Comment by broken-kebab
6 hours ago
The best manager I had in my career was a guy with zero software dev experience. Technical skills and leadership are simply different fields. Converting a best engineer into a mediocre manager doesn't sound like a solution for anything.
They're not completely different fields. Staff engineer and above is unobtainable without some of the leadership skills a manager needs. There's a lot of soft skill overlap between high impact ICs and management.
I like to think of it as a manager isn't required to have technical expertise, it can help, I can hurt, but they have to be a leader. Junior and mid career are required to have technical expertise, but not required to have leadership, though it would certainly help them be high impact and thought leaders in their space.
The more senior I get, the more like a manager I am. Less hands on, more coaching, guiding, teaching and setting direction. Meetings and docs become my tools less than code. When I'm writing code I'm only increasing the output of one person, me. Everything else is force multiplication. I just don't have to do the bullshit performance management.
> bullshit performance management
Having a manager manage performance is the worst organizational option, except for all the others.
Good managers understand they (like senior ICs) are the grease between the working gears of a large company.
Bad managers think it means status.
I wonder how the best manager was not qualified to understand what his team is doing, if they do it right or not and was also not able to help them in case there was a technical challenge. This is not how successful companies operated when they became successful, before getting bloated.
The best manager role I ever worked with wasn't incredibly technical, although he was loosely working on getting some IT certifications at the time. He wasn't even the person I really reported to, he was just a project manager that was really on the ball. I knew if I needed something, I could go ask him real quick and he'd make it happen. If I didn't have the full specs, he'd go chase down the other teams and get them sorted leaving me to stay busy with the technical work. I knew if he threw a meeting my way we'd have a good agenda with real issues to work through, and I knew I'd get minutes sent out after the meeting to keep track of what was decided.
I haven't had many excellent experiences with project managers, but dang was he good at keeping me unblocked.