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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

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.
    - nine_zeros 2y ago
      There is nothing that states that career progression must be a pyramid which creates the lack of bottleneck and parallelization. We could have many parallel units and yet each unit can keep making technical progress.
- ip26 2y ago
  Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
  - lokar 2y ago
    IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
    - coredog64 2y ago
      Enlisted =>college (via GI Bill) => ROTC/OCS
      - lokar 2y ago
        Yeah, exactly, there is a path, but it sort of involves quitting the army
        Clubber 2y ago
        I believe most contracts are 4 years active, 4 years reserves, so you can easily get a degree in the 2nd 4 years without leaving the military.
        vundercind 2y ago
        Online degree programs are very popular among active duty military, and have been for about as long as such programs have existed.
      - dctoedt 2y ago
        The Navy has Seaman-to-Admiral-21, a modernized version of the NESEP (or MESEP for Marines) program. If selected, you go to college while on active duty, more or less like NROTC midshipmen, with full pay and allowances and up to $10K per year in tuition, books, fees. https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Command/STA-21/STA-21-program/ https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Co...
- User23 2y ago
  Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner). Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority. Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
    - User23 2y ago
      This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah. In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs. Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
- lokar 2y ago
  When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Isn't this just the nature of the business? I'm sure there aren't many plumbers or factory workers who have a level similar to a senior director in plumbing companies either: as an IC, there is a cap to how much contribution you can bring to a company, limited by the type of job you do. Of course, the same is true for managers as well, and the vast majority of directors are vastly overpaid, but that's a different discussion. My point is that all or almost all industries have this distinction, and the people in charge of companies are almost all doing a different job than someone just starting in their fields. Even in law firms, the senior partners are very rarely, if ever, doing the type of litigation they would when they started out. Probably no different than a CTO doing actual technology work.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I deliberately stayed in a first line management position, for most of my career. I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level. Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades. I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level. That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.

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.
  - nine_zeros 2y ago
    There is nothing that states that career progression must be a pyramid which creates the lack of bottleneck and parallelization. We could have many parallel units and yet each unit can keep making technical progress.
ip26 2y ago
Counter argument: if we accept the military example as doing leadership/management well, you can say the same about their career track. Far as I can tell, there’s no “IC” track above Corporal, which has an average age of 21yo.
- lokar 2y ago
  IMO the bigger difference is there is no direct path from NCO to officer. If you are enlisted and you want to be an officer, there is no standard path for that, no promotion from NCO to office. And officers never serve as enlisted solders. Fighting and leading are two different jobs, done by different groups of people I sometimes wonder if the police would be better off with that model.
  - coredog64 2y ago
    Enlisted =>college (via GI Bill) => ROTC/OCS
    - lokar 2y ago
      Yeah, exactly, there is a path, but it sort of involves quitting the army
      - Clubber 2y ago
        I believe most contracts are 4 years active, 4 years reserves, so you can easily get a degree in the 2nd 4 years without leaving the military.
        vundercind 2y ago
        Online degree programs are very popular among active duty military, and have been for about as long as such programs have existed.
    - dctoedt 2y ago
      The Navy has Seaman-to-Admiral-21, a modernized version of the NESEP (or MESEP for Marines) program. If selected, you go to college while on active duty, more or less like NROTC midshipmen, with full pay and allowances and up to $10K per year in tuition, books, fees. https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Command/STA-21/STA-21-program/ https://www.netc.navy.mil/Commands/Naval-Service-Training-Co...
User23 2y ago
Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner). Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority. Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
  - User23 2y ago
    This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah. In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs. Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
lokar 2y ago
When I did a check in about 2018, almost all (like, all but 2-3) of the Distinguished engineers at Google were actually Sr Directors with vanity titles (DE was considered better then Sr Dir). Most 50+ person orgs with multiple managers working under them.
tsimionescu 2y ago
Isn't this just the nature of the business? I'm sure there aren't many plumbers or factory workers who have a level similar to a senior director in plumbing companies either: as an IC, there is a cap to how much contribution you can bring to a company, limited by the type of job you do. Of course, the same is true for managers as well, and the vast majority of directors are vastly overpaid, but that's a different discussion. My point is that all or almost all industries have this distinction, and the people in charge of companies are almost all doing a different job than someone just starting in their fields. Even in law firms, the senior partners are very rarely, if ever, doing the type of litigation they would when they started out. Probably no different than a CTO doing actual technology work.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I deliberately stayed in a first line management position, for most of my career. I was quite capable of going quite far up the ladder, but found that I could make a huge difference, at that level. Also, I was quite aware of the ethos of most managers (both high and low), at my company, and knew that they would be unable to get the results that I did, and they would quickly drive out the team, which I held together, for decades. I have always enjoyed doing effective work, much more than being BMOC. I found that I could be most effective, at that level. That said, I hated being a manager. I always did tech work, on the side, and, upon leaving that company, I went straight back to IC work.