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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

756 points by reactor 10y ago

bognition 10y ago
>The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Honestly some of my worst work experiences were getting jerked around by a superior who completely failed to understand the work required to do my job.
- yomly 10y ago
  I suspect it is a comparatively new phenomenon in the workplace which is in part attributable to the recent surge (5-10 years) in knowledge work. When I worked in bigco as an analyst, the director and even managers were from a different era. The better ones knew excel to some extent but had no idea how to do sql or even excel automation which was a large part of what the analysts were required to do. Part of this is a rapid almost stepwise change in the work that is done, part of it is due to tech companies recruiting from a diverse set of industries. In other industries like law, finance and accounting, most people start at the bottom and slowly work upwards so the skillset is more of a continuum up the hierarchy so it is feasible that your bosses can still do your job. It used to be the same in other industries but that is fast changing. For instance, the top level accountants will have been studying at a time where bookkeeping was literally done in paper books...
  - TheCowboy 10y ago
    Another phenomenon is the development of management as a science. People can end up in positions of oversight where they have a deficient understanding of the tasks people below them are performing. Study of management and processes is not without merit, and the rants against MBAs can be one dimensional by not recognizing the benefits. But if that was all that it took, then the economy wouldn't "waste" medical doctors or highly skilled engineers in administrative functions.
    - yomly 10y ago
      I think that is true, although people have been doing MBAs for a much longer time than the tech boom has been around for: e.g. doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. Though MBAs have certainly been growing in popularity over the past few years.
      - TheCowboy 10y ago
        I think that longevity is why people can feel so bitter about it. It has become strongly embedded in a lot of corporate cultures where management can find itself in a homogeneous bubble. This can serve to limit mobility of non-management level workers who could excel if provided the opportunity to take on managerial functions, which means that is lost economic potential. It's not constant across the board, as there are plenty of IT companies that seem to be doing a decent job at promoting engineers. But then I read a lot of people here talking about "up or out" views of engineers who are above a certain age. It's complicated.
      - msandford 10y ago
        > doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. That makes sense to me actually, since you need to have a high level understanding of how businesses work and what stuff the C-suite needs to be doing in order to understand how to value a business. The C-suite might be the one place where the "generic management skills" might actually be really useful. But middle management and day to day supervisory functions? You can't manage what you don't know, and if you don't understand the processes of the people you're managing you're blind.
        sbov 10y ago
        It seems like MBA schools recognize this to some extent - my brother got an MBA with a focus on software project management. They even had to learn to do some coding and worked on a couple software projects as a team in order to apply what they were learning.
        battlebot 10y ago
  - mox1 10y ago
    I would be willing to be those people still knew how to do the job, just without Excel. They fundamentally understand the reason for "analyzing" things and the output generated by that. It's when you put a recent MBA grad with 0 domain knowledge as the manager of these people where problems start. And again, with the accountants. The crusty 60 year old accountant will still be able to read a report generated by a fresh college grad. He could even open the books and spot problems. Issues arise when you put someone who isn't an Accountant in charge of the other accountants.
    - yomly 10y ago
      But when your boss has never even made a model, let alone tried to fish data out of a database, then the kind of work he can imagine, his idea for time duration for work are all off. More importantly, what he values in the team (for when it comes to promotions) is also likely to be off. And hence, you can end up in a situation where you don't get promoted despite being very good at your job.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Well, the traditional view of "management" is that it's a distinct job from "doing". Therefore, so the thinking goes, there is a distinct difference in skillsets, and thus the manager should be good at the managing bit, and the doer should be good at the doing bit. The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. Interestingly, this relates to a topic that came up yesterday about product managers (who are not "managers" in a traditional sense). Every time I see complaints about PMs, the root cause often starts with the PM not understanding how software is built and how developers work. Thus they disregard practical technical realities. Those folks describe as a "good" PM are often those with a technical background... who could, as it happens, do your job if needed.
  - hueving 10y ago
    >The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. There is an important distinction. An effective manager should understand the general process and what can be time sinks, but they don't have to understand extremely specific details of what each worker is working on at any given time. For example, a manager of a software team doesn't need to understand the idioms of the programming language used by the team or even be that effective of a programmer. Some of my best managers have been ex-software devs that understood architecture, requirements distillation, etc really well but wrote the ugliest code you would ever see. :)
    - coredog64 10y ago
      My best manager was an ex-Air Force fighter pilot who had a general idea of what we were doing. He understood his role wasn't to do what we were doing but instead to enable it. Some of the worst bosses I had were technical people who had been promoted to upper management and couldn't let go of the tech stuff. My attitude towards them was that if they wanted to code then they could take a demotion (and give up those huge equity grants) and get down in the trenches. Otherwise they could STFU.
  - 10y ago
- martincmartin 10y ago
  Because what your boss does, day-to-day, is very different than what you do. So it seems natural that they'd need different skills. I'm a software engineer, and hiring managers has been a problem at every company I've worked at. You want someone who has written software earlier in their career, and has a degree in software engineering or similar. In other words, people who have chosen to spend a lot of time with computers -- devices that are very logical and literal. But you also want someone who has good people skills. In other words, someone who chooses to spend a lot of time organizing other people, maybe was on the yearbook club in high school, that sort of thing. And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date. So you want someone at a very specific point in their career, i.e. a few years after giving up coding.
  - christophilus 10y ago
    In my experience, this part isn't true: "And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date." One of my best bosses was largely a C programmer (from back in the 80s). He'd still tinker with things from time to time, but I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. A software engineer who could have written a book like SCIP or Programming Pearls back in the day but were in management now, would probably make excellent managers.
    - dahauns 10y ago
      > I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. Not sure I agree with that. A lot of todays best practices and workflows (and the tech to go with it), especially considering team and release management, simply weren't around or at least widespread even twenty years ago. You know, stuff like CI, TDD, DVCS etc. etc.
      - throwaway729 10y ago
        > CI, TDD, DVCS Are any of these concepts particularly difficult to understand for a seasoned developer? I have a really hard time imagining that a C and SVN expert couldn't learn how to use git "well enough" in an afternoon, and effectively within a few days, for example. In particular, the freaking author of git is an 80's C programmer and SVN expert...
- smrtinsert 10y ago
  It must have been somewhat surprises for you to have gone through it several times. I'm not quite convinced. My best bosses have been extremely hands off and my worst one was a techie through and through.
- gdulli 10y ago
  I've had bosses who couldn't do my job but trusted me and didn't get in my way and gave me the exact environment I needed to work in. Those were the best work experiences I ever had. It's the bosses who can do my job I have to worry about, they feel like they need to get involved with it and that hurts my job satisfaction. I need a boss with complementary skills to mine, not the skills I already have. People have all different values and making absolute statements about them is folly.
  - vthallam 10y ago
    That would be great, as long as the employee is motivated and smart enough to do great work, else it would be difficult for the manager to gauge employee's quality of contribution.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      Which I think can be compensated for if the manager focuses on just that, more humane issues. Of course, this can be done badly...
    - gdulli 10y ago
      Right, employees have different values and different capabilities and should be managed differently. Saying "Employees are happier when [x]" always breaks down because employees aren't homogeneous.
- brbrodude 10y ago
  Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet it doesn't mean it's now been "discovered", don't fall for this trap. Everyone's who's experienced a virtuous workplace also "discovered" this as it's a self-evident truth(when it happens). How many times will we "discover" human nature again? Depending on psychologists, economists, administrators and business gurus, infinite times(corollary: we will keep on 'discovering' the same things because we never actually learn). Edit: To try and make it clearer: we are all human yet we systematically neglect our nature/ignore it in others and treat it as if it's a million pieces puzzle we can't figure out. Seems we're just looking at stuff ever more fractioned, we take 1/2, make it 1/10 and act like we made a +8 advancement in knowledge, but we haven't. Holism and shit. To me it's an example of the stupidity of modern thinking.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Indeed. So much of it comes down to behaving in a natural manner. It gets jumbled up because we've constructed artificial institutions on top of human society that don't comport with our natural behaviors. Everyone understands these things fundamentally, but they pretend like they don't because we've set up a farcical structure and told them to play along or lose their well-being. It's obvious that everyone wants a leader who has been in substantially similar shoes and done an acceptable job. That's the only way to have the credibility to boss someone around. That HBR pretends this instinctive truth is a revelation is typical of the haughtiness that makes people hate the bourgeoisie. Humans are evolved to stay in fixed family units that expand only by marriage and child birth and contract only by death. The permanence afforded there allows humans to cooperate while also behaving naturally. The survival benefits of remaining in the tribe easily surpass emotional/personal benefits that could be had by fracturing off. There is no credible fear that expressing your feelings or otherwise behaving naturally will get you fired from your tribe. It turns out people are quite fickle, and that if circumstances don't compel them to work together, lots of things get broken quickly. The modern corporation is a poor stand-in for the tribe.
  - kirse 10y ago
    Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet Well, as you know, things aren't true or factual until Science™ has confirmed it as such with a statistically significant quadruple-blind placebo trial. After all, many anecdotes from employees that they are happier with a competent and capable leader most certainly do NOT equal data. There could possibly be some outside factor, like a competent and capable leader ensures the water-cooler filter is actually being changed on a monthly basis, which is really the reason for all that employee happiness. I've always wondered if I can start a mgmt consulting company that exclusively focuses on doing Science™ that researches facts that are already known to be true to just about everyone outside the skeptical academic bubble. Just sit back and let the grant money roll in while I spend it producing papers and managerial books on things like "Can more advisers help your plans succeed?" or just about any other applied statement from the Biblical book of Proverbs.
- taeric 10y ago
  This is also one of those "discoveries" that raises the suspicion hairs on the back of my neck. Survivor bias will play large into this. In particular, people often assume teams that failed had failed members. That goes up to the leadership. So, it is likely that people were happy on successful teams. This will be a post-hoc explanation for why they were successful. Which will also be a post-hoc for why the members are happy. I want to give this research the benefit of the doubt. So, please take my post as an overly pessimistic view of the landscape. Hopefully this will help persuade me otherwise.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  And, as I can attest first hand along with more than a couple other employees, a highly incompetent boss can result in talent fleeing and the collapse of an entire functioning team responsible for millions in project bids annually.
taneq 10y ago
I thought that was one of the nice touches in Better Off Ted. It turns out that Ted probably could fill in for any one of the team if he needed to, and the reason he didn't interfere more technically was just that (as a good manager) he was avoiding micromanaging.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  Except the scientists, I don't think he could replicate their job. Otherwise, I can see it. Such a great show. I rewatch it about once a year. Really wish it had at least one more season, though.
  - taneq 10y ago
    True, their actual expertise is left kind of hand-wavey. On the one hand they can genetically engineer exploding pumpkins, on the other hand they can't fix their lab door alarm keypad. Maybe they're more biochem-based, but I digress... I don't think we ever learn enough about their skills to know what they can and can't do.
collinmanderson 10y ago
I was just thinking about this today. I'm usually happier when I'm doing things that I know my boss nearly-fully understands and when I know that they're able to work on it themselves if needed.
maxxxxx 10y ago
This not exactly surprising but yes, it's nice to be able to talk to your boss about the subtleties of my work. This is what makes work interesting. I hate when it's clear that all he is interested in are deadlines and budgets.
- b3lvedere 10y ago
  The only thing my manager is interested in, is if i solve their customers problems correctly. Most of them have little to no knowledge of computer systems. This usually applies to both the customer and the manager. There are virtually no any other meaningful rewards than the paycheck. It pays the bills, which is about the only reason i have this job anyway.
deleted 10y ago
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baursak 10y ago
I've had a boss who was very competent technically, but was completely incompetent as a people manager. Somehow he rose to a VP level, but still wanted to micromanage everything down to individual code reviews. It was comical at times. Eventually he was fired.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Successful managers need both people and technical skills. That is why it isn't an easy job.
  - wageslave2 10y ago
    Actually technical skills and then people skills and in that order.
    - dagw 10y ago
      Absolutely disagree. They need enough technical skills to understand gist of what is going on, but beyond that they should be deferring to the people on the team with the most relevant experience/expertise in technical questions. The most important skill my boss can have is the ability to sweet talk his boss.
    - tabeth 10y ago
      I disagree. A manager is not an individual contributor. It's important for them to have technical skills, but I don't think it's necessary they be on par with an average developer, let alone better than the best. * The developers they're managing.
- gt2 10y ago
  I had a similar experience but not sure the guy was ever fired. I ignored the soft skill deficit he had and enjoyed the fact that a manager cared about the code.
- rc_bhg 10y ago
  He just needed to learn to let go a little trust the people who work for him.
CarpetBench 10y ago
The most surprising part about this to me is that this matters at the top. Sure, for a middle manager it makes sense that it matters quite a bit. I'm pretty surprised that it matters much at the top, though. If Elon Musk decided to head a major grocery chain I wouldn't stop to consider whether his lack of experience in retail groceries mattered much. But maybe it does? Really interesting to see the analogy extend to sports, too. Professional sports teams, even successful ones, are almost universally run (coaches, GMs, etc.) by people who didn't play at a high level. Without actually pulling the numbers up, I'd estimate with high probability that the number of "all-stars" either managing or running teams is countable on one hand. I mean, hell, this year's superbowl is being lead by two coaches who played D3 football, and one GM who played football for a Canadian university. One of said coaches is pretty universally considered one of the greatest coaches of all time. For the most part these coaches/GMs absolutely could not do the job of the players on the field, nor could they ever.
- midgetjones 10y ago
  Did Elon Musk have a lot of experience in self-driving cars or space rockets before Tesla?
  - CarpetBench 10y ago
    Also an excellent point!
  - quantumhobbit 10y ago
    Maybe not experience, but he certainly had passion and interest in space. I don't think you could have consider him uninformed on the subjects.
  - mifeng 10y ago
    But if you listen to his interviews, it's clear the guy has a nuanced, clear understanding of the technology and business model behind both Tesla and SpaceX. He may not be able to do every job, but he can do the job of his direct reports. In contrast, there's the "professional manager" archetype, who Musk is definitely not.
midgetjones 10y ago
By the same token, you're probably more likely to be happy at work if your boss knows nothing of your job, rather than a little.
PaulHoule 10y ago
I remember being taught how to mop a floor by the store manager at a supermarket. It's a very small thing but it added to my positive feeling about the company.
mifeng 10y ago
This is why, all other things being equal, it's better for an engineer to work for an engineering driven company (Facebook) rather than a sales driven one (Oracle). The opposite is probably true for a salesperson.
matt_morgan 10y ago
This is really interesting. I don't know if it reaches the level of detail necessary to understand how it influences lots of tech work. E.g., "employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business." Well, I have deep experience in IT and building websites, but I'm not a great programmer and I have had devs reporting to me who were concerned about that (so I've worked on supporting them in other ways).
HerraBRE 10y ago
This is very interesting, and rings true on many levels. For one, it takes a certain level of competence to be able to differentiate between good and bad work. If your boss can't tell the difference between the two, workers will be rewarded/punished/promoted/fired based on some other metrics, which are likely to be unfair or even arbitrary. Another, is that bosses and managers are responsible for providing guidance. If you have two ways to do something and aren't sure which is best, it's natural to go to your manager for advice. If you get the feeling that the advice you get is worthless (or even harmful), then you'll feel lost and unsupported. And finally, in many organizations, the boss sets priorities. If he doesn't understand the work, he is likely to have unrealistic or actively harmful expectations. And you'll feel like you're wasting your time. All of these things are terrible for morale.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  There is nothing more demotivating than realizing that the person in charge of making technical decisions has no idea what he is talking about. You have no authority to make good decisions or hope of explaining things to willfully ignorant management. All you can do is quietly implement their stupidity and hope to avoid the fallout.
  - mmatants 10y ago
    I think one of the biggest saps of motivation in that situation is that even successes are meaningless. Because one instinctively doubts the whole thing then (even a broken clock is right twice a day, but it still doesn't make one feel great).
  - dagw 10y ago
    There is nothing more demotivating than realizing that the person in charge of making technical decisions has no idea what he is talking about. Maybe it's simply a question of different semantics, but I've never worked at a place where my boss was in charge of making technical decisions. That is always done by whatever senior engineer is in charge of that particular project.
throwawayboss 10y ago
So does this mean 'professional managers' are the root of most unhappiness at work? Certainly that's been my experience. A company that doesn't hire MBAs is one I want to work for.
- wageslave2 10y ago
  Me too
- wageslave2 10y ago
  May be all,the company needs to publish the number of MBA they have it will be easy to decide.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >A company that doesn't hire MBAs is one I want to work for. Can you point to all the successful companies that make a conscious effort to not hire MBAs? Tough slog. Maybe these companies know something you don't? But any company that eliminates candidates based simply off their degree is no company I want to work for.
andy_ppp 10y ago
I think it's probably a bit like Uncanny Valley this one; it goes from no understanding at all, slowly to increasing understanding but just before you get to "boss can do my job" you have "boss knows enough to be dangerous and counter productive"...
mrfusion 10y ago
I actually think you get more respect if your boss (or his nephew) can't do your job. At my last offfice job the programmers doing graphics/OpenGL stuff got way more respect than the web developers.
- throwawayboss 10y ago
  You would think so, but that's mostly not the case in practice. A lot of people that don't know what you do will assume it's simple enough. It's just not worth their time. That's why they never learned to do it. For instance, I used to think sales and marketing were easy until I had to do it.
  - mrfusion 10y ago
    Yeah it probably depends on what the job is. If it's generally seen as skilled and prestigious then you'll get respect but if it's skilled but seems easy then you won't.
- uiri 10y ago
  If your boss can do your job, then he understands its technical realities and the problems you may be facing. If your boss thinks his/her adolescent nephew can do your job, then he probably doesn't understand it and views it as a low skill position.
chrisabrams 10y ago
Is it really about whether your boss can do your job or not, or whether your boss thinks your job is difficult or not?
briantakita 10y ago
This may be true for an developer/administrator/maintainer in a "Scientific Management" (Taylorism) design process. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Scientific_management https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Scientific_management This is not true for a creative/synthesis/multi-functional/unconstrained design process. I've been basing my career on acquiring skills/knowhow on being unique in my ability to synthesize different crafts together with a defined worldview (similar to a Meta Model in NLP). Having a boss be able to do my job has often led to bike-shedding & lack of space to explore novel ideas. Since I have taken on clients that aren't able to build what I build, I have had room to perfect my craft & my process wilst learning how to communicate with others who do not share my knowledge. It's been more satisfactory to find people that share my worldview but don't necessarily share my skillset. It's kindof like a tribe of ideology or spirit.
owly 10y ago
This is core to human leadership and has been detailed as far back as ancient Greece.
yalogin 10y ago
I thought this has more or less been identified in the software world. That also probably was the reason to grow people organically for management than bringing from the outside, more so for lower management positions.
deleted 10y ago
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nateberkopec 10y ago
