Comment by stymaar
3 days ago
I'm not totally convinced by OP's whole point, but I want to point out an issue with this argument of yours:
> lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers.
A lot of people who can read are also terrible manager, but that's not an argument to put illiterate people in charge. Not every engineer has what it takes to be a good manager, and that's fine since you don't need this many manager anyway, but I'd argue that for a management jobs, understanding the craft of the people you're managing is as important as literacy, because the most important role of a manager is make decisions and you cannot make good decisions about things you don't understand.
That being said, engineering is only half the takes in software, the other half being Design and you cannot have a manager that is merely an engineer without design skills (otherwise your product is going to have the user-friendliness of Arch Linux).
The problem, as I've experienced it, is that companies don't try to determine what engineers also have managment aptitude. They simply promote whatever engineers are good at writing code.
And furthermore, in the last decades engineers have become infantilized to such a degree that most don't want to learn to be a good manager and prefer to stay Peter Pans for ever. I believe it's an outcome of the 80's and 90's "nerd" culture because, if you ask the elders, it didn't use to be like that in the US, and it's much less prevalent in Europe (but alas that's far from being the center of the software industry).
I’d say that describes me but I don’t see it as a Peter Pan thing… I’m very technically skilled and I want to keep using those skills. I know the role I want, it’s what I often see advertised as an Architect role. But companies have an order of magnitude fewer of those roles than people management roles. I don’t know that it has to be that way, a lot of projects suffer from a lack of top level technical direction more architects could provide.
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