[BuckRogers]

That's because management is one of those fields that most people think they're qualified for. If you got arms, legs and are literate, many think they're cut out for it.

Same goes for teaching or education in general. So many wannabe educators writing or producing programming lessons that clearly have never studied education theory. A notorious one or two out there as well. Art or professional grade creative endeavors are probably the same way for the vast majority.

Unless you're some sort of savant, no one gets away with shortcutting the learning involved with anything. It's just kind of blissful ignorance.

You don't know what you don't know and it becomes a strength since most are too unmotivated to ever do things the right way, in a well-informed, disciplined manner regardless. To those who are in those fields though, it's painfully obvious.

[JdeBP]

On the contrary: One of the long-standing problems in engineering, technology, and indeed many other businesses (from nursing to Nickelodeon) has been what to do, when the traditional career progression was seen to be "next, you are promoted into management", with the large number of people who did not want to go into management.

Lots of people have been considering themselves unsuitable for management for decades. This is a problem that people were talking about in the "systems" world back in the 1970s and 1980s, and that is neither the only area that it was a problem in nor the earliest time that it was mentioned. Have a snippet from the Journal of Systems Management from 1980:

> The systems professional who wants to remain within his job, i.e., does not care if he is promoted, is one who sees his main purpose as contributing to the profession. But many professionals and many organizations feel that one must get promoted to a management position, for if one does not want to be a manager he is not ambitious. This reflects itself in many organizations when the annual review time rolls round, or when one wants to change jobs.

If your company today has an organization structure where entering management is not the only promotion path, decades of mulling and lots of people not seeing themselves as management is the cause.

[bradknowles]

With respect, no -- not everyone thinks that. I would be a horrible manager. And I know plenty of people who feel the same way about themselves.

I am totally happy leaving that job to someone who is better suited for it.

[perl4ever]

Many people may not think they are qualified to be a manager.

However, it seems plausible to me that of the people who think they are qualified to be a manager, most are not.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It seems obvious that coding and managing are different jobs, and being good at one is not associated with being good at the other.

Good software team management is a superset of coding skill. Not only does the manager need to have reasonable - not necessarily outstanding - developer skills, but also needs to have good people skills, good political skills, a feel for context and strategy, and an ability to improvise creative solutions across all these domains.

The idea that someone who is good at coding should be promoted to management automatically seems bizarre. It's like expecting someone who is good at mountain biking to be good at driving a tank.

So is the idea that management can be measured with "objective" metrics, such as locs, time on/off, bugs killed, and so on.

In fact it's horrifically difficult to quantify the business ROI of software teams or of individual developers. ROI often depends on decisions made higher up the food chain, and it's even harder to get upper management to take responsibility for the consequences of bad decisions and bad attitudes.