What's with HN editors changing the title on this one from the actual title of the article ("If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work") to " Employees are far happier when led by people with deep expertise"? The original title was far more descriptive.
- gipp 10y ago
  HN mods have a really strong propensity for editing titles they consider either misleading or clickbaity. I guess this is supposed to be the latter. IMO they can be... overeager about it.
- amirmc 10y ago
  I agree with your comment. The new title seems to be taken from the article itself though (as opposed to just made up by someone). "Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business."
abawany 10y ago
I skimmed the comments and didn't see the following perspective so thought I would add it: one thing that makes it great for me to work with people with deep expertise is the ability to learn amazing things. I am willing to put up with a lot of 'management personality/quirks' if it comes with learning that is invaluable. I believe people who work with 'interesting' (sometimes abusive) chefs such as Gordon Ramsay may also share this motivation. However, this is just my opinion and I can't say that there is a general trend for this sort of thinking.
- dagw 10y ago
  I agree with you that I want to work with/for those sorts of people. I disagree that I want them as my boss.
  - abawany 10y ago
    I based my comment on my personal experiences and also from reading Ramsay's biography. I have also read some anecdotes from people who worked with Jobs. Ramsay's temper and abusiveness are legendary but people who work for him tend to stay with him for a long while; probably no correlation to subsequent success, I admit. That was the crux of my comment: the trade-off of putting up with a lot of quirks vs. learning things that you cannot learn anywhere else. Some people find the learning experience overrides the quirks to a certain point of personal tolerance.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  Nothing more annoying than an incompetent co-worker or boss. I don't think you're alone in that regard. If someone is competent that means I can trust them to do the right thing. If they're incompetent it's a crapshoot and causes unnecessary stress. I guess that is not necessarily the same as deep expertise but it's hard to imagine someone with expertise who is also incompetent in that domain.
  - SticksAndBreaks 10y ago
    Lets not forget- every lousy software architect needs a demolition crew to clean up behind him. ;)
pacaro 10y ago
There's probably some CAP theorem of management
edblarney 10y ago
Missing from this study is the fact that we tend to project confidence, intelligence and wisdom on those that we like. A staffers perception of the competence of their boss may mostly be a function of how much they like their boss. Also - staffers may have no ability to judge the competence of a boss. Example: boss is highly technical, nice, gives you good feedback, stays 'out of your hair' - and 'let's you do your job'. Problem: you're all way behind schedule, and he's afraid to be unpopular by steering you and the team in the right direction. From a management perspective, he's failing, and causing the whole company to fail.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  >"staffers may have no ability to judge the competence of a boss" They often do. The biggest indicator is one you touched on... 'let's you do your job'. A good manager sets clear but fair expectations, and then works to shield you from roadblocks so you can get the job done as promptly as possible. In my experience it's easy to see this in action.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    I agree that a worker can often reasonably evaluate their boss. But unless you've been a director level person - with 'managers of people' working for you, it's easy to see how a 'well liked boss, who lets's their workers do their jobs' is often not the best manager. Team staffers may think their job is to do ABC, but really it's XYZ. A dev may think it's his job to write 'quality software'. But the business objective may call for 'a quick iteration for demonstrative purposes'. The staffer thinks he's 'doing his job', his boss lets him, but the business objectives are totally off.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      >"But the business objective may call for 'a quick iteration for demonstrative purposes'." Most developers I've worked with are smart enough to know quick hacks are fine in small doses, but if they become the norm you end up with a great deal of technical debt, which can ultimately cripple the productivity of a company. From the perspective of managers who aren't familiar with technical debt, the 'quick win' is always going to seem like the best option. It's up to the development team to strike a balance between 'the quick way' and 'the right way', and whilst some managers may get frustrated on the occasions when 'the right way' wins out, in the mid to long term they benefit too, though they may not understand why.
BeetleB 10y ago
Having worked with a boss who had never done our work, and one who had, I can assure everyone: There's a world of a difference!
lordnacho 10y ago
Is anybody surprised by this? A boss who can do your job can: - Fill in when the team is busy. Ever seen the manager at McDonald's flipping burgers or frying fries? Some goes for any other manager, sometimes, they have to step into the code or read legal docs, or operate the machines. - Provide a perspective that's likely to be relevant to you. He knows what it was like doing your job, and has a good guess as to where it's going. As opposed to simply imagining what you do. - Understand push-back. A boss who isn't an expert will require explanation that an experienced boss will not. "We can't add this feature because it breaks our database schema". "Uhm what's a database schema?". Only so many times you can hear that from someone who supposed to be deciding things before you lose faith. - Guess what the team wants. Better experience -> better guesses. Even if the boss hasn't done the work for a while. - Give feedback beyond "work completed/not". Because they can see where the hurdles are before you complete, and they have an understanding of how big the problems you've solved are on the way to completion. Looking at my experience, anytime I worked with someone who didn't have the technical understanding, the worst drops in morale happened when I felt something was obvious, but the person needed it explained. It would have been fine for a new staffer to ask, or a graduate, but not a decision maker. The main annoyance was the issue of where costs could be cut. Some people I've worked with seemed to think that just by asking enough questions, some piece would show up that could be cut from the solution with no harm. And so they'd keep asking around about whether this-or-that was "really" necessary. And perhaps when you're not an expert you can't come up with new pieces or processes, so your line of questioning is inevitably towards slimming whatever is already there.
benmarks 10y ago
From the comments: "I'd bet a lot of workers who are unhappy for other reasons end up judging their supervisor to have low technical competence, making causality hard to determine." Curious to see how competence is objectively measured in this case.
- fpig 10y ago
  In my opinion, if the people who work with someone consider them incompetent, they likely are. I would even go so far to say that the opinion of coworkers might be the best predictor of someone's competence, better than any "objective" measure. At least if the people you're asking are themselves competent in the skill they are judging (asking the dev team whether someone is good at sales might not be predictive).
pdimitar 10y ago
Right now I am 36. I had a team- and tech-lead position for the first time in my carreer back when I was 28. All other programmers loved me (except 2 slackers who hated being asked for statuses, even if it was twice a month). QA was much better than before, frontenders were happy to receive clear directions and tasks while having some freedom in choosing designs. The devs from other teams loved interacting with me, I almost always had something interesting to share on how I do things, people were learning from me. Things were swell. It was an extremely positive environment. But I got demoted 7 or so months later simply because the other managers hated me. I didn't talk about charts showing increased amount of tickets per sprint resolved, about increased productivity, about how to make people more efficient via some BS measures that never really work (except maybe in a Chinese factory or in a pyramid-scheme marketing organization?). I knew how to make my people efficient and I was doing it. On the managerial meetings I was bored to tears and eventually I just told everybody in the room (including the CEO) -- "People. Why are we here on this meeting? I only see this as an excuse for everybody to congratulate themselves on how awesome you are. Speaking of which (at this point I pointed at 2 other managers) the only thing you ever managed to do was impede me by imposing waiting in inter-team communication for weeks while your devs are telling me they are idle and have nothing to do -- and you're also criticising my managerial techniques no matter the fact that in this 150+ people organization my team is the only one not behind schedule". Or something like that. Needless to say, I got demoted -- and left the place -- shortly after. Thinking of it 8 years later, I'd absolutely do the same but I'd use even more brutal language. Management needs less BS. It doesn't deserve its current breed of slackers who licked bottoms most of their conscious lives to get to such a position and then they figured they'll unofficially retire at 40 while officially leeching salaries into their 60s (read: show up at the job but practially do nothing). As any human system, inertia and credentialism are a huge problem. This has to change.
- lhnz 10y ago
  Although I was never demoted (I left), I completely see where you're coming from. When I was a manager, I stripped away red-tape and created an environment which I felt gave engineers room for self-improvement - particularly if I could see that they were smart and ambitious and needed to be stretched. Since then I've been freelancing, however a few of my ex-colleagues from way back have told me that I was one of the best managers they'd had. The simple reason for this was that I'd concentrated on making sure they enjoyed their job. Perhaps they were just being nice, but I know I've had similar experiences. The managers that I've enjoyed working with have always been the type that would remove menial work (this doesn't include hoarding all of the opportunities for high-level decision making which is a massive red-flag) and help you find opportunities to learn or explore the kind of work you're passionate in. Non-technical managers often see somebody that's good at what they do as a resource that must be overseen and exploited for as much work output as possible. Bean-counting ensues and that person finds that they have next to no autonomy which causes them to resent their job and eventually leave.
mverwijs 10y ago
First it states that business knowledge is most important. Than it states that deep tech knowledge is most important. Which is it?
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  I think there's 2 different questions: Which one makes people happier? Which one makes people more successful? I was at a company where a CEO with deep experience in our field effectively stepped aside as they hired a CEO with deep experience in business. A lot of people didn't like it, even though the old CEO stayed around and was very involved. But looking back, the new CEO helped the company do very well. As I stated in a different comment, you need a balance. You need technical leadership and business leadership, and sometimes they need to be different people working together on the same team.
droopybuns 10y ago
When leaders don't have expertise, we burn time educating them on fundamentals just to orient them on a decision that needs to be made. A better title would be "businesses aren't truly agile until their leaders have deep expertise."
xexers 10y ago
I agree, but this is very tricky in the software development industry where things change so quickly. I went from senior to leading a team of 5 people. As soon as I started to lead, my technical skills started to atrophy. I've now switched companies and dropped back down to a Senior position because I need to build my skills back up. How do you navigate this?
- eternalban 10y ago
  If you know fundamentals things do not change that quickly. True paradigm shifts (such as FP) that require ground up revisit of internalized knowledge happen at a fairly stately pace.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
