Comment by 29athrowaway
2 years ago
You don't "grow" into a manager, you just delegate problems to other people. The manager is a meta problem solver, the individual contributor are the real problem solvers.
Understanding the meta problem is not the same as understanding the problem and vice-versa.
Michael Jordan's supervisor is not Michael Jordan. They're people with valuable, non trivial skills that take time and effort to cultivate, but people don't buy tickets to go see a manager, just like customers don't buy manager deliverables, they buy individual contributor deliverables.
The customer doesn't buy issue tracker tickets, or speeches, or gantt charts, or burndown charts, or diagrams, or whatever manager deliverable of your choosing. They buy working software that is stable, performant and that has an ergonomic and polished interface. The manager's job is to facilitate an environment where that can happen. They are not the neurons of the team, they're more like the glia of the team.
That is, if you build a team consisting solely of managers and ask them to solve a problem, and designate one of them as the manager, they won't be an effective team. Did they really "grow"? Or they pursued a different track?
MJ was a great player but there is no way the Bulls would've won all those championships without his team mates (who themselves were of great caliber). It takes a great coach to harness talent and manage it in a team.
Software engineering is a team sport in that same regard. If we're lucky we have a MJ on the team but still needs to be managed for their own (and the team's) good.