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I think the article, and many of the comments here, miss the point badly. No manager of a team doing technically complex and creative work can for very long re

I think the article, and many of the comments here, miss the point badly. No manager of a team doing technically complex and creative work can for very long remain capable of doing all the work themselves. Modern projects and processes simply require too much specialized knowledge to function for that to work. What managers need that (probably) comes from having been a strong individual contributor is sufficient knowledge of the fields involved in what they're managing to be able to understand the critical elements in the project or process in the context of the overall goal, and to be able to evaluate well the value of ideas for improvement or problem solution that come out of their team. But they also need leadership and management skills. The latter are not the same as, and are not developed by, stellar individual contributor skills. Furthermore, it's important to understand that management and leadership are not the same thing. My personal experience has been that I was a very able individual contributor, and that I was able to learn leadership skills (that is, how to inspire people; how to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and assign work that played to the former, and created opportunities to ameliorate the latter; how to point individuals and teams in fruitful directions without having (or often being able to) do all the hard work of pushing in that direction myself) by diligent study of people and myself. But I was never able to become more than a barely competent manager - I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me from individual contributor to team lead, to product line lead, to CTO of highly successful $10B billion medical and technology organization in 20 years.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
>The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers Duh. For a technical business to have the most unfair advantage (well above patents, etc.) there has got to be the most technical competence/productivity at the very top. There's still an unfair advantage if there's as much competence at the top, but when it's the most that's when it's really the most unfair. Jobs was an outstanding visionary, salesman, task-oriented and goal oriented manager, but without Woz at the top along with him Apple would have been greatly limited. Once things took off they could build some bigger teams, on paper it looked like they could afford anything. It was expected to require more than one engineer to design as salable a product as Woz could do single-handedly. By 1985 Jobs was reminiscing about being burned: >We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all. >They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. As this took place it required more & more personnel, as well as these non-domain managers to go with them, in order to accomplish less than Woz and a small team. It was a no brainer. What a person can do single handedly turns out to be the best indication of how much more they can do with a proper high leadership position (if they are willing), especially when compared to "professional managers" without the domain expertise to hold their own when there's no technical team backing them up. Not how many people the impressive manager has managed before, even if there was legitimate positive financial outcome in their background. Once there was a competent all-technical team, if less wizardly than Woz himself, Jobs could sell that just as well, Woz was well set, and he was out of there with his shares in Apple wisely held. If Apple had not recognized this as early as they did, there would be no way Apple could have gotten as big as they are now. >I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me Woz could legitimately say this about Jobs which is a true measure of whether there was adequate technical leadership at the very top during his time.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

>The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers Duh. For a technical business to have the most unfair advantage (well above patents, etc.) there has got to be the most technical competence/productivity at the very top. There's still an unfair advantage if there's as much competence at the top, but when it's the most that's when it's really the most unfair. Jobs was an outstanding visionary, salesman, task-oriented and goal oriented manager, but without Woz at the top along with him Apple would have been greatly limited. Once things took off they could build some bigger teams, on paper it looked like they could afford anything. It was expected to require more than one engineer to design as salable a product as Woz could do single-handedly. By 1985 Jobs was reminiscing about being burned: >We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all. >They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. As this took place it required more & more personnel, as well as these non-domain managers to go with them, in order to accomplish less than Woz and a small team. It was a no brainer. What a person can do single handedly turns out to be the best indication of how much more they can do with a proper high leadership position (if they are willing), especially when compared to "professional managers" without the domain expertise to hold their own when there's no technical team backing them up. Not how many people the impressive manager has managed before, even if there was legitimate positive financial outcome in their background. Once there was a competent all-technical team, if less wizardly than Woz himself, Jobs could sell that just as well, Woz was well set, and he was out of there with his shares in Apple wisely held. If Apple had not recognized this as early as they did, there would be no way Apple could have gotten as big as they are now. >I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me Woz could legitimately say this about Jobs which is a true measure of whether there was adequate technical leadership at the very top during his time.