Hiring MBAs at tech companies as managers directly managing engineers has not proved to be effective. MBAs have traditionally worked in finance, oil and other Wall Street companies and everyone thought that bringing in MBAs to tech world (partially pushed by investors) would be a good idea. As with any new experiment, you just have to wait and let the time decide the results. And it has been few good years now since MBAs have flooded tech industry and as many like minded engineers have experienced, MBAs with no technical background are a bust as your decision making managers. Sure they can thrive at duties such as managing supply chain management of a large tech companies such as Apple or Amazon. Or dealing with international clients where your "prized" skills such as charisma, emotional intelligence and thinking on the feet matters.
ryandrake 10y ago
I guess I have to be a little bit contrarian. Of course we want our managers to have good technical fluency and to not have to have everything explained to them. It's necessary but insufficient. The skill set of a good manager is different from the skill set of a good individual contributor. I've worked with way too many engineering managers who were great engineers but needed a lot of coaching in order to manage well. At lots of tech companies, you get managers this way: Roger is "smarter than the average bear" and we want to reward smart people, and the only promotion we know is management, so congratulations: Roger is now a manager! Go manage people, Roger! Go understand the business implications of your team's work. Go communicate effectively with execs. Go write a project plan. It's not that Roger is stupid--far from it, its that he is now in a role that requires a totally different skill set.
sage76 10y ago
At a unicorn I was working at, MBAs were being hired to be engineering managers. I did not see a single engineer promoted to management, it was mostly all MBAs. The few I had direct contact were really useless at helping engineers out, all I ever heard from them was "Just get it done.". If I asked for help, they'd say "Well who else is gonna do it then?". I felt demoralised and lost some of my confidence. But the company was bleeding talent at the engineering level, plenty of engineers called out this crap and asked the CEO for answers. CEO would make excuses and not do much. Now the company is not doing well at all, even the senior leadership is leaving in droves, the CEO has even been replaced, the valuation has also declined quite a bit. I am not in silicon valley, so not sure about there but over here, it seems to be a trend to have MBAs in all management positions above engineering and even CTOs of startups who are MBAs. I had no interest in an MBA until I saw this trend. Now I am seriously considering that route, because it seems there is a serious glass ceiling. Doing an MBA might be necessary for me to move up the ranks.
- temp246810 10y ago
  Why don't you name the company? Unless there is personally identifying information about you somewhere in your comment history, your comment would be so much more helpful with useful examples, especially for people that are familiar with the actual company. Just my 2 cents.
  - sumitkumar 10y ago
    It's flipkart.
    - pavanky 10y ago
      Sounded very much like an Indian company. But I'd rather see OP mention the company name :)
  - sage76 10y ago
    Not sure if I should directly name. You can google my info and quickly find out which startup it is.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
I think that startups are particularly susceptible to this, everyone else is sharing stories of MBA's in charge of software dev, but it happens in other areas as well. I do work in performance marketing (very data driven, analytics, testing, etc.) and the new Chief Marketing Officer was someone from a big ad agency. He had worked with some really big names and bragged constantly about how he had had an ad play in the SuperBowl, etc. Which was all great, but none of those skills translated down to a budget 1000X less than what he was used to dealing with. He was unprepared to think about things like a website's "Devcenter" as having a purpose beyond a branding exercise. He wasn't a bad person or actually incompetent, but he didn't have the deep expertise in startup marketing that it would take to really see them succeed.
temp246810 10y ago
I'll throw in an alternative perspective: I don't care so much about expertise, but about just raw intelligence. Talk to a really smart person about your engineering problem, and even if they are not an engineer they will give you good advice. Ditto for sales, marketing, etc. I've always been happy when I can tell the person that is managing me is a few steps ahead of me, allows me to learn from them and actually makes my job easier. To me, it's only a bonus if they can do my job better.
- collyw 10y ago
  A really smart person would probably admit that they weren't the best person to deal with a problem outside of their own area of expertise.
Magi604 10y ago
“People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses" Looking back, this is the actual reason why I left my previous jobs.
Zork212 10y ago
especially when they are flying on a plane.
z3t4 10y ago
i think managers should be good at observing and linking cause to consequence. and use that experience to make good decisions. in the future we might be able to replace managers with AI.
saosebastiao 10y ago
Amazon still has pockets of very deep expertise with highly technical leaders that make for very productive and profitable teams. I've personally worked with some OR and Economics teams that consistently deliver exceptional results for the bottom line. And I know that many of Amazon's best businesses have come (originally) from organizations like these: AWS, Kindle, Echo, etc. But it very quickly is moving away from that idea and toward a world in which MBAs with half baked ideas that don't pass basic sanity checks are allowed to commit to impossible (P=NP!) ideas on behalf of their teams. And it destroys morale: nobody wants to work on a project that is known from the start to be impossible to deliver as specced. So they churn out. And when you talk to the goon that is in charge of it all, the problem always magically seems to be that they can't hire fast enough.
sshrinivasan 10y ago
Considering this is HN, I'll stick to the software/hardware field. While there is some truth to this, I disagree with the assertion that in order for a manager to be good, he "should be able to do your job". I fully agree that a manager for a technical team should have a technical background, and more specifically in the same broad field as the employee. Taking my own case, I am a scientific software developer, with lots of experience in Python, C etc. But as a manager of a team of software developers in different fields, I have no clue how to do web application development or devopsy type stuff, JavaScript, Kubernetes, Go and the like, which we use as well. However I hope I can still be a good manager because I understand the process of software development, I understand people and their needs (technical needs, motivational needs, professional development needs etc), and I can recognize good people when I see them, who can be leaders in their respective technical roles and mentors to others. Or maybe I suck at my job and I don't know it!
keeganjw 10y ago
So with Donald Trump as prez, I guess we're all gonna be very unhappy...
jaysprout 10y ago
Oh my gosh, that's all I've wanted for years: a boss who knew at least as much as I did. Trying to persuade -- to be an agent of positive change or even just get anything done -- is all but impossible when you have to explain everything to someone before you can even begin a dialogue.
tudorconstantin 10y ago
A manager should be just a facilitator. Our department manager at a previous company that I've worked for had economic background, while we were a Perl dev department. Basically, his job depended on our productivity, while our job depended on his ability to win projects. We had to trust each other that we were doing our jobs properly. While we made sure he could make the customers happy with our work, he screened us from interactions with pesky customers and got us all we needed so we can focus entirely on the projects. I worked with him for 5 years and we've been totally happy.
viswanathk 10y ago
If you're talking about Flipkart, then it's not really a tech company as much as it is a retail company these days. So it is expected to have more MBAs in important positions, or in places where they can prioritize like an MBA. No wonder Amazon is kicking their ass, and their last few product launches were nothing short of a disaster.
gdledsan 10y ago
A leader has to lead, it does not matter if the leader knows or does not know how to do the team's job. Those MBAs were not leaders, as simple as that. However, a company does not need a lot of MBAs to function, 1 or 2 should be enough, dedicated to improve the business in general. That unicorn was very sick.
stevefeinstein 10y ago
So people like it better when the people in charge know what they're talking about. But people keep putting the ones that tell them what they want to hear in charge. And the two sets don't usually overlap much.
stevefeinstein 10y ago
So people like it better when the people in charge know what they're talking about. But people keep putting the ones that tell them what they want to hear in charge. And the two sets don't usually overlap much.
nunez 10y ago
Well, yeah. It's not that they can do the work (they shouldn't), it's that they can better relate to the people they're leading. They know, for example, that asking engineers to complete an arbitrary development task in two weeks without regard to scope, value or other work is completely unreasonable. They've been there. Managers without that experience (or even knowledge of that experience) can never relate, so when their managers ask for a thing and ask that it be done in two weeks (because we're doing "Agile"), they'll more than likely pass the buck down. But as long as businesses are run by professional C-executives that don't even understand the business they're managing, this will be a problem.
nunez 10y ago
Well, yeah. It's not that they can do the work (they shouldn't), it's that they can better relate to the people they're leading. They know, for example, that asking engineers to complete an arbitrary development task in two weeks without regard to scope, value or other work is completely unreasonable. They've been there. Managers without that experience (or even knowledge of that experience) can never relate, so when their managers ask for a thing and ask that it be done in two weeks (because we're doing "Agile"), they'll more than likely pass the buck down. But as long as businesses are run by professional C-executives that don't even understand the business they're managing, this will be a problem.
icanhackit 10y ago
It works both ways. In my first job I had the most intelligent and insightful boss I've ever encountered but I was too young and cocky to notice and the same went for my coworkers. We insulted him behind his back, ignored his suggestions to improve our work, ignored the fact that he was a truly interesting person who had some incredible stories to tell (his background was consumer electronics and radio comm's systems) and it wasn't until I left the company, travelled, grew wiser and older that I realized we as a team made him a pretty unhappy person and he wound up leaving the company to take a more junior role to save his sanity. The only reason he couldn't get rid of us was he wasn't respected by the owner of the (quite small) company and thus no real power beyond supervision. Work went out the door on time so everything was dandy. Be careful judging others abilities through the lens of your own role in a company. Now that I've had two managerial roles I can see things from his perspective and often long to take a job where I'm simply judged on my own work rather than the sum of a collective.
jderoner 10y ago
It seems many take the negative perspective of this finding - anecdotes about moments where management "doesn't get it" and tying that back to their lack of technical expertise. What's missing from the discussion is the underlying foundation of the finding: in an average case, if your manager has technical expertise in your field, you're likely to learn a lot from them - that learning (and growth) is a major driver of job satisfaction. It creates closer relationships through shared understanding/experiences as well. I'd also argue that simply being able to do the job and not developing the team in technical expertise yields similar job satisfaction as not having deep technical expertise at all.
fowse 10y ago
this is a good article!

