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Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able

Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". I'm also curious why smart people become idiots when they're promoted. Come on. Managing is hard and definitely looks different depending on your position. To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too.

k__ 13y ago
Most managers are good talkers. Most smart people aren't.
- ArekDymalski 13y ago
  Being unable to give a good talk is quite unusual definition of smartness:) But I can see where are you coming from. Indeed that analytical type of smartness which is so useful for engineers often correlates with introversion. Which doesn't help when it comes to dealing with people, promoting self and building your position in the company.
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    yup, let's replace "smart" with technically competent/proficient :)
  - k__ 13y ago
    Probably. There are many smart people who are good talkers. But I only know them from the Internet. The top scientists and engineers of our time. The leaders of the biggest companies are often engineers themself. But they don't make the mass of smart people. It seems like many managers have a network of mighty people, which just lets them float over the real world. They get fired here and a new job (as good paid manager!!) somewhere else in no time.
seivan 13y ago
No one said it isn't hard to manage or managers in general are idiots. I was just clarifying that the decline of decent software practices isn't a scale issue, it's management issues. That tends to be because of non-technical managers/superiors.
- ArekDymalski 13y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of non-technicality. You can find non-technical founders who are doing more or less well (Squidoo, Yammer, Groupon for example) and there's a lot of companies managed by engineers which are falling. I think it's a matter of lacking general management skills as well as number and level of complexity of problems you have to solve when you go up.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    You don't need to be a coder to be winning in this game. But you definitely need be somebody who gets the job done in whatever their area of expertise is. Those are the kind of people you quoted in your example. There are somethings you can't teach a person. They have to learn by doing or go through the grind.
kaolinite 13y ago
The Dilbert Principle explains this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_principle). The Dilbert principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.
- throwaway1979 13y ago
  Another reasonable explanation I've come across is that employees keep getting promoted until they hit a job where they aren't competent. I always attributed that to the Dilbert comics but maybe I was mistaken.
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    The Peter Principle: The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
    - peacemaker 13y ago
      If you liked The Office, I think the Gervais Principle is an even better explanation of this: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
w0utert 13y ago
>> Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". I guess you must have worked for completely different companies than I did, because in my experience it's not the smartest people who work their way up into management, just the loudest ones that don't have any specific skill that would make them hard to replace elsewhere. IMO the smartest people I know at my workplace are the engineers who manage themselves into a position where they can work on interesting projects without getting dicked around by managers distracting from the real work all the time, and make a good living doing it.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  "Ability" isn't a uniform stat. There's many factors that comprise our competence. Once of them is technical excellence. Others include sales, politicking (or "managing up"), managing a team, empathy, oratory, etc. The best technical minds don't necessarily want to become suits (I'm going to avoid using the term "managers" since engineering managers are very different from "suits" imo). Even if they become one, they may not have the negotiation skills or willingness to smooch that is required for a suit to succeed. >how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". For #2, a good counterexample would be, "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches".
  - ArekDymalski 13y ago
    Your point about different skill-sets (as well as the one below about replacing "smart" with "technically competent") is a great one. These are things missing from my post. Regarding > "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches" i think that's a very good illustration to whole this discussion. If the most talented athlete benefits from the help of a coach. However the critical part comes when the coach makes a mistake. Should athlete just put whole responsibility on his coach? Just lean back and say "my coach is an idiot and all I can do is to rant about it"? I believe it's a mutual responsibility for both sides to address the issues. If the athlete can't properly express his needs/doubts it's something what he should improve because waiting for the coach to "get smarter" may be a recipe for disaster. Of course the same works the other way too. Now if we replace coach/athlete with manager/employee it's clear where so many problems come from.
superos 13y ago
At my workplace most (not all!) smart people wants to do the real sh*t. ie design, programming etc. They do not want to be a manager because that means there is no time to do what they love, and have to do management instead (meetings, more meetings, budgets, meet other managers (BORING!), attend management gatherings and conference (EVEN MORE BORING) etc).
redial 13y ago
