One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason: it's how things are done, they really want to do it, etc. There needs to be a separate, equally status-conferring, career track for them if they're really not going to be good at managing people. They need to be convinced that the best thing for them is to stay where they are, being awesome. Which is probably hard. The idea that you are awesome, therefore you become a manager, get an office, etc. is pretty pervasive.
(The bonus would be that those of us who never, ever want to be managers no matter how much our directors want us to would have that career path available too.)
Definitely the solution is to decouple reward hierarchy from managerial hierarchy. Unfortunately, the people who would make that decision in most situations stand to lose from such a decision. There is too much focus on leaders when the best a leader can ever hope for is to allow the formation of a gestalt out of all the team members including themselves.
Completely agree with this.
So my advice to those considering the switch is: if you are motivated by money and influence, management is basically the only option to advance without killing yourself. If you are motivated by technical challenges and couldn’t care less about the “people” stuff, however, be an IC, with the understanding that your growth will stall well before that of your former peers who went into management.
So not only do they end up not understanding 90%+ of IT's functions in any real sense, they are typically not even trained on how to manage.
I work with one such moron at my current job. The entire company goes around the fool, yet they keep him. Why? The acting CEO is likely embezzling and competent IT might shine a light on it. That and the CEO outsources work to her husband's company for 10s of thousands a month with no deliverables or results (beyond what I suspect is the normal embezzlement in other areas).
I've been in this field for ~25 or so years. Maybe I'm jaded by working in consulting/contracting for most of that (and working for myself). I have never worked with an IT Director or CIO that I would personally hire for my own business in that entire time. Being technical enough to make the right decisions and having enough managerial experience/knowledge to be a good manager at the same time is extraordinarily elusive.
Another question is, how do people hire a CIO, when they themselves don't understand IT (or even want IT it seems). They guess or outsource it. I've never seen that work either.
But people start to ask you for IT related things because you are the "tech" guy. If your honest and say you need to hire someone to do that specific task, often people are ok with that.
I follow this simple guide when hiring someone to do something I don't understand.
1. Explain to me how you would solve problem X, in as many steps as possible. I make them walk me through it, and ask for more and more detail. Usually spending about an hour.
2. If they have no problems getting into the details, then we set a roadmap and schedule and I check in periodically to make sure we are staying close to it. If they can't stick to their own plan... I move on.
3. If they could give me enough detail to start with, and too much of it was, I'll have to do research or figure it out when we get there, I don't hire them.
4. This results with me having a solid bank of IT people I can outsource problems too, and in tern executives depend on ME to deliver actual results.
That doesn't sound awful, but it actually is. I get to spend extremely little time doing something I could potentially be great at, WEB DEVELOPMENT. And I know the people that work for me, think I'm an idiot and don't understand why they don't have my job.
I try to ask questions and get domain knowledge as I go, but unless you are a genius or spend many years, its just too hard to know everything. And I can't pretend that I'm an expert at managing people, because I'm not. I just do those 4 steps, and then try to be friendly. That's it.
I feel like I'm stuck managing a team of people, when I would rather be an intern for a master developer.
Because traditionally that's the only way to get better comp' once you reach a certain point. In most companies, regardless of your IC and management skills if you don't step on the management track you're going to cap out pretty fast.
I was once literally told that I wouldn't be considered for career advancement because I was "a do-er" and too useful doing the things that the incapable-of-doing-things managers told me to do. It never even crossed their minds that they should give the do-er a say in what things should be done. I don't work there any more.
If you want better money, or just to get paid the equity you're worth, you are forced into management roles.
Yeah, but the flip side is that "has an MBA" is equally sloppy. Anybody who's ever had a paper manager that "doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground" knows that while hiring an MBA might get you someone who is good enough at managing people, if they have no understanding of the core business -- or worse, no capacity to understand the core business -- then they can't lead.
Leadership and management are two very different things just like leadership and expertise or management and expertise are two very different things.
But if you can handle the amount needed, you can still rise. Just seems to be a lot slower and harder to rise as an IC.
The mechanism would work this way: sales people exhibit multiple features, and they are promoted based on some combination of those. If a sales person has outstanding other credentials, they might be promoted despite poor sales percentile. Those other credentials might actually be better predictors of managerial experience. Conversely, many of the top sales people might have been promoted on the grounds that they were good sales people, without exhibiting any other skills.