756 points by reactor 10y ago

>The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Honestly some of my worst work experiences were getting jerked around by a superior who completely failed to understand the work required to do my job.

yomly 10y ago
I suspect it is a comparatively new phenomenon in the workplace which is in part attributable to the recent surge (5-10 years) in knowledge work. When I worked in bigco as an analyst, the director and even managers were from a different era. The better ones knew excel to some extent but had no idea how to do sql or even excel automation which was a large part of what the analysts were required to do. Part of this is a rapid almost stepwise change in the work that is done, part of it is due to tech companies recruiting from a diverse set of industries. In other industries like law, finance and accounting, most people start at the bottom and slowly work upwards so the skillset is more of a continuum up the hierarchy so it is feasible that your bosses can still do your job. It used to be the same in other industries but that is fast changing. For instance, the top level accountants will have been studying at a time where bookkeeping was literally done in paper books...
- TheCowboy 10y ago
  Another phenomenon is the development of management as a science. People can end up in positions of oversight where they have a deficient understanding of the tasks people below them are performing. Study of management and processes is not without merit, and the rants against MBAs can be one dimensional by not recognizing the benefits. But if that was all that it took, then the economy wouldn't "waste" medical doctors or highly skilled engineers in administrative functions.
  - yomly 10y ago
    I think that is true, although people have been doing MBAs for a much longer time than the tech boom has been around for: e.g. doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. Though MBAs have certainly been growing in popularity over the past few years.
    - TheCowboy 10y ago
      I think that longevity is why people can feel so bitter about it. It has become strongly embedded in a lot of corporate cultures where management can find itself in a homogeneous bubble. This can serve to limit mobility of non-management level workers who could excel if provided the opportunity to take on managerial functions, which means that is lost economic potential. It's not constant across the board, as there are plenty of IT companies that seem to be doing a decent job at promoting engineers. But then I read a lot of people here talking about "up or out" views of engineers who are above a certain age. It's complicated.
    - msandford 10y ago
      > doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. That makes sense to me actually, since you need to have a high level understanding of how businesses work and what stuff the C-suite needs to be doing in order to understand how to value a business. The C-suite might be the one place where the "generic management skills" might actually be really useful. But middle management and day to day supervisory functions? You can't manage what you don't know, and if you don't understand the processes of the people you're managing you're blind.
      - sbov 10y ago
        It seems like MBA schools recognize this to some extent - my brother got an MBA with a focus on software project management. They even had to learn to do some coding and worked on a couple software projects as a team in order to apply what they were learning.
      - battlebot 10y ago
- mox1 10y ago
  I would be willing to be those people still knew how to do the job, just without Excel. They fundamentally understand the reason for "analyzing" things and the output generated by that. It's when you put a recent MBA grad with 0 domain knowledge as the manager of these people where problems start. And again, with the accountants. The crusty 60 year old accountant will still be able to read a report generated by a fresh college grad. He could even open the books and spot problems. Issues arise when you put someone who isn't an Accountant in charge of the other accountants.
  - yomly 10y ago
    But when your boss has never even made a model, let alone tried to fish data out of a database, then the kind of work he can imagine, his idea for time duration for work are all off. More importantly, what he values in the team (for when it comes to promotions) is also likely to be off. And hence, you can end up in a situation where you don't get promoted despite being very good at your job.
zzalpha 10y ago
This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Well, the traditional view of "management" is that it's a distinct job from "doing". Therefore, so the thinking goes, there is a distinct difference in skillsets, and thus the manager should be good at the managing bit, and the doer should be good at the doing bit. The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. Interestingly, this relates to a topic that came up yesterday about product managers (who are not "managers" in a traditional sense). Every time I see complaints about PMs, the root cause often starts with the PM not understanding how software is built and how developers work. Thus they disregard practical technical realities. Those folks describe as a "good" PM are often those with a technical background... who could, as it happens, do your job if needed.
- hueving 10y ago
  >The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. There is an important distinction. An effective manager should understand the general process and what can be time sinks, but they don't have to understand extremely specific details of what each worker is working on at any given time. For example, a manager of a software team doesn't need to understand the idioms of the programming language used by the team or even be that effective of a programmer. Some of my best managers have been ex-software devs that understood architecture, requirements distillation, etc really well but wrote the ugliest code you would ever see. :)
  - coredog64 10y ago
    My best manager was an ex-Air Force fighter pilot who had a general idea of what we were doing. He understood his role wasn't to do what we were doing but instead to enable it. Some of the worst bosses I had were technical people who had been promoted to upper management and couldn't let go of the tech stuff. My attitude towards them was that if they wanted to code then they could take a demotion (and give up those huge equity grants) and get down in the trenches. Otherwise they could STFU.
- 10y ago
martincmartin 10y ago
Because what your boss does, day-to-day, is very different than what you do. So it seems natural that they'd need different skills. I'm a software engineer, and hiring managers has been a problem at every company I've worked at. You want someone who has written software earlier in their career, and has a degree in software engineering or similar. In other words, people who have chosen to spend a lot of time with computers -- devices that are very logical and literal. But you also want someone who has good people skills. In other words, someone who chooses to spend a lot of time organizing other people, maybe was on the yearbook club in high school, that sort of thing. And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date. So you want someone at a very specific point in their career, i.e. a few years after giving up coding.
- christophilus 10y ago
  In my experience, this part isn't true: "And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date." One of my best bosses was largely a C programmer (from back in the 80s). He'd still tinker with things from time to time, but I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. A software engineer who could have written a book like SCIP or Programming Pearls back in the day but were in management now, would probably make excellent managers.
  - dahauns 10y ago
    > I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. Not sure I agree with that. A lot of todays best practices and workflows (and the tech to go with it), especially considering team and release management, simply weren't around or at least widespread even twenty years ago. You know, stuff like CI, TDD, DVCS etc. etc.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      > CI, TDD, DVCS Are any of these concepts particularly difficult to understand for a seasoned developer? I have a really hard time imagining that a C and SVN expert couldn't learn how to use git "well enough" in an afternoon, and effectively within a few days, for example. In particular, the freaking author of git is an 80's C programmer and SVN expert...
smrtinsert 10y ago
It must have been somewhat surprises for you to have gone through it several times. I'm not quite convinced. My best bosses have been extremely hands off and my worst one was a techie through and through.
gdulli 10y ago
I've had bosses who couldn't do my job but trusted me and didn't get in my way and gave me the exact environment I needed to work in. Those were the best work experiences I ever had. It's the bosses who can do my job I have to worry about, they feel like they need to get involved with it and that hurts my job satisfaction. I need a boss with complementary skills to mine, not the skills I already have. People have all different values and making absolute statements about them is folly.
- vthallam 10y ago
  That would be great, as long as the employee is motivated and smart enough to do great work, else it would be difficult for the manager to gauge employee's quality of contribution.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Which I think can be compensated for if the manager focuses on just that, more humane issues. Of course, this can be done badly...
  - gdulli 10y ago
    Right, employees have different values and different capabilities and should be managed differently. Saying "Employees are happier when [x]" always breaks down because employees aren't homogeneous.
brbrodude 10y ago
Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet it doesn't mean it's now been "discovered", don't fall for this trap. Everyone's who's experienced a virtuous workplace also "discovered" this as it's a self-evident truth(when it happens). How many times will we "discover" human nature again? Depending on psychologists, economists, administrators and business gurus, infinite times(corollary: we will keep on 'discovering' the same things because we never actually learn). Edit: To try and make it clearer: we are all human yet we systematically neglect our nature/ignore it in others and treat it as if it's a million pieces puzzle we can't figure out. Seems we're just looking at stuff ever more fractioned, we take 1/2, make it 1/10 and act like we made a +8 advancement in knowledge, but we haven't. Holism and shit. To me it's an example of the stupidity of modern thinking.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Indeed. So much of it comes down to behaving in a natural manner. It gets jumbled up because we've constructed artificial institutions on top of human society that don't comport with our natural behaviors. Everyone understands these things fundamentally, but they pretend like they don't because we've set up a farcical structure and told them to play along or lose their well-being. It's obvious that everyone wants a leader who has been in substantially similar shoes and done an acceptable job. That's the only way to have the credibility to boss someone around. That HBR pretends this instinctive truth is a revelation is typical of the haughtiness that makes people hate the bourgeoisie. Humans are evolved to stay in fixed family units that expand only by marriage and child birth and contract only by death. The permanence afforded there allows humans to cooperate while also behaving naturally. The survival benefits of remaining in the tribe easily surpass emotional/personal benefits that could be had by fracturing off. There is no credible fear that expressing your feelings or otherwise behaving naturally will get you fired from your tribe. It turns out people are quite fickle, and that if circumstances don't compel them to work together, lots of things get broken quickly. The modern corporation is a poor stand-in for the tribe.
- kirse 10y ago
  Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet Well, as you know, things aren't true or factual until Science™ has confirmed it as such with a statistically significant quadruple-blind placebo trial. After all, many anecdotes from employees that they are happier with a competent and capable leader most certainly do NOT equal data. There could possibly be some outside factor, like a competent and capable leader ensures the water-cooler filter is actually being changed on a monthly basis, which is really the reason for all that employee happiness. I've always wondered if I can start a mgmt consulting company that exclusively focuses on doing Science™ that researches facts that are already known to be true to just about everyone outside the skeptical academic bubble. Just sit back and let the grant money roll in while I spend it producing papers and managerial books on things like "Can more advisers help your plans succeed?" or just about any other applied statement from the Biblical book of Proverbs.
taeric 10y ago
This is also one of those "discoveries" that raises the suspicion hairs on the back of my neck. Survivor bias will play large into this. In particular, people often assume teams that failed had failed members. That goes up to the leadership. So, it is likely that people were happy on successful teams. This will be a post-hoc explanation for why they were successful. Which will also be a post-hoc for why the members are happy. I want to give this research the benefit of the doubt. So, please take my post as an overly pessimistic view of the landscape. Hopefully this will help persuade me otherwise.
6stringmerc 10y ago
And, as I can attest first hand along with more than a couple other employees, a highly incompetent boss can result in talent fleeing and the collapse of an entire functioning team responsible for millions in project bids annually.

