3 ms·

I'm a boss (founder & CTO) and I consider my reportees often equal or superior to me on many aspects of our work. The main reason i'm in my possition is willing

• aristofun 5y ago
  This is pretty obvious but still great explanation of the business owner position. But i'm curious more about bottom-middle management level. In most of the tech companies i know they don't bear any additional risks.
  • zn44 5y ago
    Fair I guess on that note I've promoted people to managers that other didn't considered lesser or equal from technical stand point. Usually reason for that promotions were either better product/business sense, more clear ambitions and a bit of luck for joining early enough. I've observed that feeling that the middle manager is not great relates to whatever subordinate is great at, let's say one is great architect and knows everything about aws and manager doesn't. But the subordinate doesn't event realise strengths of the manager in understanding underlying business value, managing stakeholders, and enough technical knowledge to make right tradeoff to deliver business impact. One successful experiment we did in our team was to share majority off manager project responsibilities with IC developers for specific projects. The resulting comment from IC to manager was: 'wow I honestly thought you just slack off all day, now I understand how difficult your work is'