Note that there might still be a positive correlations between sales skills and managerial skills, but due to how the promotions are selected, you end up observing a negative correlation in the promoted group.
At least where I am, there’s no management role I could go to that would make me happier or better paid.
A big thing about management is knowing how to keep people engaged and motivated, with freedom to be creative but enough oversight so they're kept on track and not lost. You'll have to experiment with this. Also importantly different people need different guidance, so the experienced old hand needs little advice just steer them in the right direction, where the new guy needs daily help.
Many people just want to be mangers, even disregarding the salary. I would take a management job anytime even if my salary is reduced and even if I'm not competent enough.
What do they think that I'll be productive in my current role forever? NO. I'm productive now so that I can be a manager someday.
What's an "IC"?
You have junior people who are evaluated according to arbitrary metrics. So they try to put in a process and get a bunch of people to give feedback. So now you have these people getting evaluated according to arbitrary metrics in an overwrought process. You have overhead and barriers and all sorts of politics in place just to prevent a junior engineer getting promoted to mid level with slightly less experience. The impact to the company of doing that is negligible. The impact to the employee can be negative, but if they don't make that level fairly quickly they get fired anyway.
I'd say the impact of that person giving up and quitting and getting the next level at another company is worse. Now you have lost someone you put years of effort into.
I've seen this first hand. Surveys showing that a majority of engineers don't know what it takes to get to the next level, don't believe they can make the next level on their current team, frustration with promotion processes. Orgs arbitrarily deciding to ignore new guidelines because they think they are too easy. All because of a lack of transparency and a broken process, developed as a result of the dreaded peter principle.
No different than shitty interviews powered by false negatives because "it's too costly to hire someone bad".
I find it very interesting that Google then interviews with programming challenges...
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Every industry has certain euphemisms for the least savory aspects of its business. In sales, there is the secretly ugly phrase, “goal-oriented.” That sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? If I point at a woman and I say, “That entrepreneur is goal-oriented,” then you probably think I am complimenting her. But if I point at her and say, “That entrepreneur is a lying, manipulative, soulless psychopath who brutally exploits labor from the eleven-year-olds she employs in her sweatshops in Indonesia,” then you probably think I am insulting her, unless you are a libertarian. And yet both statements mean about the same thing: that she is someone who is willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure the success of her business.
When I read about Milburn online, I’d seen testimonials from his colleagues in which he was often described as a goal-oriented salesperson. That probably meant that he was a master of manipulating other people’s emotions. He knew all the tricks: praise, shame, laughter, anger, promises, guilt, threats.
Whether his use of these tools was conscious or unconscious is, of course, unknowable. But it doesn’t matter much. A lifetime as a sales professional left him with an arsenal of psychological ploys that had become second nature to him.
...Milburn truly had a genius for the strategic use of anger. If he sensed the risk of losing control of the conversation, he would indulge in another outburst. If I were to ever switch over to the Dark Side, I would want to study with him. His techniques were fundamentally dishonest and manipulative, but that is probably what made him so good at sales. And his tactics were probably an effective way to drive a sales team, but I sincerely believed that such tactics were the wrong way to run a software development team. Especially when doing something cutting-edge original, like we were doing, I think open and honest communications were extremely important. (I have worked with many companies where the sales team was both friendly and successful. One does not need to use abusive tactics to have success in sales. Indeed, the sales manager who relies on abuse is typically more interested in aggrandizing their own success, rather than the success of the company they work for.)
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
The problem is, you're being very valuable doing something that you don't actually want to do. You may not feel that it is emotionally rewarding. You may just want to do what you like. That's fine; I'm not trying to argue with that. But don't feel like an incompetent or a failure at what you're doing. You're not.
It reminds me of George Carlin's bit on "Shell Shock"/"Post Traumatic Stress Disorder".
It's pretty funny to me. I don't give a shit because I'm just riding this out until I have to get something else or I get a few more clients for my startup.
Oh, everyone's 401k got stolen by a friend of the CEO's kid. So that was nice.
I get paid, so I don't give a shit either. They're just funding me while I work on side projects.