taneq 10y ago

I thought that was one of the nice touches in Better Off Ted. It turns out that Ted probably could fill in for any one of the team if he needed to, and the reason he didn't interfere more technically was just that (as a good manager) he was avoiding micromanaging.

cableshaft 10y ago
Except the scientists, I don't think he could replicate their job. Otherwise, I can see it. Such a great show. I rewatch it about once a year. Really wish it had at least one more season, though.
- taneq 10y ago
  True, their actual expertise is left kind of hand-wavey. On the one hand they can genetically engineer exploding pumpkins, on the other hand they can't fix their lab door alarm keypad. Maybe they're more biochem-based, but I digress... I don't think we ever learn enough about their skills to know what they can and can't do.

collinmanderson 10y ago

I was just thinking about this today. I'm usually happier when I'm doing things that I know my boss nearly-fully understands and when I know that they're able to work on it themselves if needed.

maxxxxx 10y ago

This not exactly surprising but yes, it's nice to be able to talk to your boss about the subtleties of my work. This is what makes work interesting. I hate when it's clear that all he is interested in are deadlines and budgets.

b3lvedere 10y ago
The only thing my manager is interested in, is if i solve their customers problems correctly. Most of them have little to no knowledge of computer systems. This usually applies to both the customer and the manager. There are virtually no any other meaningful rewards than the paycheck. It pays the bills, which is about the only reason i have this job anyway.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

baursak 10y ago

I've had a boss who was very competent technically, but was completely incompetent as a people manager. Somehow he rose to a VP level, but still wanted to micromanage everything down to individual code reviews. It was comical at times. Eventually he was fired.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Successful managers need both people and technical skills. That is why it isn't an easy job.
- wageslave2 10y ago
  Actually technical skills and then people skills and in that order.
  - dagw 10y ago
    Absolutely disagree. They need enough technical skills to understand gist of what is going on, but beyond that they should be deferring to the people on the team with the most relevant experience/expertise in technical questions. The most important skill my boss can have is the ability to sweet talk his boss.
  - tabeth 10y ago
    I disagree. A manager is not an individual contributor. It's important for them to have technical skills, but I don't think it's necessary they be on par with an average developer, let alone better than the best. * The developers they're managing.
gt2 10y ago
I had a similar experience but not sure the guy was ever fired. I ignored the soft skill deficit he had and enjoyed the fact that a manager cared about the code.
rc_bhg 10y ago
He just needed to learn to let go a little trust the people who work for him.

CarpetBench 10y ago

The most surprising part about this to me is that this matters at the top. Sure, for a middle manager it makes sense that it matters quite a bit. I'm pretty surprised that it matters much at the top, though. If Elon Musk decided to head a major grocery chain I wouldn't stop to consider whether his lack of experience in retail groceries mattered much. But maybe it does? Really interesting to see the analogy extend to sports, too. Professional sports teams, even successful ones, are almost universally run (coaches, GMs, etc.) by people who didn't play at a high level. Without actually pulling the numbers up, I'd estimate with high probability that the number of "all-stars" either managing or running teams is countable on one hand. I mean, hell, this year's superbowl is being lead by two coaches who played D3 football, and one GM who played football for a Canadian university. One of said coaches is pretty universally considered one of the greatest coaches of all time. For the most part these coaches/GMs absolutely could not do the job of the players on the field, nor could they ever.

midgetjones 10y ago
Did Elon Musk have a lot of experience in self-driving cars or space rockets before Tesla?
- CarpetBench 10y ago
  Also an excellent point!
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Maybe not experience, but he certainly had passion and interest in space. I don't think you could have consider him uninformed on the subjects.
- mifeng 10y ago
  But if you listen to his interviews, it's clear the guy has a nuanced, clear understanding of the technology and business model behind both Tesla and SpaceX. He may not be able to do every job, but he can do the job of his direct reports. In contrast, there's the "professional manager" archetype, who Musk is definitely not.

midgetjones 10y ago

By the same token, you're probably more likely to be happy at work if your boss knows nothing of your job, rather than a little.

PaulHoule 10y ago

I remember being taught how to mop a floor by the store manager at a supermarket. It's a very small thing but it added to my positive feeling about the company.

mifeng 10y ago

This is why, all other things being equal, it's better for an engineer to work for an engineering driven company (Facebook) rather than a sales driven one (Oracle). The opposite is probably true for a salesperson.

matt_morgan 10y ago

This is really interesting. I don't know if it reaches the level of detail necessary to understand how it influences lots of tech work. E.g., "employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business." Well, I have deep experience in IT and building websites, but I'm not a great programmer and I have had devs reporting to me who were concerned about that (so I've worked on supporting them in other ways).

HerraBRE 10y ago

This is very interesting, and rings true on many levels. For one, it takes a certain level of competence to be able to differentiate between good and bad work. If your boss can't tell the difference between the two, workers will be rewarded/punished/promoted/fired based on some other metrics, which are likely to be unfair or even arbitrary. Another, is that bosses and managers are responsible for providing guidance. If you have two ways to do something and aren't sure which is best, it's natural to go to your manager for advice. If you get the feeling that the advice you get is worthless (or even harmful), then you'll feel lost and unsupported. And finally, in many organizations, the boss sets priorities. If he doesn't understand the work, he is likely to have unrealistic or actively harmful expectations. And you'll feel like you're wasting your time. All of these things are terrible for morale.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
There is nothing more demotivating than realizing that the person in charge of making technical decisions has no idea what he is talking about. You have no authority to make good decisions or hope of explaining things to willfully ignorant management. All you can do is quietly implement their stupidity and hope to avoid the fallout.
- mmatants 10y ago
  I think one of the biggest saps of motivation in that situation is that even successes are meaningless. Because one instinctively doubts the whole thing then (even a broken clock is right twice a day, but it still doesn't make one feel great).
- dagw 10y ago
  There is nothing more demotivating than realizing that the person in charge of making technical decisions has no idea what he is talking about. Maybe it's simply a question of different semantics, but I've never worked at a place where my boss was in charge of making technical decisions. That is always done by whatever senior engineer is in charge of that particular project.

throwawayboss 10y ago

So does this mean 'professional managers' are the root of most unhappiness at work? Certainly that's been my experience. A company that doesn't hire MBAs is one I want to work for.

wageslave2 10y ago
Me too
wageslave2 10y ago
May be all,the company needs to publish the number of MBA they have it will be easy to decide.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>A company that doesn't hire MBAs is one I want to work for. Can you point to all the successful companies that make a conscious effort to not hire MBAs? Tough slog. Maybe these companies know something you don't? But any company that eliminates candidates based simply off their degree is no company I want to work for.

andy_ppp 10y ago

I think it's probably a bit like Uncanny Valley this one; it goes from no understanding at all, slowly to increasing understanding but just before you get to "boss can do my job" you have "boss knows enough to be dangerous and counter productive"...

mrfusion 10y ago

I actually think you get more respect if your boss (or his nephew) can't do your job. At my last offfice job the programmers doing graphics/OpenGL stuff got way more respect than the web developers.

throwawayboss 10y ago
You would think so, but that's mostly not the case in practice. A lot of people that don't know what you do will assume it's simple enough. It's just not worth their time. That's why they never learned to do it. For instance, I used to think sales and marketing were easy until I had to do it.
- mrfusion 10y ago
  Yeah it probably depends on what the job is. If it's generally seen as skilled and prestigious then you'll get respect but if it's skilled but seems easy then you won't.
uiri 10y ago
If your boss can do your job, then he understands its technical realities and the problems you may be facing. If your boss thinks his/her adolescent nephew can do your job, then he probably doesn't understand it and views it as a low skill position.

chrisabrams 10y ago

Is it really about whether your boss can do your job or not, or whether your boss thinks your job is difficult or not?

briantakita 10y ago

This may be true for an developer/administrator/maintainer in a "Scientific Management" (Taylorism) design process. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Scientific_management https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Scientific_management This is not true for a creative/synthesis/multi-functional/unconstrained design process. I've been basing my career on acquiring skills/knowhow on being unique in my ability to synthesize different crafts together with a defined worldview (similar to a Meta Model in NLP). Having a boss be able to do my job has often led to bike-shedding & lack of space to explore novel ideas. Since I have taken on clients that aren't able to build what I build, I have had room to perfect my craft & my process wilst learning how to communicate with others who do not share my knowledge. It's been more satisfactory to find people that share my worldview but don't necessarily share my skillset. It's kindof like a tribe of ideology or spirit.

