[wool_gather]

The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it's caused by bad management. Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. You are not considering the person/what they're good at. You're just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance.

One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason: it's how things are done, they really want to do it, etc. There needs to be a separate, equally status-conferring, career track for them if they're really not going to be good at managing people. They need to be convinced that the best thing for them is to stay where they are, being awesome. Which is probably hard. The idea that you are awesome, therefore you become a manager, get an office, etc. is pretty pervasive.

(The bonus would be that those of us who never, ever want to be managers no matter how much our directors want us to would have that career path available too.)

[BlackFly]

I remember seeing a paper that showed that at moderate correlations of "Good as an X -> good as a manager of Xs" you are still better off promoting people randomly. The reason being, promoting your best X eliminates your best X and does not replace them by a great manager of Xs, so you take a definite loss, at least some time transition until they become a functioning manager, and then a risk that they will never be as productive in their new role as they were in the last.

Definitely the solution is to decouple reward hierarchy from managerial hierarchy. Unfortunately, the people who would make that decision in most situations stand to lose from such a decision. There is too much focus on leaders when the best a leader can ever hope for is to allow the formation of a gestalt out of all the team members including themselves.

[collyw]

"Definitely the solution is to decouple reward hierarchy from managerial hierarchy."

Completely agree with this.

[throwaway84742]

I have never seen this “parallel IC track” work well. Basically the problem is, it is dramatically harder to advance on the IC track than on manager track. A demigod of compilers could easily be making less than a director, and there are a lot more directors than “demigod” ICs. After some point, the atmosphere becomes so rarefied and criteria so fuzzy that most people would be much better off in terms of both money and organizational influence if they just bit the bullet and became managers earlier. It’s a different job, to be sure, but it’s not actually that hard once you focus on it and emphasize the people aspect of it.

So my advice to those considering the switch is: if you are motivated by money and influence, management is basically the only option to advance without killing yourself. If you are motivated by technical challenges and couldn’t care less about the “people” stuff, however, be an IC, with the understanding that your growth will stall well before that of your former peers who went into management.

[justherefortart]

My favorite thing is seeing people I wouldn't hire to be a low level IT tech as CIO/IT Director because they're a "network guy".

So not only do they end up not understanding 90%+ of IT's functions in any real sense, they are typically not even trained on how to manage.

I work with one such moron at my current job. The entire company goes around the fool, yet they keep him. Why? The acting CEO is likely embezzling and competent IT might shine a light on it. That and the CEO outsources work to her husband's company for 10s of thousands a month with no deliverables or results (beyond what I suspect is the normal embezzlement in other areas).

I've been in this field for ~25 or so years. Maybe I'm jaded by working in consulting/contracting for most of that (and working for myself). I have never worked with an IT Director or CIO that I would personally hire for my own business in that entire time. Being technical enough to make the right decisions and having enough managerial experience/knowledge to be a good manager at the same time is extraordinarily elusive.

Another question is, how do people hire a CIO, when they themselves don't understand IT (or even want IT it seems). They guess or outsource it. I've never seen that work either.

[ghostbrainalpha]

I have the problem of being the "moron" at your work. I wanted to just be a web developer. It's the only thing I'm good at, and I'm not even really great. Just functional.

But people start to ask you for IT related things because you are the "tech" guy. If your honest and say you need to hire someone to do that specific task, often people are ok with that.

I follow this simple guide when hiring someone to do something I don't understand.

1. Explain to me how you would solve problem X, in as many steps as possible. I make them walk me through it, and ask for more and more detail. Usually spending about an hour.

2. If they have no problems getting into the details, then we set a roadmap and schedule and I check in periodically to make sure we are staying close to it. If they can't stick to their own plan... I move on.

3. If they could give me enough detail to start with, and too much of it was, I'll have to do research or figure it out when we get there, I don't hire them.

4. This results with me having a solid bank of IT people I can outsource problems too, and in tern executives depend on ME to deliver actual results.

