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That’s silly. Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. T

That’s silly. Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. These articles are undoubtedly written by people who have never been managers themselves, and frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for. Which is fine - everyone starts that way. But to then assume the job is useless is classic sign of imaturity. > Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary That’s literally the premise of the article posted.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  I think this is the sign of inexperience/immaturity. What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    And we're honing in on the pain point of that aspect of life. I'm not having a revelation here, I'm lamenting the fact with my peers on a site dedicated to technology/engineering.
  - 015a 4y ago
    I think what you're describing isn't inexperience or immaturity; its idealism in the idea that competent people should hold power. The world may not work like that, but it isn't immature to fight for it.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I do think that this is fair and it is a reason why bad managers stand out so much in people's minds. I think that making it feasible for a team to fire its own manager would be generally a good thing. But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.
  - tayo42 4y ago
    Why? If most managers are useless that means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything yet the world seems to go on. Why have that role then? If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
    - rco8786 4y ago
      > If most managers are useless Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity. > means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing. > If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it. By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
      - tayo42 4y ago
        Idk if its that big of an "if". People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support. Often just attracting bad personalities. Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager. Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job. > By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it. Its not really the same because there's only one manager. If i had redundant managers maybe then a couple bad ones could get by. bad engineers have a tons of checks to prevent them being a real drain. theres no code review for a manager.
- bratbag 4y ago
  Thats assuming the average is net neutral to your career/work. The average engineering manager may be a net benefit, or a net detriment. The rest we can extrapolate from there.
- rco8786 4y ago
  > Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement. It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work. If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YOU have on your career. If you find yourself on a team with a truly bad manager who is having a negative affect on your career, get out...but this is truly a rare occurrence in my experience.
  - johnbellone 4y ago
    If your manager is only adding a marginal value to your career it is time to have a conversation with them. A manager that isn't advocating for their team isn't a good manager at all. They're something else.
    - rco8786 4y ago
      A manager can only add marginal value to your career. ONLY. You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career. 100% agree that they need to be advocating for you/your team, finding the right projects for you/your team, etc, etc. But at the end of the day your career is your responsibility, and it's only a fraction of your manager's responsibility.
      - bumby 4y ago
        I'm not sure I agree here, because the manager has the ability to impact all those other hours. A good manager helps remove the hurdles that will make those 40+ hours immensely more productive. A bad manager adds to those hurdles, potentially whittling productive hours to nothing.
      - pyrale 4y ago
        > You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career. If your manager has little more leverage than you do, that's true. In many orgs, managers have considerably more leverage than their reports, and their help is mandatory to get some things (promotions, pay increase, access to conferences and trainings, changing teams, passing messages up the chain or laterally, support for escalation, etc). The only trump card the report has is leaving, but they pay for that by losing all the social capital acquired at the current company.
radicalbyte 4y ago
> Most are about average. That is not how averages work. It depends on the distribution.
- spiderice 4y ago
  To answer your nitpick with a nitpick, averages can work that way. Do you know the distribution of engineering managers well enough to say that most aren't "about average"? GP was making a claim about engineering managers.. not about all averages. But regardless, that's missing the point. The point is that the distribution of engineering manager quality is likely pretty similar to that of any other role. So claiming that "there are way more bad engineering managers than good ones" seems likely to be untrue unless you also believe that about nearly any other engineering/management/product position.
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    > To answer your nitpick with a nitpick, > averages can work that way. Do you know > the distribution of engineering managers > well enough to say that most aren't > "about average"? Sorry it hit a sore spot; especially in a community such as this we should at least try to speak accurately regards statistics. That's not what I'm saying. The OP is stating that it holds for averages. It doesn't. It might in this case but we don't have the stats. The statement just doesn't make sense - you can say exactly the same about a random value. It will hold in some cases. Average too. However it will not hold in all cases.
- ameister14 4y ago
  It's most likely a bell curve
liuliu 4y ago
> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. I do understand what OP said somewhat though. Mostly due to Peter's principle, thus, managers are not "about average" but "mostly incompetent". It is easier to promote people managers than ICs in growing organization, hence it is easier to play out Peter's principle in real life for people managers.
- grumple 4y ago
  The Peter Principle is just an idea someone had (and intended to be satire) and not an actual factual reflection of the way the world works.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    The fact that it's satire doesn't make it untrue.
    - afarrell 4y ago
      However if the satyrical speaker did not believe that they had a duty of care to the truth, then it is bullshit[1]. [1] Prof. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
      - fluoridation 4y ago
        Not really, that does not follow. It is possible to speak the truth by accident.
        afarrell 4y ago
        It is also possible to arrive safely at your destination via reckless driving.
__alexs 4y ago
I have been a manager and a manager of managers and I think we really do not have good data on whether not "management" as a profession in software engineering really adds value. We're bad at quantifying the value of engineers, and we're worse at quantifying the value of managers. There are definitely a wide range of non-engineering skills required to produce good software but that doesn't automatically justify the existence of a dedicated engineering manager role in most or even any teams.
