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I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other comp

I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.

whatshisface 2y ago
There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations. They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs. First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible. In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs). Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow. And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
  - nine_zeros 2y ago
    > And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
    - gradstudent 2y ago
      In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts. Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      It seems reasonable that eventually it's easier to parallelize instead of having a single unit just do more stuff.
alphazard 2y ago
You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons: 1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle. 2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute. Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.
- sevensor 2y ago
  Strange that you’d say that. What I’ve seen is that promoting homegrown ICs to line management is a favored strategy of nontechnical MBAs in upper management. Any large organization is bureaucratic. Given the intensely bureaucratic record of communist governments, your invocation of Marxist rhetoric here is frankly laughable. What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
  - alphazard 2y ago
    > he used the word "class", let me find Marxism in my dialogue tree. If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant. Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.
torginus 2y ago
I wonder, what do you see as a desirable alternative?
JoshTriplett 2y ago
I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.
jackcosgrove 2y ago
That's inevitable given how quickly the ranks of software workers have grown in the past 20 years.
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
The alternative of professional managers who never did anything didn’t work out so well either, especially in engineering.

I see an absolutely shocking number of managers promoted from the IC ranks, who not only have no preparation for management, but no experience at any other company.

whatshisface 2y ago

There is no guaranteed way to create managers from scratch, business specialists don't understand the technical facts well enough to resolve the kinds of disputes that arise at the project manager level, and as you observe ICs are not always inclined to make other people's work their primary concern.

datavirtue 2y ago
It's an outdated arrangement. All you need are respected VPs that know their area and foster collaboration toward ideal technical/operationl goals in line with the business objectives. If your approach is invoking fear and exhibiting aggression to drive outcomes you have already lost half of the productivity battle. Jaime Daimon is the new Jack Welch. Too busy looking good and laying down the law to focus on innovation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

In the (US) military, the sergeants run the army. NCOs are highly-trained, and have been the secret of managing battlefield chaos, for generations. They don't do strategy, but they do tactics, like nobody's business, and are often highly valuable input into development of strategies. They are given tremendous agency, and are highly trained. The military does a great job of training and retaining highly-experienced, and highly-skilled NCOs. First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. They don't like their jobs, and want to get out, as quickly as possible. In unions, foremen are often quite happy with their roles, and don't really want to go beyond (they wouldn't mind more perks and pay, but they like their jobs). Like bad tech career ladders, the manager career ladders are also pretty terrible.

ryandrake 2y ago
> First-line managers have a similar role, but they are treated like garbage by their superiors, and consider their position a "necessary evil," towards higher ranks. This is because most companies don't have a promotion track above "Senior Software Engineer" that doesn't involve people-management, which is an entirely different job. It's as if you ran a restaurant and in order for your highest rated chef to get promoted, he had to learn how to make kitchen cabinets. You'd have a bunch of people who loved cooking but had to build cabinets instead because that's the only way their career could grow. And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, it's often not truly parallel. If you work in one of these companies, count how many Directors and VPs are in your company, and then compare it to how many technical people there are at equivalent levels who are not managing people. I bet there are at least 10x as many Directors and VPs if not 100x than super-senior-staff-ultra-mega Engineers.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > And even at the BigTech companies who claim to have "parallel" technical promotion tracks that don't involve people management, And the promotion to upper technical levels involves - once again - larger influence over people as opposed to technical growth.
  - gradstudent 2y ago
    In my experience, there is not much technical growth as you go upward because there's not that much need for technical depth. What most companies need is armies of low and intermediate programmers churning out various kinds of CRUD apps. There's a bit of scope to be a "senior" grunt, and there may even be some very small number of "architects" above that but generally what's needed is people to manage the grunts and senior grunts. Further technical growth requires something like a PhD, and even then, that just makes you a grunt on a new (=academic) ladder, which has the same structure as before.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    It seems reasonable that eventually it's easier to parallelize instead of having a single unit just do more stuff.

alphazard 2y ago

You are describing the best kind of manager for two reasons: 1. They understand what their reports do, can mentor the less experienced ones, and are a competent peer to the more experienced ones, rather than an obstacle. 2. If they turn out to be bad managers, there is a low stakes, no hard feelings, path for them to go back to being an IC. There is a huge aversion to firing people, so bad managers who can't do anything else tend to stay around creating problems much longer than bad managers who can also contribute. Your presentation of "experience" and "preparation" as the most important things for a manager is typical gatekeeping that we see from the bureaucratic class--parasites without any real skills.

sevensor 2y ago
Strange that you’d say that. What I’ve seen is that promoting homegrown ICs to line management is a favored strategy of nontechnical MBAs in upper management. Any large organization is bureaucratic. Given the intensely bureaucratic record of communist governments, your invocation of Marxist rhetoric here is frankly laughable. What promoting inexperienced managers from within does is place them at a tremendous informational disadvantage. Never having worked anywhere else, they don’t understand the coded language of bureaucracy and they have no perspective on what constitutes normal behavior. This gives the MBA latitude to abuse them as pawns in organizational power games they don’t understand, until they either burn out or wise up.
- alphazard 2y ago
  > he used the word "class", let me find Marxism in my dialogue tree. If you were unaware of the term "bureaucratic class", it's not a pro-marxist shibboleth. It refers to the population of aging white collar workers without useful skills, usually in management positions. They can be found parasitizing most large companies. If their incompetence could be reliably detected, it would trigger a massive unemployment crisis. They are often unwilling or unable to learn new skills; the productive skills that originally got them in the door have atrophied or become irrelevant. Any organization as dysfunctional as you describe isn't going to be meaningfully affected by choice of managers. If politics are that prevalent, then the company is coasting on laurels, and it's not really about getting anything done to expand the pie. It's about in-fighting over the predictable, fixed-sized pie that comes in every quarter.

torginus 2y ago

I wonder, what do you see as a desirable alternative?

JoshTriplett 2y ago

I've encountered both good and bad managers who were promoted from individual contributors. A key difference is whether they wanted to be in management, or whether they found themselves forced into management because there wasn't a good technical leadership ladder or a good opportunity to climb it.

jackcosgrove 2y ago

That's inevitable given how quickly the ranks of software workers have grown in the past 20 years.

tightbookkeeper 2y ago

The alternative of professional managers who never did anything didn’t work out so well either, especially in engineering.