Managers Don't Understand the Field They're In

From @qkd+1jwdzEeK - not sure if I agree about the stereotype statement on "The ones who master their craft and continue being practitioners of it are not usually best suited for dealing with people problems.", otherwise it's a great post.

The ones who turn left towards management at the fork in the road typically wanted to stop keeping up with the technology and tools of the company years ago, but they like the culture. The ones who master their craft and continue being practitioners of it are not usually best suited for dealing with people problems. I'm not knocking either and can understand both motivations.

However, this forces early career folks to take orders from (1) a MANAGER who doesn't understand the field they're in and (2) a bunch of MASTER CRAFTSPEOPLE whose roles and authority over them aren't quite clear. Are they mentors? Are they bosses? Etc. Navigating this dynamic is confusing at best, and torture for many.

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Our PM just learned how to login to GitHub.

The problem is IBM keeps putting people with absolutely no practicitoner experiences in managerial positions. These practices need to meet today's modern technological standard and not from decades ago. They blindly put those managers based on a lateral band levels and hope for the best, but those managers without practices cannot lead by example because obviously they have no experiences in the field they are in. In stead, they hold multiple unproductive meetings with fellow confused managers without coming to an ideal solution then they communicate their clueless solution to their teams. They also make bad hiring decisions due to lack of practical knowledge. Infinite bad cycles. This is not limited to technical roles but also other areas in IBM.

Well, I know one thing ... if the leadership at IBM was managing for shiitt, they couldn't catch a whiff ....

Fair point. I didn’t mean the master craftspeople were unfriendly or particularly bad with people—more that their interest and motivations for staying weren’t particularly people-based.

I wish there were more technical leadership. Usually the best people for the job don’t want to do it unfortunately.

On the Red Hat side the problem is too many people promoted from engineering technical roles that have no idea how to actually manage people.

In my experience, technical managers come from advanced areas such as:

Blockchain
Unified neural networks
Threat detection
Thrombosis
Security threat posture detection
Ennui data modeling
Xamarin endpoints
Jetrinisc intelligence
Olyphant managed services
Yasuragi query language

But if you stay as an IC too long it gets really hard to make that move into leadership.

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Managers Don't Understand the Field They're In

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