- sulam 4y ago
  I can justify it quite easily. Take it away and see what happens.
  - bojo 4y ago
    Exactly this.
  - soperj 4y ago
    I've worked for months while they hired a new manager, and we just had less meetings.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Presumably someone was still managing you (e.g. there was someone for you to go to if you wanted to book time off, ask for a pay rise, etc)?
      - soperj 4y ago
        Vacations are booked through a booking system, pay raises are negotiated by a union, so not an issue.
        Cederfjard 4y ago
        Mind if I ask where you’re from? Even in highly unionized Scandinavia I’ve never seen software devs (specifically) join unions to any larger extent, let alone negotiate salary through them.
vlovich123 4y ago
> Most are about average Surely you meant to communicate something different here and not a mathematical impossibility. Do you mean most fall within 1 standard deviation of the average? That still means half the managers you encounter would be below the average quality assuming a normal distribution (which it’s clearly not - skills tend to follow the power law). Most engineers are actually decidedly quite bad at software development itself for what it’s worth. The equivalent of a first level line manager is typically a first level engineer (not always but usually). Good managers get promoted to manage managers / multiple teams which dilutes their qualities (they now have to train other managers to be good). So think about whether you’d put a very junior engineer in charge of a project and what kind of results that might have, especially since if the manager is actually good they’ll be promoted away whereas an IC who’s hood is simply given more responsibility on the project but the role doesn’t change too much.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rco8786 4y ago
  Really unclear what point you are trying to make. But yes my intention of using the word "about" average and not "exactly" average was to communicate that most people hover somewhere around the middle. If you want to get really specific and get into stddevs, be my guest.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    "Most people" cannot be above average. That's an information free statement.
linuxftw 4y ago
The 'average' manager may indeed be a net-negative, much like the average car crash. > frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for We know what the job is for, but maybe there's no actual value there. Do doctors have managers? Do lawyers have managers? No, they might report to some administrative body, but they mostly work on contract or in teams. The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.' What engineers need is low-level clerical people to handle the day to day comms with others outside the org. We don't need managers, unskilled labor needs managers.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  > Do doctors have managers? Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers. Obviously not "technical" managers in that they're doctors themselves or the doctor's "boss" but in that there are managers who are co-ordinating workforce, priorities, staffing, supplies etc etc. This is very much a thing and is more broad than engineering managers but is an incredibly important task so the daily admin work does not come to a doctor who is probably prioritising saving lives and helping people > The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.' This is incredibly demeaning of people in hospitals who actually have to do these jobs. There's a massive amount of work required here and it is by no means "clerical". When "customers" literally have their lives in a doctor's hands, the complexity increases hundredfold. There's legal sensitivities, paperwork, spending, collections and so much more stuff involved and this is not even counting the kinds of things they need to do which involves interfacing with patients and their kin about sensitive matters. This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff
  - tayo42 4y ago
    Are managers of doctors saying ridiculous things like you need to only seem patients 30 and up this week, or your not diagnosing enough strep throat.
    - aniforprez 4y ago
015a 4y ago
Maybe these articles are written by people who have never been managers themselves. I'd also posit that most of the defense of the position comes from managers. Do you not recognize the irony in this? I'm sure you're aware of what they say: Its difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it. Do you have the self-awareness to recognize that this, alone, is a huge reason why managers immediately come to the defense of their position? I've been in the industry for 20 years now. I've worked with good EMs; I've worked with bad EMs; I've been an EM (less often). That spectrum isn't even relevant to the underlying assertion that the core definition of the role is invalid. Its extremely rare to work with an EM whose entire scope of responsibilities wouldn't be more productively served by a peer PM. The only advantage to an EM title is in the organizational power structure, which is far too often leveraged to abuse their reports by trading quality output and mentorship for more working hours, burnout, and Jira graphs.
- bumby 4y ago
  This is interesting. What, in your opinion, should the core definition be (if anything)? And how is that eroded when tasked to an engineering manager vs. a project manager? One of the major issues I have with the article is they lean heavily on the "creative work can't be managed like manufacturing widgets" train of thought. It feels to me that they define developers as artists when the article is about engineering. I think those are different roles are different. Even though both require a certain amount of creativity/subjectivity, it's a mistake IMO to conflate the two.
  - erikpukinskis 4y ago
    A Project Manager is a non-executive role. They facilitate the flow of information that keeps a project on track, including reporting progress up. A Technical Lead, Design Lead, and/or Product Lead is the final arbiter of executive decisions about how a project will be completed. A Coach meets regularly with ICs to help debug workflows and interpersonal issues. A Manager signs paychecks, and takes responsibility for the work actually getting done professionally, reporting to HR when it’s not and taking action on behalf if The Company when needed. They are the legally responsible person for the things happening underneath them in the org chart. In an ideal week they do nothing at all. Engineering Managers tend to do some combination of all of these things, usually most of them poorly since that’s way too much work for a single individual.
charles_f 4y ago
> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. I think it doesn't help that you'll find about 1 manager for 8-10 engineers. The same spectrum, but lower raw numbers, might give an exaggerated impression of mediocrity.
drewcoo 4y ago
> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Anecdotally, I've met a lot more people who don't want to manage (again) than people who don't want to be ICs. I think that indicates a different "spectrum" of humanity.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.

