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I thought a lot about this a while back. A very few large companies have dual tracks, one for promoting professional engineers but keep them out of the manageme

I thought a lot about this a while back. A very few large companies have dual tracks, one for promoting professional engineers but keep them out of the management track. In my opinion, this is a good idea. If a software or hardware engineer is promoted into managing other engineers, this is an entirely different skill. It helps when one understands the technical requirements and issues but management is a business skill.

gregoriol 8y ago
Management is not a business skill: it's an HR skill.
- barrkel 8y ago
  There's at least two distinct aspects to management. One is getting the best out of the team. The manager is subservient to the needs of the team, from this perspective. The other is ensuring the team is doing the right thing. The manager is in control of the team in this perspective. The former has more of the human relations aspect. The latter is definitely business focused.
  - mrep 8y ago
    > The other is ensuring the team is doing the right thing. The manager is in control of the team in this perspective. This is what I consider to be the most important part of management. At a large company, you will have thousands of employees working on tons of different features and products and your job is to make sure everyone's incentives (usually through things like quarterly goals) are aligned to the most productive things while accounting for what everyone else will be working on. I like to think of it as commanding a navy where individual contributors are rowers and managers are overseeing ships of various sizes (different products and features). The battle is constantly changing as some products fail while others are successes, new markets opportunities open up while others close, and good managers will monitor it all and rebalance/incentivize their workforce as necessary.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    The military approach is interesting in this regard - generally you have a "leadership pair" of officer+NCO; commanding officer + executive officer, with quite separate duties, one is responsible for planning and giving the orders/deciding what needs to be done; and the other is responsible for "managing the troops" to get that task done effectively and ensuring that they have what they need to do it. Business, on the other hand, tends to conflate these roles in a single position.
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  I wonder if ratio of business skill vs HR skill depends on how political the organization is and how much direct business-oriented impact the management position has on the organization. And that makes me wonder if there’s a way to (partially) decouple management from power, at least for most managerial positions. Part of what attracts the wrong people to management, be they players or engineers with limited people skills that want to fix things, is power. Would it be possible to have a manager that only dealt with performance, personnel issues and resource management without having any say over what they worked on or how they did things? It seems like there’s elements of that already accepted as the norm (project managers, product owners, etc.) but the effectiveness of those positions varies wildly from org-to-org because of people managers. Sometimes they’re not even distinct roles because people managers won’t surrender any power.

gregoriol 8y ago

Management is not a business skill: it's an HR skill.

barrkel 8y ago
There's at least two distinct aspects to management. One is getting the best out of the team. The manager is subservient to the needs of the team, from this perspective. The other is ensuring the team is doing the right thing. The manager is in control of the team in this perspective. The former has more of the human relations aspect. The latter is definitely business focused.
- mrep 8y ago
  > The other is ensuring the team is doing the right thing. The manager is in control of the team in this perspective. This is what I consider to be the most important part of management. At a large company, you will have thousands of employees working on tons of different features and products and your job is to make sure everyone's incentives (usually through things like quarterly goals) are aligned to the most productive things while accounting for what everyone else will be working on. I like to think of it as commanding a navy where individual contributors are rowers and managers are overseeing ships of various sizes (different products and features). The battle is constantly changing as some products fail while others are successes, new markets opportunities open up while others close, and good managers will monitor it all and rebalance/incentivize their workforce as necessary.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  The military approach is interesting in this regard - generally you have a "leadership pair" of officer+NCO; commanding officer + executive officer, with quite separate duties, one is responsible for planning and giving the orders/deciding what needs to be done; and the other is responsible for "managing the troops" to get that task done effectively and ensuring that they have what they need to do it. Business, on the other hand, tends to conflate these roles in a single position.
brazzledazzle 8y ago
I wonder if ratio of business skill vs HR skill depends on how political the organization is and how much direct business-oriented impact the management position has on the organization. And that makes me wonder if there’s a way to (partially) decouple management from power, at least for most managerial positions. Part of what attracts the wrong people to management, be they players or engineers with limited people skills that want to fix things, is power. Would it be possible to have a manager that only dealt with performance, personnel issues and resource management without having any say over what they worked on or how they did things? It seems like there’s elements of that already accepted as the norm (project managers, product owners, etc.) but the effectiveness of those positions varies wildly from org-to-org because of people managers. Sometimes they’re not even distinct roles because people managers won’t surrender any power.