Your sample is biased. I assume you read most of this rants here (as do I), and this is a place mainly for software engineers and designers, not managers. They complain about their bosses, as do all, and that means you get a lot of complains about stupid managers (because everybody thinks the boss is stupid). I don't believe for a second that there are no good managers, or that they are not necessary. Apple and Google produce the kind of software that they do because they have good managers (for the most part). The thing is, no one complains about his/her awesome manager. (In an episode of the Debug podcast, Don Melton describes his life as a manager and gives a little more insight about what goes on on a big company). This is not to say that you couldn't have a system in which the engineers managed themselves, as in Valve. Having said that, the quality of Samsung's software has not impressed anyone, so I kind of believe that they have a management problem.
kamaal 13y ago
You don't have to be smart to be a manager. I mean in our(developer circles) definition of smart is some one who gets the job done. I mean the real job. Something that is of value. Most people managers don't do that. In most corporates management really is book keeping. Managing vacations, leaves, holidays. Filling up appraisal sheets, expense documents, coordinating with HR, forwarding Information, arranging meetings and all these kind of assorted chores. This classifies under what you can call as 'running the affairs' as they are. This has nothing to do building something awesome. That is a different territory. What managers in most companies do ideally is enforce sanity by bringing in mediocrity. Much of their work is in bringing in a process so that their life gets easier. They need numbers, so they have to deal and force people to do things like fill in time sheets, constantly update some system to keep the their managers alerted. You get the point? Situation only gets worse because, sooner or later all managers realize- they hit a career dead end unless they are politically well connected within an organization to get that next promotion or a travel opportunity. In many ways they are forced to, their position encourages them to. Imagine having no coding skills, no ideas, no ways to show that you got something real done in years. Over time your own value in the market will fall down to point you know you can't really get any real work done any where. This is the story of many middle managers in big corporates. Most managers are really cost and work accountants.
samolang 13y ago
I think a lot of people are idiots. Managers are just the ones that have the most control over other peoples' lives, so they're the ones people complain about the most.
wes-exp 13y ago
In teams of ordinary laborers, managers usually are smarter than the employees. But in teams "rocket scientists", it can easily be a misallocation of resources to employ another rocket scientist as the rocket scientists' manager. The management job may be one of task coordination and solving mundane people issues more suited to a normal college graduate rather than some genius-level person. This can leave you in the awkward situation where the person in a higher position within the organization is not as intelligent as his employees. But given limited resources, as most companies are subject to, it may be the optimal structure for an organization, despite whatever "Dilbert" moments come out of it.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". Look, for an analogy, at the theological incompetence seen in many cases of religious colonization ca. 1500-1914. The good priests stayed in the mainland. A lot of idiots were sent to the outposts. What you have in colonization is the worst people of one society being put over the best of another. That's true even now. Who are the Americans and British who flock to Dubai? People not smart enough to get executive-level positions in their own countries, who want the upper-class lifestyle (that comes from living in a slave state as not-a-slave) but can't get it on their own steam in their own land. In Managerland/MBAistan, the good ones end up in $5 million per year private equity jobs or running divisions in investment banks. The bad ones get stuck managing nerds (us) and they get really resentful as time goes on. A 40-year-old top-notch programmer is a badass. A 40-year-old Partner at Sequoia is also a badass. A 40-year-old who manages a team of 5 programmers on some project defined by an executive two levels above him (i.e. he has no creative control either) is probably a bitter, terminal middle manager. The thing is that the best technologists don't want to be managers. They want to be great at their jobs. They don't climb the ranks at all. Managers, on the other hand, always want to climb, and the capable ones do. Top technologists end up answering to people in Managerland who never got out of middle-management and are bitter/resentful. If we answered to the $5 million per year top-notch businessmen who can actually sell and motivate people, maybe we'd like our jobs better. Or maybe they'd be even bigger assholes; who knows. I think the Colonization Effect (technologists being the colonized people, Managerland being the father country) is worth looking into, though. It might explain why technology management is so terrible. We end up answering to the ones who failed because they don't have any social skills, and who therefore suck at finding a way to motivate us to do the work. The quality of people who do sales in an investment bank is just much higher-- they can actually convince people to do what they want instead of ordering them around-- than that of the people who manage software engineers in a traditional "tech" company. I've seen both. To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too. The more intelligent managers don't complain that employees are "idiots". It's more that low-level employees don't care enough. They don't have any authority or autonomy so they're not conscientious. The mismatch comes from the fact that the manager obviously believes the beauty contest is worth playing (he played it and won) while his underlings are often disengaged outright.
SatvikBeri 13y ago
People who have good managers aren't as loud about it. I've had 7 managers. 6 of them were good and 2 of those I'd even classify as stellar. Only one was a bad manager. As a result, I simply don't talk about management very much. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation.

Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". I'm also curious why smart people become idiots when they're promoted. Come on. Managing is hard and definitely looks different depending on your position. To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too.

k__ 13y ago

Most managers are good talkers. Most smart people aren't.

ArekDymalski 13y ago
Being unable to give a good talk is quite unusual definition of smartness:) But I can see where are you coming from. Indeed that analytical type of smartness which is so useful for engineers often correlates with introversion. Which doesn't help when it comes to dealing with people, promoting self and building your position in the company.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  yup, let's replace "smart" with technically competent/proficient :)
- k__ 13y ago
  Probably. There are many smart people who are good talkers. But I only know them from the Internet. The top scientists and engineers of our time. The leaders of the biggest companies are often engineers themself. But they don't make the mass of smart people. It seems like many managers have a network of mighty people, which just lets them float over the real world. They get fired here and a new job (as good paid manager!!) somewhere else in no time.

seivan 13y ago

No one said it isn't hard to manage or managers in general are idiots. I was just clarifying that the decline of decent software practices isn't a scale issue, it's management issues. That tends to be because of non-technical managers/superiors.

ArekDymalski 13y ago
I don't think it's a matter of non-technicality. You can find non-technical founders who are doing more or less well (Squidoo, Yammer, Groupon for example) and there's a lot of companies managed by engineers which are falling. I think it's a matter of lacking general management skills as well as number and level of complexity of problems you have to solve when you go up.
- kamaal 13y ago
  You don't need to be a coder to be winning in this game. But you definitely need be somebody who gets the job done in whatever their area of expertise is. Those are the kind of people you quoted in your example. There are somethings you can't teach a person. They have to learn by doing or go through the grind.

kaolinite 13y ago

The Dilbert Principle explains this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dilbert_principle). The Dilbert principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.

throwaway1979 13y ago
Another reasonable explanation I've come across is that employees keep getting promoted until they hit a job where they aren't competent. I always attributed that to the Dilbert comics but maybe I was mistaken.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  The Peter Principle: The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
  - peacemaker 13y ago
    If you liked The Office, I think the Gervais Principle is an even better explanation of this: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

w0utert 13y ago

>> Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". I guess you must have worked for completely different companies than I did, because in my experience it's not the smartest people who work their way up into management, just the loudest ones that don't have any specific skill that would make them hard to replace elsewhere. IMO the smartest people I know at my workplace are the engineers who manage themselves into a position where they can work on interesting projects without getting dicked around by managers distracting from the real work all the time, and make a good living doing it.

hkmurakami 13y ago
"Ability" isn't a uniform stat. There's many factors that comprise our competence. Once of them is technical excellence. Others include sales, politicking (or "managing up"), managing a team, empathy, oratory, etc. The best technical minds don't necessarily want to become suits (I'm going to avoid using the term "managers" since engineering managers are very different from "suits" imo). Even if they become one, they may not have the negotiation skills or willingness to smooch that is required for a suit to succeed. >how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". For #2, a good counterexample would be, "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches".
- ArekDymalski 13y ago
  Your point about different skill-sets (as well as the one below about replacing "smart" with "technically competent") is a great one. These are things missing from my post. Regarding > "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches" i think that's a very good illustration to whole this discussion. If the most talented athlete benefits from the help of a coach. However the critical part comes when the coach makes a mistake. Should athlete just put whole responsibility on his coach? Just lean back and say "my coach is an idiot and all I can do is to rant about it"? I believe it's a mutual responsibility for both sides to address the issues. If the athlete can't properly express his needs/doubts it's something what he should improve because waiting for the coach to "get smarter" may be a recipe for disaster. Of course the same works the other way too. Now if we replace coach/athlete with manager/employee it's clear where so many problems come from.

superos 13y ago

At my workplace most (not all!) smart people wants to do the real sh*t. ie design, programming etc. They do not want to be a manager because that means there is no time to do what they love, and have to do management instead (meetings, more meetings, budgets, meet other managers (BORING!), attend management gatherings and conference (EVEN MORE BORING) etc).

redial 13y ago

Your sample is biased. I assume you read most of this rants here (as do I), and this is a place mainly for software engineers and designers, not managers. They complain about their bosses, as do all, and that means you get a lot of complains about stupid managers (because everybody thinks the boss is stupid). I don't believe for a second that there are no good managers, or that they are not necessary. Apple and Google produce the kind of software that they do because they have good managers (for the most part). The thing is, no one complains about his/her awesome manager. (In an episode of the Debug podcast, Don Melton describes his life as a manager and gives a little more insight about what goes on on a big company). This is not to say that you couldn't have a system in which the engineers managed themselves, as in Valve. Having said that, the quality of Samsung's software has not impressed anyone, so I kind of believe that they have a management problem.

