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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 c

by 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.
- hnfong 4y ago
  That makes more sense. It can be argued that there's no "absolute scale" for management competency though, and relative competence is the only measure you can hope to make.

by hnfong 4y ago

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.

hnfong 4y ago
That makes more sense. It can be argued that there's no "absolute scale" for management competency though, and relative competence is the only measure you can hope to make.