owly 10y ago

This is core to human leadership and has been detailed as far back as ancient Greece.

yalogin 10y ago

I thought this has more or less been identified in the software world. That also probably was the reason to grow people organically for management than bringing from the outside, more so for lower management positions.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nateberkopec 10y ago

What's with HN editors changing the title on this one from the actual title of the article ("If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work") to " Employees are far happier when led by people with deep expertise"? The original title was far more descriptive.

gipp 10y ago
HN mods have a really strong propensity for editing titles they consider either misleading or clickbaity. I guess this is supposed to be the latter. IMO they can be... overeager about it.
amirmc 10y ago
I agree with your comment. The new title seems to be taken from the article itself though (as opposed to just made up by someone). "Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business."

abawany 10y ago

I skimmed the comments and didn't see the following perspective so thought I would add it: one thing that makes it great for me to work with people with deep expertise is the ability to learn amazing things. I am willing to put up with a lot of 'management personality/quirks' if it comes with learning that is invaluable. I believe people who work with 'interesting' (sometimes abusive) chefs such as Gordon Ramsay may also share this motivation. However, this is just my opinion and I can't say that there is a general trend for this sort of thinking.

dagw 10y ago
I agree with you that I want to work with/for those sorts of people. I disagree that I want them as my boss.
- abawany 10y ago
  I based my comment on my personal experiences and also from reading Ramsay's biography. I have also read some anecdotes from people who worked with Jobs. Ramsay's temper and abusiveness are legendary but people who work for him tend to stay with him for a long while; probably no correlation to subsequent success, I admit. That was the crux of my comment: the trade-off of putting up with a lot of quirks vs. learning things that you cannot learn anywhere else. Some people find the learning experience overrides the quirks to a certain point of personal tolerance.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Nothing more annoying than an incompetent co-worker or boss. I don't think you're alone in that regard. If someone is competent that means I can trust them to do the right thing. If they're incompetent it's a crapshoot and causes unnecessary stress. I guess that is not necessarily the same as deep expertise but it's hard to imagine someone with expertise who is also incompetent in that domain.
- SticksAndBreaks 10y ago
  Lets not forget- every lousy software architect needs a demolition crew to clean up behind him. ;)

pacaro 10y ago

There's probably some CAP theorem of management

edblarney 10y ago

Missing from this study is the fact that we tend to project confidence, intelligence and wisdom on those that we like. A staffers perception of the competence of their boss may mostly be a function of how much they like their boss. Also - staffers may have no ability to judge the competence of a boss. Example: boss is highly technical, nice, gives you good feedback, stays 'out of your hair' - and 'let's you do your job'. Problem: you're all way behind schedule, and he's afraid to be unpopular by steering you and the team in the right direction. From a management perspective, he's failing, and causing the whole company to fail.

ZenoArrow 10y ago
>"staffers may have no ability to judge the competence of a boss" They often do. The biggest indicator is one you touched on... 'let's you do your job'. A good manager sets clear but fair expectations, and then works to shield you from roadblocks so you can get the job done as promptly as possible. In my experience it's easy to see this in action.
- edblarney 10y ago
  I agree that a worker can often reasonably evaluate their boss. But unless you've been a director level person - with 'managers of people' working for you, it's easy to see how a 'well liked boss, who lets's their workers do their jobs' is often not the best manager. Team staffers may think their job is to do ABC, but really it's XYZ. A dev may think it's his job to write 'quality software'. But the business objective may call for 'a quick iteration for demonstrative purposes'. The staffer thinks he's 'doing his job', his boss lets him, but the business objectives are totally off.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    >"But the business objective may call for 'a quick iteration for demonstrative purposes'." Most developers I've worked with are smart enough to know quick hacks are fine in small doses, but if they become the norm you end up with a great deal of technical debt, which can ultimately cripple the productivity of a company. From the perspective of managers who aren't familiar with technical debt, the 'quick win' is always going to seem like the best option. It's up to the development team to strike a balance between 'the quick way' and 'the right way', and whilst some managers may get frustrated on the occasions when 'the right way' wins out, in the mid to long term they benefit too, though they may not understand why.

BeetleB 10y ago

Having worked with a boss who had never done our work, and one who had, I can assure everyone: There's a world of a difference!

lordnacho 10y ago

Is anybody surprised by this? A boss who can do your job can: - Fill in when the team is busy. Ever seen the manager at McDonald's flipping burgers or frying fries? Some goes for any other manager, sometimes, they have to step into the code or read legal docs, or operate the machines. - Provide a perspective that's likely to be relevant to you. He knows what it was like doing your job, and has a good guess as to where it's going. As opposed to simply imagining what you do. - Understand push-back. A boss who isn't an expert will require explanation that an experienced boss will not. "We can't add this feature because it breaks our database schema". "Uhm what's a database schema?". Only so many times you can hear that from someone who supposed to be deciding things before you lose faith. - Guess what the team wants. Better experience -> better guesses. Even if the boss hasn't done the work for a while. - Give feedback beyond "work completed/not". Because they can see where the hurdles are before you complete, and they have an understanding of how big the problems you've solved are on the way to completion. Looking at my experience, anytime I worked with someone who didn't have the technical understanding, the worst drops in morale happened when I felt something was obvious, but the person needed it explained. It would have been fine for a new staffer to ask, or a graduate, but not a decision maker. The main annoyance was the issue of where costs could be cut. Some people I've worked with seemed to think that just by asking enough questions, some piece would show up that could be cut from the solution with no harm. And so they'd keep asking around about whether this-or-that was "really" necessary. And perhaps when you're not an expert you can't come up with new pieces or processes, so your line of questioning is inevitably towards slimming whatever is already there.

benmarks 10y ago

From the comments: "I'd bet a lot of workers who are unhappy for other reasons end up judging their supervisor to have low technical competence, making causality hard to determine." Curious to see how competence is objectively measured in this case.

fpig 10y ago
In my opinion, if the people who work with someone consider them incompetent, they likely are. I would even go so far to say that the opinion of coworkers might be the best predictor of someone's competence, better than any "objective" measure. At least if the people you're asking are themselves competent in the skill they are judging (asking the dev team whether someone is good at sales might not be predictive).

pdimitar 10y ago

Right now I am 36. I had a team- and tech-lead position for the first time in my carreer back when I was 28. All other programmers loved me (except 2 slackers who hated being asked for statuses, even if it was twice a month). QA was much better than before, frontenders were happy to receive clear directions and tasks while having some freedom in choosing designs. The devs from other teams loved interacting with me, I almost always had something interesting to share on how I do things, people were learning from me. Things were swell. It was an extremely positive environment. But I got demoted 7 or so months later simply because the other managers hated me. I didn't talk about charts showing increased amount of tickets per sprint resolved, about increased productivity, about how to make people more efficient via some BS measures that never really work (except maybe in a Chinese factory or in a pyramid-scheme marketing organization?). I knew how to make my people efficient and I was doing it. On the managerial meetings I was bored to tears and eventually I just told everybody in the room (including the CEO) -- "People. Why are we here on this meeting? I only see this as an excuse for everybody to congratulate themselves on how awesome you are. Speaking of which (at this point I pointed at 2 other managers) the only thing you ever managed to do was impede me by imposing waiting in inter-team communication for weeks while your devs are telling me they are idle and have nothing to do -- and you're also criticising my managerial techniques no matter the fact that in this 150+ people organization my team is the only one not behind schedule". Or something like that. Needless to say, I got demoted -- and left the place -- shortly after. Thinking of it 8 years later, I'd absolutely do the same but I'd use even more brutal language. Management needs less BS. It doesn't deserve its current breed of slackers who licked bottoms most of their conscious lives to get to such a position and then they figured they'll unofficially retire at 40 while officially leeching salaries into their 60s (read: show up at the job but practially do nothing). As any human system, inertia and credentialism are a huge problem. This has to change.

lhnz 10y ago
Although I was never demoted (I left), I completely see where you're coming from. When I was a manager, I stripped away red-tape and created an environment which I felt gave engineers room for self-improvement - particularly if I could see that they were smart and ambitious and needed to be stretched. Since then I've been freelancing, however a few of my ex-colleagues from way back have told me that I was one of the best managers they'd had. The simple reason for this was that I'd concentrated on making sure they enjoyed their job. Perhaps they were just being nice, but I know I've had similar experiences. The managers that I've enjoyed working with have always been the type that would remove menial work (this doesn't include hoarding all of the opportunities for high-level decision making which is a massive red-flag) and help you find opportunities to learn or explore the kind of work you're passionate in. Non-technical managers often see somebody that's good at what they do as a resource that must be overseen and exploited for as much work output as possible. Bean-counting ensues and that person finds that they have next to no autonomy which causes them to resent their job and eventually leave.

mverwijs 10y ago

First it states that business knowledge is most important. Than it states that deep tech knowledge is most important. Which is it?

TallGuyShort 10y ago
I think there's 2 different questions: Which one makes people happier? Which one makes people more successful? I was at a company where a CEO with deep experience in our field effectively stepped aside as they hired a CEO with deep experience in business. A lot of people didn't like it, even though the old CEO stayed around and was very involved. But looking back, the new CEO helped the company do very well. As I stated in a different comment, you need a balance. You need technical leadership and business leadership, and sometimes they need to be different people working together on the same team.

droopybuns 10y ago

When leaders don't have expertise, we burn time educating them on fundamentals just to orient them on a decision that needs to be made. A better title would be "businesses aren't truly agile until their leaders have deep expertise."

xexers 10y ago

I agree, but this is very tricky in the software development industry where things change so quickly. I went from senior to leading a team of 5 people. As soon as I started to lead, my technical skills started to atrophy. I've now switched companies and dropped back down to a Senior position because I need to build my skills back up. How do you navigate this?

eternalban 10y ago
If you know fundamentals things do not change that quickly. True paradigm shifts (such as FP) that require ground up revisit of internalized knowledge happen at a fairly stately pace.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

Hiring MBAs at tech companies as managers directly managing engineers has not proved to be effective. MBAs have traditionally worked in finance, oil and other Wall Street companies and everyone thought that bringing in MBAs to tech world (partially pushed by investors) would be a good idea. As with any new experiment, you just have to wait and let the time decide the results. And it has been few good years now since MBAs have flooded tech industry and as many like minded engineers have experienced, MBAs with no technical background are a bust as your decision making managers. Sure they can thrive at duties such as managing supply chain management of a large tech companies such as Apple or Amazon. Or dealing with international clients where your "prized" skills such as charisma, emotional intelligence and thinking on the feet matters.

ryandrake 10y ago

I guess I have to be a little bit contrarian. Of course we want our managers to have good technical fluency and to not have to have everything explained to them. It's necessary but insufficient. The skill set of a good manager is different from the skill set of a good individual contributor. I've worked with way too many engineering managers who were great engineers but needed a lot of coaching in order to manage well. At lots of tech companies, you get managers this way: Roger is "smarter than the average bear" and we want to reward smart people, and the only promotion we know is management, so congratulations: Roger is now a manager! Go manage people, Roger! Go understand the business implications of your team's work. Go communicate effectively with execs. Go write a project plan. It's not that Roger is stupid--far from it, its that he is now in a role that requires a totally different skill set.

sage76 10y ago

At a unicorn I was working at, MBAs were being hired to be engineering managers. I did not see a single engineer promoted to management, it was mostly all MBAs. The few I had direct contact were really useless at helping engineers out, all I ever heard from them was "Just get it done.". If I asked for help, they'd say "Well who else is gonna do it then?". I felt demoralised and lost some of my confidence. But the company was bleeding talent at the engineering level, plenty of engineers called out this crap and asked the CEO for answers. CEO would make excuses and not do much. Now the company is not doing well at all, even the senior leadership is leaving in droves, the CEO has even been replaced, the valuation has also declined quite a bit. I am not in silicon valley, so not sure about there but over here, it seems to be a trend to have MBAs in all management positions above engineering and even CTOs of startups who are MBAs. I had no interest in an MBA until I saw this trend. Now I am seriously considering that route, because it seems there is a serious glass ceiling. Doing an MBA might be necessary for me to move up the ranks.

temp246810 10y ago
Why don't you name the company? Unless there is personally identifying information about you somewhere in your comment history, your comment would be so much more helpful with useful examples, especially for people that are familiar with the actual company. Just my 2 cents.
- sumitkumar 10y ago
  It's flipkart.
  - pavanky 10y ago
    Sounded very much like an Indian company. But I'd rather see OP mention the company name :)
- sage76 10y ago
  Not sure if I should directly name. You can google my info and quickly find out which startup it is.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

I think that startups are particularly susceptible to this, everyone else is sharing stories of MBA's in charge of software dev, but it happens in other areas as well. I do work in performance marketing (very data driven, analytics, testing, etc.) and the new Chief Marketing Officer was someone from a big ad agency. He had worked with some really big names and bragged constantly about how he had had an ad play in the SuperBowl, etc. Which was all great, but none of those skills translated down to a budget 1000X less than what he was used to dealing with. He was unprepared to think about things like a website's "Devcenter" as having a purpose beyond a branding exercise. He wasn't a bad person or actually incompetent, but he didn't have the deep expertise in startup marketing that it would take to really see them succeed.

temp246810 10y ago

I'll throw in an alternative perspective: I don't care so much about expertise, but about just raw intelligence. Talk to a really smart person about your engineering problem, and even if they are not an engineer they will give you good advice. Ditto for sales, marketing, etc. I've always been happy when I can tell the person that is managing me is a few steps ahead of me, allows me to learn from them and actually makes my job easier. To me, it's only a bonus if they can do my job better.

collyw 10y ago
A really smart person would probably admit that they weren't the best person to deal with a problem outside of their own area of expertise.

Magi604 10y ago

“People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses" Looking back, this is the actual reason why I left my previous jobs.

Zork212 10y ago

especially when they are flying on a plane.

z3t4 10y ago

i think managers should be good at observing and linking cause to consequence. and use that experience to make good decisions. in the future we might be able to replace managers with AI.

saosebastiao 10y ago

Amazon still has pockets of very deep expertise with highly technical leaders that make for very productive and profitable teams. I've personally worked with some OR and Economics teams that consistently deliver exceptional results for the bottom line. And I know that many of Amazon's best businesses have come (originally) from organizations like these: AWS, Kindle, Echo, etc. But it very quickly is moving away from that idea and toward a world in which MBAs with half baked ideas that don't pass basic sanity checks are allowed to commit to impossible (P=NP!) ideas on behalf of their teams. And it destroys morale: nobody wants to work on a project that is known from the start to be impossible to deliver as specced. So they churn out. And when you talk to the goon that is in charge of it all, the problem always magically seems to be that they can't hire fast enough.

sshrinivasan 10y ago

Considering this is HN, I'll stick to the software/hardware field. While there is some truth to this, I disagree with the assertion that in order for a manager to be good, he "should be able to do your job". I fully agree that a manager for a technical team should have a technical background, and more specifically in the same broad field as the employee. Taking my own case, I am a scientific software developer, with lots of experience in Python, C etc. But as a manager of a team of software developers in different fields, I have no clue how to do web application development or devopsy type stuff, JavaScript, Kubernetes, Go and the like, which we use as well. However I hope I can still be a good manager because I understand the process of software development, I understand people and their needs (technical needs, motivational needs, professional development needs etc), and I can recognize good people when I see them, who can be leaders in their respective technical roles and mentors to others. Or maybe I suck at my job and I don't know it!

keeganjw 10y ago

So with Donald Trump as prez, I guess we're all gonna be very unhappy...

jaysprout 10y ago

Oh my gosh, that's all I've wanted for years: a boss who knew at least as much as I did. Trying to persuade -- to be an agent of positive change or even just get anything done -- is all but impossible when you have to explain everything to someone before you can even begin a dialogue.

tudorconstantin 10y ago

A manager should be just a facilitator. Our department manager at a previous company that I've worked for had economic background, while we were a Perl dev department. Basically, his job depended on our productivity, while our job depended on his ability to win projects. We had to trust each other that we were doing our jobs properly. While we made sure he could make the customers happy with our work, he screened us from interactions with pesky customers and got us all we needed so we can focus entirely on the projects. I worked with him for 5 years and we've been totally happy.

viswanathk 10y ago

If you're talking about Flipkart, then it's not really a tech company as much as it is a retail company these days. So it is expected to have more MBAs in important positions, or in places where they can prioritize like an MBA. No wonder Amazon is kicking their ass, and their last few product launches were nothing short of a disaster.

gdledsan 10y ago

A leader has to lead, it does not matter if the leader knows or does not know how to do the team's job. Those MBAs were not leaders, as simple as that. However, a company does not need a lot of MBAs to function, 1 or 2 should be enough, dedicated to improve the business in general. That unicorn was very sick.

stevefeinstein 10y ago

So people like it better when the people in charge know what they're talking about. But people keep putting the ones that tell them what they want to hear in charge. And the two sets don't usually overlap much.

stevefeinstein 10y ago

nunez 10y ago

Well, yeah. It's not that they can do the work (they shouldn't), it's that they can better relate to the people they're leading. They know, for example, that asking engineers to complete an arbitrary development task in two weeks without regard to scope, value or other work is completely unreasonable. They've been there. Managers without that experience (or even knowledge of that experience) can never relate, so when their managers ask for a thing and ask that it be done in two weeks (because we're doing "Agile"), they'll more than likely pass the buck down. But as long as businesses are run by professional C-executives that don't even understand the business they're managing, this will be a problem.

nunez 10y ago

icanhackit 10y ago

It works both ways. In my first job I had the most intelligent and insightful boss I've ever encountered but I was too young and cocky to notice and the same went for my coworkers. We insulted him behind his back, ignored his suggestions to improve our work, ignored the fact that he was a truly interesting person who had some incredible stories to tell (his background was consumer electronics and radio comm's systems) and it wasn't until I left the company, travelled, grew wiser and older that I realized we as a team made him a pretty unhappy person and he wound up leaving the company to take a more junior role to save his sanity. The only reason he couldn't get rid of us was he wasn't respected by the owner of the (quite small) company and thus no real power beyond supervision. Work went out the door on time so everything was dandy. Be careful judging others abilities through the lens of your own role in a company. Now that I've had two managerial roles I can see things from his perspective and often long to take a job where I'm simply judged on my own work rather than the sum of a collective.

jderoner 10y ago

It seems many take the negative perspective of this finding - anecdotes about moments where management "doesn't get it" and tying that back to their lack of technical expertise. What's missing from the discussion is the underlying foundation of the finding: in an average case, if your manager has technical expertise in your field, you're likely to learn a lot from them - that learning (and growth) is a major driver of job satisfaction. It creates closer relationships through shared understanding/experiences as well. I'd also argue that simply being able to do the job and not developing the team in technical expertise yields similar job satisfaction as not having deep technical expertise at all.

fowse 10y ago

this is a good article!