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> My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all. Of course t

> My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all. Of course they do - their entire experience with the company prior is the "manager test". A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems.

lapcat 4y ago
> A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems. This is a straw man. It doesn't happen, and nobody believes that it happens. What does happen is that people who are good at engineering get promoted to engineering management, but writing code and managing humans are two entirely different skills. In fact it's especially true in companies with "rigorous" entrance exams that engineers employed by the company have focused on the coding aspect heavily in the past, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pass the exams. So their people skills would have tended to be neglected or ignored entirely.
- hnfong 4y ago
  You're missing the point. When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. Sure, you might claim (as you seem to have, as a strawman) that before the promotion the would-be manager was merely an engineer with no management duties, but that's not exactly how things work. Sometimes it happens like you describe, but often the person being promoted gets assigned some light management or leadership duties before they take on the role officially. At any rate, the higher management already knows more about the would-be manager than any candidate you can interview in a 8 hour period.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. What makes you think that people higher in the management chain are any better at managing people or even care about that aspect? Many tech companies were founded by college kids who were programmers and had no background or training in management. They were thrust into their roles by the circumstances with no preparation. It seems like people are living in a hypothetical magical utopia in these comments instead of reality. We all know that managers are incompetent. We're experienced it. You can find endless engineers complaining about it. Why are we denying the truth here?
    - hnfong 4y ago
      That's a different thing. Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. The chain of replies was an attempt to refute that. If your claim is that (for some companies) managers are less competent because that's how it has been forever, then the sample logic can apply to engineers in the company. It's not that I dispute the conclusion, but the reasoning doesn't hold because it doesn't differentiate the two cases.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. My original claim was "engineers are frequently promoted to engineering managers despite having no background or training in management". This doesn't have much to do with interviews for engineering managers, though I did note sarcastically that there's no real "FizzBuzz" equivalent for managers. Engineer to engineering manager is effectively a career change. Programming skills are different from people skills. It's important for an engineering manager to understand programming, but there's much more to the job. How many of them got management degrees in college rather the computer science degrees? How many of them were "managing since I was 13 years old" as opposed to "coding since I was 13 years old"? (You don't actually need to do either since you were 13 years old, but I think you get the rhetorical point.) Even if the "most qualified" of the current engineers get promoted to manager, that doesn't mean any of the current engineers are actually qualified to be a good manager of people rather than machines.

lapcat 4y ago

> A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems. This is a straw man. It doesn't happen, and nobody believes that it happens. What does happen is that people who are good at engineering get promoted to engineering management, but writing code and managing humans are two entirely different skills. In fact it's especially true in companies with "rigorous" entrance exams that engineers employed by the company have focused on the coding aspect heavily in the past, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pass the exams. So their people skills would have tended to be neglected or ignored entirely.

hnfong 4y ago
You're missing the point. When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. Sure, you might claim (as you seem to have, as a strawman) that before the promotion the would-be manager was merely an engineer with no management duties, but that's not exactly how things work. Sometimes it happens like you describe, but often the person being promoted gets assigned some light management or leadership duties before they take on the role officially. At any rate, the higher management already knows more about the would-be manager than any candidate you can interview in a 8 hour period.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. What makes you think that people higher in the management chain are any better at managing people or even care about that aspect? Many tech companies were founded by college kids who were programmers and had no background or training in management. They were thrust into their roles by the circumstances with no preparation. It seems like people are living in a hypothetical magical utopia in these comments instead of reality. We all know that managers are incompetent. We're experienced it. You can find endless engineers complaining about it. Why are we denying the truth here?
  - hnfong 4y ago
    That's a different thing. Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. The chain of replies was an attempt to refute that. If your claim is that (for some companies) managers are less competent because that's how it has been forever, then the sample logic can apply to engineers in the company. It's not that I dispute the conclusion, but the reasoning doesn't hold because it doesn't differentiate the two cases.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. My original claim was "engineers are frequently promoted to engineering managers despite having no background or training in management". This doesn't have much to do with interviews for engineering managers, though I did note sarcastically that there's no real "FizzBuzz" equivalent for managers. Engineer to engineering manager is effectively a career change. Programming skills are different from people skills. It's important for an engineering manager to understand programming, but there's much more to the job. How many of them got management degrees in college rather the computer science degrees? How many of them were "managing since I was 13 years old" as opposed to "coding since I was 13 years old"? (You don't actually need to do either since you were 13 years old, but I think you get the rhetorical point.) Even if the "most qualified" of the current engineers get promoted to manager, that doesn't mean any of the current engineers are actually qualified to be a good manager of people rather than machines.