works

[juancn]

I should not feed the trolls, but anyway, I'll bite.

I disagree on both counts, Medallia has been profitable for quite some time and it's growing really fast, so hardly a waste of VC capital.

On the engineering side, we do build new things, some are really challenging. For example we have a very cool real-time OLAP engine (we can render reports with a median time of 183ms, on datasets with a hundred million records and thousands of columns), our text analytics team does build it's own models (we have researchers on payroll), our sentiment analysis models for some industries are better than anything else out there, the testing infrastructure is wonderful, and there are things I cannot discuss :)

Working here I've met some of the brightest people in the world (I stand by that). In all, it's a great place to work as an engineer.

Re: I looked up where this dude works

[jcr]

Medallia has been profitable for quite some time and it's growing really fast, so hardly a waste of VC capital.

A company is profitable when it's earned more than was spent to get it off the ground. Have you reached that point?

our sentiment analysis models for some industries are better than anything else out there

"Sentiment analysis"? Ok, I'll take your word for it that you're making slicker snake oil than the next guy, but you're still not convincing me that you're doing anything that would attract first-rate engineering management.

Working here I've met some of the brightest people in the world (I stand by that)

Sounds like you need to get out more.

-jcr

Re: I looked up where this dude works

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, you seem grumpy today. Somebody shit in your coffee? He stated his opinion based on working there. You don't need to question his personal life -- though I agree that a lot of large firms have engineers that are uninterested in toy software problems (and yes, BI is toy software still, even though Crystal et al are integral to many operations.)

Re: I looked up where this dude works

[jcr]

Boy, you seem grumpy today.

No, actually I'm somewhat amused.

-jcr

Train the from the start...

[servant]

I went through 'normal' Engineering school. The best geeks were the cream. Few had significant social skills.

My son went to another kind of Engineering School, Olin College of Engineering in Needham MA near Boston. They work hard to recruit people (students) that personality, ambition, people skills, as well as great geeks in their own right. Some other schools like Harvey Mudd and others are taking a similar tact.

This gives me hope the next generation of Engineers will have at least SOME individuals to be managers available that are both good engineers, people, people, and have management skills.

The Peter Principle is at work in industry everywhere. (The basic competence is 'people rise to their level of incompetence').

Re:False. I have an entire reporting chain full.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you work for a douche. Enjoying the pager?

Oddly enough

[tchall]

Some folks decide that management suits them better than engineering and move in that direction without actually giving up their interest in the nuts and bolts of the business.

Good managers are pretty rare in my experience, if you define "Good" as knowing the basics of the technical jobs of people they supposedly tell what to do...

Harder to find yet are managers that delegate appropriately to the lowest practical level, supervise unobtrusively, and see their primary task as making sure that talent is recognized, materials are obtained on time, and hard work rewarded

Funny thing... but THOSE managers just seem to get jobs done on time, have fewer errors, and keep corporate knowledge levels up by retaining the "good ones"

Good Engineers don't usually convert to good managers, but that doesn't mean that there aren't "Good Engineering Managers" that break the "Pointy Haired Boss" stereotype.

What if you are forced into it?

[kaybee]

I'm not sure what path I would have taken on my own, but I was an engineer who ran into some major hand problems and couldn't code all day any longer, forcing me into a management direction. I'd like to think I'm a decent one, and according to the article that might still be possible ;)

My take on this....

[erp_consultant]

I've been in IT for a long time. If i wanted to be a "boss" I could have been one a long time ago. I have tried my hand at technical management more than once because I was asked to do it...not because I had a deep desire to manage others. My takeaway from it was basically that if you're going to be in management you don't want to be on the bottom rung of management.

A lot of it is, as the article says, "taking out the trash". Meetings, reports, deadlines. You have to directly supervise people that you used to work with. For me, it was difficult to give out orders. I'd rather just do the code myself than tell someone else to do it. In short, it wasn't a lot of fun. To me, coding is fun.

The other aspect, which turned out to be interesting, was that it gave me an insight into how other managers are chosen. Many of them seemed to have common traits. Far more extroverts than introverts. Long on self confidence, short on any real skills. A lot of them seemed to be the ones that are good at playing the corporate games. It seemed to me that the only interesting things happening in management were happening at the very top. The strategy, planning and business direction were being decided by a very few people at the very top of the organization. The rest of them were mired in some sort of middle management purgatory.

What I discovered is that the real power lies in having a job where you have freedom to do the things you want to do. Many engineering jobs offer just this, particularly in consulting. Sure, you still have to answer to deadlines and such but you get to focus on things that you enjoy without having to attend a lot of meetings or having to kiss the bosses ass. I might not be making as much money as some of the top brass but I'm having fun doing what I'm doing and I'm making a very good living at the same time. To me, it's a life well lived.

I think you're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is saying that all those who teach can't or don't do things. For every Ron Rivest, or Vaugh Pratt there are dozens of teachers in their field who have nowhere near the same level of accomplishments. The point of the saying is that a great deal of the people who end up in teaching (or managing to bring this back to the discussion at hand) end up there because they couldn't accomplish anything else of significance. Note that you didn't refer to Rajeev Motwani as teacher who also happened to co-found Google.