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> An additional clue: Not just the immediate managers of the worker bees, but going up the chain of management there should be people who understand the technology. There's a natural (and I think fundamental) inversion that happens as you go up the leadership chain. The first level of supervision almost inevitably knows more than the most junior employee about their area of work. (Think a senior developer mentoring a new college hire.) That may hold for two levels, but at some point, management is about breadth and not depth. The head of technical operations probably came from networking or systems or storage or database or communications, but probably didn't come from ALL of those, so is unlikely to know more about networking than the head of networking AND more about databases than the head of databases, etc. In fact, they may know next to nothing about some particular field of ops and yet still be the right choice to lead operations. (I was in this position in a prior role.) So you get this weird situation where at the junior levels, the supervisor knows more than the supervised. At the more senior levels, that's usually inverted. And then you get people who determine that the senior person is clueless because they know more about their specialized field than the boss. IMO, it's unreasonable to expect the CEO of Boeing to be an expert in finance, operations, aerodynamics, manufacturing, supply chain, engine design, certification rules, avionics, landing gear, radar, flight controls, and the 100 other disciplines needed to make Boeing work. I see no reason to think that technology is extra-special in that all managers of technologists need to be world-class technologists. |