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One thing you may be overlooking is the importance of employees respecting management. We nerds tend toward inherent distrust of nontechnical management, and it
by daxorid 10y ago
One thing you may be overlooking is the importance of employees respecting management. We nerds tend toward inherent distrust of nontechnical management, and it is likely that promoting technical people into management helps overall team cohesion by enabling far better manager-managee respect and rapport.
- CaptSpify 10y agoI agree that non-technical management is a huge problem. I'm one of the first to complain about that. If a tech person wants to be a manager, and they can get the right training, then great! But too often I think non-tech people are pushed into management because that's the only way to advance their career, get a raise, etc. They don't really want it. Pushing people who don't really want a job into management doesn't really solve the "tech vs non-tech" issue IME.
- analogwzrd 10y agoMy company is going through a phase where someone thought "We're doing pretty well by promoting engineers into management/business positions. How well could we do if we put some people with "real" business backgrounds (MBAs) in charge?" It's a disaster. It seems that finding a technical person and having them learn the business skills is more common and easier than taking a business person and hoping they can learn enough technical skills to be able to understand the piece of the business they're in charge of. In my situation, it's a manufacturing engineer with an MBA who was asked to manage a design engineering department. What happened was that he forced the implementation of procedures and checklists on immature processes. So the procedures were immediately out of date and because the processes were immature, there's no solid theory of operation - just lists of steps that engineers and techs execute blindly.