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Nah, this is wrong. Management is a discipline in its own right, and teams function better with management. It's not a slight to say that teams need a lead, either. I'm sure that developers can self-organize and use their personal leadership skills to help guide the team, but that isn't optimal. In my experience (as a manager), here's why: 1. First and foremost, it takes time to lead. If I have a 6-8 person dev team, it's far less efficient to spread out the overhead to all of them rather than concentrating it in one person - the lead/manager/whatever. 2. Related to #1, what we really want is to let our best developers... develop. It's my job to keep them out of useless meetings and bureaucracy, and even the smallest of companies have bureaucracy. I deal with the roadblocks, you write code. 3. Management is a discipline in its own right. I have a technical background, but these days I should not ever be the best developer on the team. I have a different set of skills and my job is to use them to enable good devs. By that same token, I would not expect any developer on my team to be the best manager. The only time I expect that is if the company thinks the best analyst/dev/whatever is logically who shuold be the manager, which is common, and incorrect. The manager is the best leader - if that's also the best dev, then go for it, but it is not automatic that best individual contributor = manager. 4. I've posted this before, but this bleeds into the idea of the "hands on" engineering manager/director. Terrible idea, for all of the reasons above. Pick one role and go with it - if you want a leader and a coach to develop your talent, then get a manager/director. If you want a senior engineer, hire that instead. Or both. But not the same person in both roles. None of this is to minimize the ability for developers to lead. There are lots of smart developers out there who also have good leadership skills and have made the transition, but none of them are good manager simply because they were good engineers. Consider the reverse, you'd never assume someone can plug in as an engineer simply because they are a good manager, it's absurd. I think it's inefficient to have someone do both, as management and engineering skillsets don't overlap all that much. You need each other, I promise. |
I also fully agree that management is a discipline that is overlooked; often oddly by managers themselves. I attribute this phenomenon to my observation that many managers in startups growing into the role rather than coming from a formal MBA type background. I would go one step further and say that a manager doesn't necessarily have to be a leader either, with leadership being another unique discipline.
A lot of comments here cover similar ground by using similar titles for different roles, which is understandable as different organisations have different needs and may assign a title that is not the most appropriate.
The author basically makes the same argument by admitting that different scenarios require different skill sets such as mediation, architecture, advocation, etc. However, the author takes a idealistic view that admits ideally any competent team member should be able to step up to the role when required.
In my experience though, in an organisation that requires structure, predictability, and on a compensation level as well, dedicated titles are important. It becomes even more important depending on the broader organisation and national culture. For teams that come from countries with high power distance, the difference in having opinions come from a "team leader" versus a co-worker can be received quite differently.
Therefore, I think the article has been able to create such an active discussion is because of the circumstantial nature of an appropriate answer. Coincidentally such discussions are often a trigger for teams to wish that there were a leader who can make a decision and for others to fall in line so that everyone can get on with actual work.