That doesn't sound awful, but it actually is. I get to spend extremely little time doing something I could potentially be great at, WEB DEVELOPMENT. And I know the people that work for me, think I'm an idiot and don't understand why they don't have my job.

I try to ask questions and get domain knowledge as I go, but unless you are a genius or spend many years, its just too hard to know everything. And I can't pretend that I'm an expert at managing people, because I'm not. I just do those 4 steps, and then try to be friendly. That's it.

I feel like I'm stuck managing a team of people, when I would rather be an intern for a master developer.

[AnimalMuppet]

The ability to hire contractors who can actually do the work... that's a formidable asset to the company. You're not the moron. You're not the incompetent. You are actually very valuable.

The problem is, you're being very valuable doing something that you don't actually want to do. You may not feel that it is emotionally rewarding. You may just want to do what you like. That's fine; I'm not trying to argue with that. But don't feel like an incompetent or a failure at what you're doing. You're not.

[jessaustin]

Wow if accounting/finance can't find that level of embezzlement the CIO is the least of their problems.

[justherefortart]

Accounting is in on it. Everything they do here is cooking the books. They give the auditors doctored spreadsheets for everything.

It's pretty funny to me. I don't give a shit because I'm just riding this out until I have to get something else or I get a few more clients for my startup.

Oh, everyone's 401k got stolen by a friend of the CEO's kid. So that was nice.

[s2g]

No whistleblowing?

[justherefortart]

Lol, whistle blow to whom? No one gives a shit (including the owner). As long as there's money in the bank account...

I get paid, so I don't give a shit either. They're just funding me while I work on side projects.

[masklinn]

> One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason

Because traditionally that's the only way to get better comp' once you reach a certain point. In most companies, regardless of your IC and management skills if you don't step on the management track you're going to cap out pretty fast.

[taneq]

Exactly. This is the problem: That most company hierarchies are broken, in that they stratify themselves into managers at the top and "do-ers" at the bottom. If you do things (like directly create value or personally solve problems), you're a "do-er", and you are automatically subordinate to anyone who can't do things, anyone not doing things must be a manager.

I was once literally told that I wouldn't be considered for career advancement because I was "a do-er" and too useful doing the things that the incapable-of-doing-things managers told me to do. It never even crossed their minds that they should give the do-er a say in what things should be done. I don't work there any more.

[angersock]

I don't care about status so much as compensation. With most IC roles, you cap out pretty quickly in salary and equity pretty quickly regardless of performance.

If you want better money, or just to get paid the equity you're worth, you are forced into management roles.

[bluGill]

I know I'd be a bad manager, but I can still make more money as a bad manager than as a great technical person. When I look at toys I want (and the retirement I hope to get someday) it is hard to not think maybe I should jump ship - I might hate my job for a while, but overall I might be happier anyway.

[codingdave]

Good management would also mentor and coach people who get promoted. Being great at an individual contributor role is a good start to being a leader, but there are additional leadership and business skills and knowledge that need to be added on to successfully move up the chain. A leader who actively gives his newly promoted people those skills will help them grow to their full potential and avoid the Peter Principle. But if you just promote them and walk away... you are setting them up for failure.

[da_chicken]

> Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy.

Yeah, but the flip side is that "has an MBA" is equally sloppy. Anybody who's ever had a paper manager that "doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground" knows that while hiring an MBA might get you someone who is good enough at managing people, if they have no understanding of the core business -- or worse, no capacity to understand the core business -- then they can't lead.

Leadership and management are two very different things just like leadership and expertise or management and expertise are two very different things.

[wool_gather]

Oh, absolutely agreed. My ideal world has people moved (not necessarily "promoted") to manager because people up the chain know that they'll be good at it, and not for any other reason.

[s2g]

There really can't be, since people leadership becomes more and more required as you go up.

But if you can handle the amount needed, you can still rise. Just seems to be a lot slower and harder to rise as an IC.