Comment by moogleii
1 day ago
It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions.
That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one.
Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill.
But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc.
The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career.
I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.