droopyEyelids 4y ago
I think this is the sign of inexperience/immaturity. What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  And we're honing in on the pain point of that aspect of life. I'm not having a revelation here, I'm lamenting the fact with my peers on a site dedicated to technology/engineering.
- 015a 4y ago
  I think what you're describing isn't inexperience or immaturity; its idealism in the idea that competent people should hold power. The world may not work like that, but it isn't immature to fight for it.
UncleMeat 4y ago
I do think that this is fair and it is a reason why bad managers stand out so much in people's minds. I think that making it feasible for a team to fire its own manager would be generally a good thing. But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.
- tayo42 4y ago
  Why? If most managers are useless that means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything yet the world seems to go on. Why have that role then? If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    > If most managers are useless Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity. > means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing. > If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it. By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
    - tayo42 4y ago
      Idk if its that big of an "if". People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support. Often just attracting bad personalities. Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager. Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job. > By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it. Its not really the same because there's only one manager. If i had redundant managers maybe then a couple bad ones could get by. bad engineers have a tons of checks to prevent them being a real drain. theres no code review for a manager.
bratbag 4y ago
Thats assuming the average is net neutral to your career/work. The average engineering manager may be a net benefit, or a net detriment. The rest we can extrapolate from there.
rco8786 4y ago
> Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement. It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work. If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YOU have on your career. If you find yourself on a team with a truly bad manager who is having a negative affect on your career, get out...but this is truly a rare occurrence in my experience.
- johnbellone 4y ago
  If your manager is only adding a marginal value to your career it is time to have a conversation with them. A manager that isn't advocating for their team isn't a good manager at all. They're something else.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    A manager can only add marginal value to your career. ONLY. You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career. 100% agree that they need to be advocating for you/your team, finding the right projects for you/your team, etc, etc. But at the end of the day your career is your responsibility, and it's only a fraction of your manager's responsibility.
    - bumby 4y ago
      I'm not sure I agree here, because the manager has the ability to impact all those other hours. A good manager helps remove the hurdles that will make those 40+ hours immensely more productive. A bad manager adds to those hurdles, potentially whittling productive hours to nothing.
    - pyrale 4y ago
      > You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career. If your manager has little more leverage than you do, that's true. In many orgs, managers have considerably more leverage than their reports, and their help is mandatory to get some things (promotions, pay increase, access to conferences and trainings, changing teams, passing messages up the chain or laterally, support for escalation, etc). The only trump card the report has is leaving, but they pay for that by losing all the social capital acquired at the current company.

