Comment by harimau777
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
In an organisation made of mature people, some of the highly skilled people would recognise the need for them to become people managers (not Architects), and so the organisation would benefit from managers who were actually competent, having done the work themselves before.
I see complaints about companies not promoting from within their ranks, and choosing MBAs for managers, but the grim reality is that the engineers themselves don't want to step up and grow up.
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