[ragona]

> understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively.

Wait, saying "no" to upper management _is_ managing upwards. If you have a high performing team you can damned near ignore them as long as you're paying attention to what matters to them so that you can manage up effectively and keep bullshit off their place. If you have a team that needs a lot of help then yes, you have to focus on managing "down" -- but that's the less common scenario in my experience.

I suspect you're defining "managing up" as "brown-nosing" -- which is just managing up ineffectively. Being good at managing up and out is honestly the bulk of the job at most organizations; engineers can usually just do their thing.

[halfmatthalfcat]

I didn't say that there is no managing up, only that managers should be focused on managing down while simultaneously pushing back against top-down bullshit. I've usually seen managers just focusing on the later (whether it's ass kissing, career gunning or from bullshit) while neglecting their team.