radicalbyte 4y ago

> Most are about average. That is not how averages work. It depends on the distribution.

spiderice 4y ago
To answer your nitpick with a nitpick, averages can work that way. Do you know the distribution of engineering managers well enough to say that most aren't "about average"? GP was making a claim about engineering managers.. not about all averages. But regardless, that's missing the point. The point is that the distribution of engineering manager quality is likely pretty similar to that of any other role. So claiming that "there are way more bad engineering managers than good ones" seems likely to be untrue unless you also believe that about nearly any other engineering/management/product position.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  > To answer your nitpick with a nitpick, > averages can work that way. Do you know > the distribution of engineering managers > well enough to say that most aren't > "about average"? Sorry it hit a sore spot; especially in a community such as this we should at least try to speak accurately regards statistics. That's not what I'm saying. The OP is stating that it holds for averages. It doesn't. It might in this case but we don't have the stats. The statement just doesn't make sense - you can say exactly the same about a random value. It will hold in some cases. Average too. However it will not hold in all cases.
ameister14 4y ago
It's most likely a bell curve

liuliu 4y ago

> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. I do understand what OP said somewhat though. Mostly due to Peter's principle, thus, managers are not "about average" but "mostly incompetent". It is easier to promote people managers than ICs in growing organization, hence it is easier to play out Peter's principle in real life for people managers.

grumple 4y ago
The Peter Principle is just an idea someone had (and intended to be satire) and not an actual factual reflection of the way the world works.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  The fact that it's satire doesn't make it untrue.
  - afarrell 4y ago
    However if the satyrical speaker did not believe that they had a duty of care to the truth, then it is bullshit[1]. [1] Prof. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      Not really, that does not follow. It is possible to speak the truth by accident.
      - afarrell 4y ago
        It is also possible to arrive safely at your destination via reckless driving.

__alexs 4y ago

I have been a manager and a manager of managers and I think we really do not have good data on whether not "management" as a profession in software engineering really adds value. We're bad at quantifying the value of engineers, and we're worse at quantifying the value of managers. There are definitely a wide range of non-engineering skills required to produce good software but that doesn't automatically justify the existence of a dedicated engineering manager role in most or even any teams.

sulam 4y ago
I can justify it quite easily. Take it away and see what happens.
- bojo 4y ago
  Exactly this.
- soperj 4y ago
  I've worked for months while they hired a new manager, and we just had less meetings.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Presumably someone was still managing you (e.g. there was someone for you to go to if you wanted to book time off, ask for a pay rise, etc)?
    - soperj 4y ago
      Vacations are booked through a booking system, pay raises are negotiated by a union, so not an issue.
      - Cederfjard 4y ago
        Mind if I ask where you’re from? Even in highly unionized Scandinavia I’ve never seen software devs (specifically) join unions to any larger extent, let alone negotiate salary through them.

vlovich123 4y ago

> Most are about average Surely you meant to communicate something different here and not a mathematical impossibility. Do you mean most fall within 1 standard deviation of the average? That still means half the managers you encounter would be below the average quality assuming a normal distribution (which it’s clearly not - skills tend to follow the power law). Most engineers are actually decidedly quite bad at software development itself for what it’s worth. The equivalent of a first level line manager is typically a first level engineer (not always but usually). Good managers get promoted to manage managers / multiple teams which dilutes their qualities (they now have to train other managers to be good). So think about whether you’d put a very junior engineer in charge of a project and what kind of results that might have, especially since if the manager is actually good they’ll be promoted away whereas an IC who’s hood is simply given more responsibility on the project but the role doesn’t change too much.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rco8786 4y ago
Really unclear what point you are trying to make. But yes my intention of using the word "about" average and not "exactly" average was to communicate that most people hover somewhere around the middle. If you want to get really specific and get into stddevs, be my guest.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  "Most people" cannot be above average. That's an information free statement.

linuxftw 4y ago

The 'average' manager may indeed be a net-negative, much like the average car crash. > frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for We know what the job is for, but maybe there's no actual value there. Do doctors have managers? Do lawyers have managers? No, they might report to some administrative body, but they mostly work on contract or in teams. The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.' What engineers need is low-level clerical people to handle the day to day comms with others outside the org. We don't need managers, unskilled labor needs managers.

aniforprez 4y ago
> Do doctors have managers? Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers. Obviously not "technical" managers in that they're doctors themselves or the doctor's "boss" but in that there are managers who are co-ordinating workforce, priorities, staffing, supplies etc etc. This is very much a thing and is more broad than engineering managers but is an incredibly important task so the daily admin work does not come to a doctor who is probably prioritising saving lives and helping people > The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.' This is incredibly demeaning of people in hospitals who actually have to do these jobs. There's a massive amount of work required here and it is by no means "clerical". When "customers" literally have their lives in a doctor's hands, the complexity increases hundredfold. There's legal sensitivities, paperwork, spending, collections and so much more stuff involved and this is not even counting the kinds of things they need to do which involves interfacing with patients and their kin about sensitive matters. This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff
- tayo42 4y ago
  Are managers of doctors saying ridiculous things like you need to only seem patients 30 and up this week, or your not diagnosing enough strep throat.
  - aniforprez 4y ago

015a 4y ago

Maybe these articles are written by people who have never been managers themselves. I'd also posit that most of the defense of the position comes from managers. Do you not recognize the irony in this? I'm sure you're aware of what they say: Its difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it. Do you have the self-awareness to recognize that this, alone, is a huge reason why managers immediately come to the defense of their position? I've been in the industry for 20 years now. I've worked with good EMs; I've worked with bad EMs; I've been an EM (less often). That spectrum isn't even relevant to the underlying assertion that the core definition of the role is invalid. Its extremely rare to work with an EM whose entire scope of responsibilities wouldn't be more productively served by a peer PM. The only advantage to an EM title is in the organizational power structure, which is far too often leveraged to abuse their reports by trading quality output and mentorship for more working hours, burnout, and Jira graphs.

bumby 4y ago
This is interesting. What, in your opinion, should the core definition be (if anything)? And how is that eroded when tasked to an engineering manager vs. a project manager? One of the major issues I have with the article is they lean heavily on the "creative work can't be managed like manufacturing widgets" train of thought. It feels to me that they define developers as artists when the article is about engineering. I think those are different roles are different. Even though both require a certain amount of creativity/subjectivity, it's a mistake IMO to conflate the two.
- erikpukinskis 4y ago
  A Project Manager is a non-executive role. They facilitate the flow of information that keeps a project on track, including reporting progress up. A Technical Lead, Design Lead, and/or Product Lead is the final arbiter of executive decisions about how a project will be completed. A Coach meets regularly with ICs to help debug workflows and interpersonal issues. A Manager signs paychecks, and takes responsibility for the work actually getting done professionally, reporting to HR when it’s not and taking action on behalf if The Company when needed. They are the legally responsible person for the things happening underneath them in the org chart. In an ideal week they do nothing at all. Engineering Managers tend to do some combination of all of these things, usually most of them poorly since that’s way too much work for a single individual.

charles_f 4y ago

> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. I think it doesn't help that you'll find about 1 manager for 8-10 engineers. The same spectrum, but lower raw numbers, might give an exaggerated impression of mediocrity.

drewcoo 4y ago

> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Anecdotally, I've met a lot more people who don't want to manage (again) than people who don't want to be ICs. I think that indicates a different "spectrum" of humanity.