Comment by budgefrankly
6 hours ago
> Most managers are no longer technical, and just create bloated middle layers that slow everyone else down.
> The only managers that are decent are the ones that have kept their technical skills sharp.
Alex Ferguson was a terrible footballer when he was managing Manchester United. Yet they won the premiership in 6 of his last 10 years in that role, and have never won it since he left.
The skills that make one great at doing work on ones own aren't necessarily the skills that make a _team_ of 3, 6, 12 people all collaborate with one another, and with the other teams within the company.
Good management is rare, due to the tendency to promote engineers into the role instead of hiring people specifically trained in that discipline, but when you're in a well-managed -- and hence highly focused -- team the results you can all obtain together can be impressive.
He still had a decent player career, and anyhow, this is a completely different field. The issue is that good engineers are not promoted to management positions because their skills are needed or they don't want to get promoted because of politics. But one of the things that I noticed a lot is people "specifically trained" to be managers. Our company is full of project managers and POs that never built anything their entire life, they never led a team, they never did anything except start with something like an assistant or QA and then all of the sudden they want to manage people. This is what I find frustrating, people that never in their life did something productive or build or contribute to something, but their expectation is to be a manager, just because they were "specifically trained in that discipline"
But he was a footballer, some managers in it are like Alex Ferguson was baking goods, not knowing football
A good manager understands the tech and what it takes to implement it on a high level, at least enough to not get BS'd.
This instinct can be developed due to direct experience as an engineer, but it can also be due to experience as a product manager or something else, as long as they have some curiosity to actually learn the big picture stuff.
Now with AI chatbots there's little excuse for a manager to be completely clueless about this stuff, but still there are a class of these people who just can't be bothered to care about anything other than moving units of work around boards.
Was in a company that didn't promote engineers (never saw this happen), only hired managers externally. Resulted in a management layer clueless about the work and product.
Good management is rare.
Good management is rare partly because nobody wants to take risks and hire inexperienced management.
This leads to a reluctance to promote people without previous experience into management roles. This in turn leads to a shortage of experienced managers.
Good management is rare because it's the wrong people doing it. The bigger problem is that we're all always told that we need "professional" management, implicitly people who's been to "management" schools, this dissuades promoting from within (that honestly can be equally disastrous).
The upside of people from within is that they know what the bottom line comes from, there's been some highlighting of the effects in terms of the founder-mode discussions.
https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
Not all good footballers are great managers but many great managers were good footballers. Playing in the first or second division is already good in my books.