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Senior engineer speaking. 20 years of experience in the software industry. Management is knowing of to make people work together toward a common goal. 1. A ma
by Juliate 7y ago
Senior engineer speaking. 20 years of experience in the software industry.
Management is knowing of to make people work together toward a common goal.
1. A managerial role is not _easy_ to hire for if you're looking for someone who has (for a start) correct skills & experience to manage a team (of engineers only, or of various backgrounds).
One of their roles is to help his team focus on what they want to/can do for everyone to succeed. That implies a lot of ingesting, structuring information and communicate it in all directions, all of the time.
You need practice, and skills, to handle that without becoming completely numb.
2. Technical skills aren't everything. Far from that. When hiring, it's among the last items on my checklist. You want people to be motivated for the job, to be capable and willing to work in a team, to be willing to learn and spread what they learnt. What they know and can bring in total derives from that.
3. You get 1 manager for several members of a team. And a manager also coordinates with other managers & team members.
Budget-wise, you can take and compare the manager compensation with any one team member's compensation but that does not make much sense.
4. Companies success being the result of (mostly) the technical excellence of their teams is the worst toxic professional myth I've encountered; it took me 5 years to see it and 10 more to accept it.
Purpose/strategy (know what you want) + design (know how to get there) + logistics (know who/what to ask for it) trumps most of the rest.
The bonus is if you also have the technical skills to do it but that's not a requirement.
Being an engineer is great, I love it. But it's far from being THE ultimate valuable role in a company.
- znpy 7y ago> Management is knowing of to make people work together toward a common goal. I have almost three years of experience and found myself leading a team of 14 people, all of them sysadmin and/or system engineers. I reported to my manager, as did the people i lead. I can tell you, managing people is IMMENSELY hard. People have all kind of problems and issues, serious and trivial, and can create a problem out of a stupid technical detail. Some people can’t take a criticism and will take it to hr. I am still amazed ad how well my manager is capable of keeping his temper, how he can tone down a heated discussion and manage to get people to work together, reach some form of consensus and generally move forward. I just don’t have (yet?) that kind of skills. I do however realise that it is a completely different skillset, and that for such job one would need just enough technical knowledge to understand what the problem is about and who to pull into the discussion should things get too technical.
- StriverGuy 7y agoNumber 2 is so hard for a lot of engineers to grasp. Technical knowledge does not translate to strong management skills. In fact, I would say at a certain point deep technical expertise becomes a hinderance on your ability to manage people.
- riku_iki 7y agotechnical skills are necessary to make educated decisions and judgments. Managers on high tech projects without such skills blindly shuffle people between roles usually base on which person is nicer to talk.
- Juliate 7y agoRight. For every single person, yes. But there are many people to make an organisation work. There, experts provide their expertise, managers make calls (hopefully for everyone - that's also part of their job, informed calls). If the call was wrong, you can question & identify if it is either the manager's judgement that was debatable, or the piece of expertise provided, or both. And then decide what to do: change the methods, change the role, change the teams, move the people. If you have a single person being the expert and making the calls, all you have is a bus number of 1.
- riku_iki 7y agoAll those iterations take resources from somewhere else. Manager with strong tech skills can reduce number of mistakes and frictions significantly and improve projects chances. > you can question & identify if it is either the manager's judgement that was debatable You are probably referring on some VP level person, so I think they usually have even lower expertise, and will just fire manager who doesn't deliver, which is correct, VP shouldn't dig to such low level of execution.
- StriverGuy 7y agoI am not implying no technical skills are necessary to manage. The point is that hyper-technical skills in very specific niches seem to negatively correlate with people skills required to manage well. Of course knowing enough about the product and space is important to make correct technical decisions as a manager. That goes without saying. The point is rather that the goal of a technical manager is not to come up with all of the answers, but put the right heads together to answer tough questions.
- eb0la 7y ago> 2. Technical skills aren't everything Also, technical skills have "shelf-life": they tend to phase-out / get cannibalized / commoditized after 3-6 years. For managerial roles you need people with skills that improve over time and are not dependent on technology.