[voidlogic]

>It's a source of constant amazement to me that people who will drill incessantly on red-black trees won't put in a modicum of effort to learn even a little bit about the inherently more complicated business of managing people.

This isn't really an issue if you promote an engineer to mgmt when they have demonstrated that can manage people, rather than before and assume they can grow.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

There's an alternative: put them in management and enforce mandatory management training.

A former employer of mine had a rule that anyone at a "management level" (including engineers of a certain rank, even if they weren't actually managing anyone) had to complete a set of training courses within a certain period of being promoted. As an engineer entering management, I found the courses to be surprisingly useful in terms of understanding and managing people and so did others. Classes like communication, negotiation, basic finance, employment law, etc.

Then HR decided they were useless and stopped offering them. And they went back to the state the GP is complaining about...

[omouse]

I would highly recommend this. I didn't understand why a WBS made sense to do or how to keep a list of risks, but after attending a project management class it made sense. Not only that, but as we worked through a project in the class, it enforced how tasks and communication work properly for projects.

Basic finance and negotation are a must.

It's amazing how many people don't have much training in these skills.

[voidlogic]

>There's an alternative: put them in management and enforce mandatory management training.

IMHO, I think your faulty assumption here is every good engineer can be trained into a good manager, and I think thats just not realistic...

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I'm not assuming anything: I'm saying that there's an answer to the question of how you put an untrained person into an unfamiliar environment: train them.

Whether or not a good/bad X can be retrained into a bad/good Y is a wholly different question.

[Tenhundfeld]

That's a fair point, but I think that clean idea can be messy in practice.

For one, engineers rarely manage people before they are managers. They might lead a team or be a product manager, etc., but those have different (albeit overlapping) challenges from managing people.

Another important factor is that in small or fast-growing companies, there's often not a formal promotion to manager. One day, you're the solo dev or maybe the you're senior dev of some secondary system. That system gets unexpected popularity/traction, and your manager starts throwing resumes or new recruits in front of you. And before you know it, you're managing a team, still trying to lead code reviews but also dealing with personnel issues, manage timelines, etc. You weren't really promoted. You were just the person in charge of this thing, and the thing grew underneath you. I'm not saying that's ideal, but it's something I've seen fairly often.

[kchoudhu]

You've got a chicken and egg problem here. The only way to train an engineer in this scheme is to have him manage people without having a clue, which necessarily implies breakage for the people working under him: definitionally a new person entering a specialized role has no idea how to carry out said role.

The only thing that fixes this is extensive training before promotion -- but this is anathema in modern corporations.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[voidlogic]

>You've got a chicken and egg problem here.

Not really, say you are a manager and you want to groom a good engineer to become a manager as well. Step one is, can they manage their own projects, step 2 is can they manage a project with 1 other, step 3, several others. Once they can do that and display moral and technical leadership, they are ready to be a manager.

>The only thing that fixes this is extensive training before promotion

When it comes to leadership and people skills, training can increase chances of success, but does not guarantee it by far.

[mizzao]

Another way to learn is to work for a great manager and pay attention, or work for a crappy manager and see the consequences of mistakes. The latter is painful, but also more instructive than the former.

[kchoudhu]

Life is way too short to spend time working for the abusive and the incompetent.

I prefer to mark the organization as broken and move on to greener pastures.

[mg03pa]

It'd be great if you were right, and it was that easy. But you're wrong, and it's not.

[kchoudhu]

I appreciate the appeal of Starship Troopers style leadership: "everybody drops, everybody fights" is wonderful for morale, but everyone needs to go read the book to see what needs to happen before it is organizationally feasible.

In the Troopers universe, promoted troopers are sent to a grueling OCS course that trains them to understand the ins and outs of leadership. NO technology organization I have been exposed to has had a similar training course for new promotes; leadership skills are assumed to blossom overnight upon promotion.