kamaal 13y ago

You don't have to be smart to be a manager. I mean in our(developer circles) definition of smart is some one who gets the job done. I mean the real job. Something that is of value. Most people managers don't do that. In most corporates management really is book keeping. Managing vacations, leaves, holidays. Filling up appraisal sheets, expense documents, coordinating with HR, forwarding Information, arranging meetings and all these kind of assorted chores. This classifies under what you can call as 'running the affairs' as they are. This has nothing to do building something awesome. That is a different territory. What managers in most companies do ideally is enforce sanity by bringing in mediocrity. Much of their work is in bringing in a process so that their life gets easier. They need numbers, so they have to deal and force people to do things like fill in time sheets, constantly update some system to keep the their managers alerted. You get the point? Situation only gets worse because, sooner or later all managers realize- they hit a career dead end unless they are politically well connected within an organization to get that next promotion or a travel opportunity. In many ways they are forced to, their position encourages them to. Imagine having no coding skills, no ideas, no ways to show that you got something real done in years. Over time your own value in the market will fall down to point you know you can't really get any real work done any where. This is the story of many middle managers in big corporates. Most managers are really cost and work accountants.

samolang 13y ago

I think a lot of people are idiots. Managers are just the ones that have the most control over other peoples' lives, so they're the ones people complain about the most.

wes-exp 13y ago

In teams of ordinary laborers, managers usually are smarter than the employees. But in teams "rocket scientists", it can easily be a misallocation of resources to employ another rocket scientist as the rocket scientists' manager. The management job may be one of task coordination and solving mundane people issues more suited to a normal college graduate rather than some genius-level person. This can leave you in the awkward situation where the person in a higher position within the organization is not as intelligent as his employees. But given limited resources, as most companies are subject to, it may be the optimal structure for an organization, despite whatever "Dilbert" moments come out of it.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots". Look, for an analogy, at the theological incompetence seen in many cases of religious colonization ca. 1500-1914. The good priests stayed in the mainland. A lot of idiots were sent to the outposts. What you have in colonization is the worst people of one society being put over the best of another. That's true even now. Who are the Americans and British who flock to Dubai? People not smart enough to get executive-level positions in their own countries, who want the upper-class lifestyle (that comes from living in a slave state as not-a-slave) but can't get it on their own steam in their own land. In Managerland/MBAistan, the good ones end up in $5 million per year private equity jobs or running divisions in investment banks. The bad ones get stuck managing nerds (us) and they get really resentful as time goes on. A 40-year-old top-notch programmer is a badass. A 40-year-old Partner at Sequoia is also a badass. A 40-year-old who manages a team of 5 programmers on some project defined by an executive two levels above him (i.e. he has no creative control either) is probably a bitter, terminal middle manager. The thing is that the best technologists don't want to be managers. They want to be great at their jobs. They don't climb the ranks at all. Managers, on the other hand, always want to climb, and the capable ones do. Top technologists end up answering to people in Managerland who never got out of middle-management and are bitter/resentful. If we answered to the $5 million per year top-notch businessmen who can actually sell and motivate people, maybe we'd like our jobs better. Or maybe they'd be even bigger assholes; who knows. I think the Colonization Effect (technologists being the colonized people, Managerland being the father country) is worth looking into, though. It might explain why technology management is so terrible. We end up answering to the ones who failed because they don't have any social skills, and who therefore suck at finding a way to motivate us to do the work. The quality of people who do sales in an investment bank is just much higher-- they can actually convince people to do what they want instead of ordering them around-- than that of the people who manage software engineers in a traditional "tech" company. I've seen both. To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too. The more intelligent managers don't complain that employees are "idiots". It's more that low-level employees don't care enough. They don't have any authority or autonomy so they're not conscientious. The mismatch comes from the fact that the manager obviously believes the beauty contest is worth playing (he played it and won) while his underlings are often disengaged outright.

SatvikBeri 13y ago

People who have good managers aren't as loud about it. I've had 7 managers. 6 of them were good and 2 of those I'd even classify as stellar. Only one was a bad manager. As a result, I simply don't talk about management very much. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation.