> Communicating effectively is a complex skill that takes years to develop, and an essential one if you want to program professionally. I suspect that a good c

> Communicating effectively is a complex skill that takes years to develop, and an essential one if you want to program professionally. I suspect that a good chunk of the drive to send "aging" programmers into management is that they're much better at communication than their peers. And part of it has to be that a subordinate who is better at communication than the manager often becomes a de facto manager. Leadership often doesn't respect organization charts. But this can cause a great deal of angst among anointed leaders.