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In engineering Hiring good managers is not what they optimize for. Yes Engineering management should still have a high level of understanding of engineering pr

In engineering Hiring good managers is not what they optimize for. Yes Engineering management should still have a high level of understanding of engineering principals within that domain, but management also because a people skill. Out of all my interviews, people skills and EQ are very often overlooked.

at_a_remove 6y ago
EQ has already been co-opted as a term and rendered essentially meaningless. One job, there was a craze for it, starting at the top, so naturally we all eventually had to go to this wretched little one day course on it. I kid you not, everything was about either "fear" or "love." If that sounds familiar, if it sounds like Donnie Darko, you would be right ... almost everything we were "taught" in this emotional intelligence course was almost directly out of that mindset, done straight and not as a parody. Fear and love are the only real motivators, apparently, and we don't want to be afraid of things, blah blah, it was such a wretched simplification and so absurd in its manipulative outlook ("do it, you wouldn't want to be ... afraid ... now would you?") that I began to wonder if this was some kind of larger test on who could keep from laughing.
- jevanish 6y ago
  Yeah, HR cannot help you be a better manager, especially considering many of the worst managers and experiences people have at their companies involve HR. Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-forgetting-curve/ https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...
- loopz 6y ago
  That sounds like mental abuse. EQ would be more about using empathy to connect to others, try to understand other's points etc. Of course, if you "teach" such stuff to manipulative people, you get wretched results.

at_a_remove 6y ago

EQ has already been co-opted as a term and rendered essentially meaningless. One job, there was a craze for it, starting at the top, so naturally we all eventually had to go to this wretched little one day course on it. I kid you not, everything was about either "fear" or "love." If that sounds familiar, if it sounds like Donnie Darko, you would be right ... almost everything we were "taught" in this emotional intelligence course was almost directly out of that mindset, done straight and not as a parody. Fear and love are the only real motivators, apparently, and we don't want to be afraid of things, blah blah, it was such a wretched simplification and so absurd in its manipulative outlook ("do it, you wouldn't want to be ... afraid ... now would you?") that I began to wonder if this was some kind of larger test on who could keep from laughing.

jevanish 6y ago
Yeah, HR cannot help you be a better manager, especially considering many of the worst managers and experiences people have at their companies involve HR. Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-forgetting-curve/ https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...
loopz 6y ago
That sounds like mental abuse. EQ would be more about using empathy to connect to others, try to understand other's points etc. Of course, if you "teach" such stuff to manipulative people, you get wretched results.