[abadger9]

I'll say something I wish someone told me in my 20's: most leadership/upper management is poor. I've worked at FAANGs, a unicorn, and currently @ a company that recently IPO'd. Most people in product leadership neither really understand how to make original ideas that effect the product at a high level or the technical details of the product, their responsibility is to be good stewards of a certain revenue stream and not mess it up and maybe grow it by x%. Most engineering leadership above the staff level is usually better at "aligning" with upper management and that's why they're kept around.

The main exception to this are some startups with strong/technical founders (however I've recently had conversations with recent yc & techstars founders where this isn't to be assumed) and biotech startups where a PhD/MD is needed to develop the initial idea.

[borroka]

To paraphrase, it is not that most leadership/high management is poorer than expected, it appears poorer even when it is expected to be poorer than expected.

At some point between the ages of 20 and 30, you begin to believe that, although it is difficult to point out what they are better at than you or your peers, in order to be in the position they are in, "leaders" must be better in some way--say, in the technical skills, the strategies and tactics used to achieve a goal, the personality that inspires subordinates--than you and your colleagues.

Then, perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly, thanks to age, experience, and new, maybe more jaded, eyes, you realize that the words, strategies, and perspectives communicated or elaborated by those "leaders," which you thought were nonsense but had decided to consider something you simply did not have the tools to understand, were, in fact, nonsense, delusional thinking, intellectual garbage.

And, at that point, you may try to understand how it is possible for such important companies to have such incompetent leaders. But that is another story.

[ryandrake]

Im convinced that a lot of leaders, especially in tech, are leaders not because they are smart or skilled, but simply because they were there early.

[borroka]

This is empirically verifiable and, dare I say it, quite visible.

It is also a virtuous circle: you come in early, you are promoted because there is virtually no one else around, or you are chosen as the best among a group of fairly mediocre people--maybe they use a die to choose who will become the new "leader" of the group--and in a couple of months you go from being just another IC to a rising star.

You are quickly recognized as such and, in an environment with very loose feedback cycles such as management in the technology sector, you are free to fake your way up to the top. As soon as you are exposed, if ever, you can recycle yourself elsewhere as a true and proven leader of vast experience.

Or, assuming you are not very good at leadership in absolute terms, you do a good job anyway because most management is skirting responsibilities, taking advantage, in a good way, of colleagues and the machinery that makes the company work, and, most of all, going with the flow.

[dasil003]

The reason executives talk the way they do is because when you’re speaking to thousands of people everyone has different base context and interprets things a little different. Messages need to be coarse grained and contain little nuance. This is at the heart of all politics.

It’s easy to assume therefore that the words are intellectual garbage, but that’s not always the case. In fact there’s no way to tell competent and incompetent leadership apart just from speeches they give, but make no mistake the distinction exists, and as an employee it’s critical to ferret out the answer over time as you will learn entirely the wrong lessons if you work for muppets for any length of time.

Fortunately good leadership does exist. It is usually built over decades of a solid skill foundation (ie. Experts leading experts) rather than MBAs, and the top skill is sniffing out bullshit. Of course every company has a mix of people, but in healthy ones there will be a critical mass of competent people and they generally know who each other are and keep things pointed in the right direction.

[borroka]

I think that "messages need to be coarse-grained and contain little nuance," as stated in the comment, is a comforting thought, but it has little truth to it. I just have observations, many of them anyway, and not any proper experimental or observation study, but reflecting on them has changed the lens through which I look at leadership and management.

When you say in the previous comment that "it's easy to assume that words are intellectual garbage, but that's not always the case," I see the position/authority bias at work: it can't be nonsense, they are the leaders, what they say has to make sense, if only seen in the context of having to speak all day, or to dozens, hundreds, thousands (unlikely outside of politics) of people every day.

Or look at the layoffs at Twitter, Meta, Google, etc.: even if they seem to make little sense (some of the decisions anyway) in the way they are done, somehow they have to make sense, either because the layoffs are a "blunt instrument," or because the shareholders are asking for something particular or whatever.

I would like to bring an example. A person in my company was hired in a management role, overseeing a function for a group of hundreds of people. As soon as they gave their first "speech," it was clear to my shrewd eyes that the words uttered made no sense, that they were lying about their past, their accomplishments, and that their skills were not what was advertised. If I focus my attention on what people do in a context where I am competent, it takes between very little and not much to assign them to a broad range of competence: incompetent, somewhat competent, okay competent, very competent.

Similarly, I've played a couple of sports at a high level, and if I see people training for, say, an hour, I can assign them to a level of competence, with little margin for error. The guy who does everything differently and originally is sort of an invention of novels and TV shows. Sometimes, very rarely, they show up in real life, so I might add a little bucket labeled "mysterious."

The executive hired by my company fell squarely into the category of incompetent. But because the executive had been hired into that management position by people deemed competent (they weren't, that's why it was a flywheel, a charade), my colleagues considered the executive competent for years, despite the obvious nonsense. It was rather bizarre to observe, but position bias (and "whatever" bias) is as strong as many of the biases related to physical characteristics that we carry around with us all day, every day. And when I tried to explain to my colleagues what I had seen, they did not believe me. I think they still don't believe me.

[dasil003]

You’re conflating competence with the realities of messaging at scale. In reality they are not related as both competent and incompetent leaders at large corporations have to speak in a somewhat wishy-washy way to account for the widely varying contexts that a broad audience holds.

[hgsgm]

"Leaders" are good at one thing: communicating in a palatable way to other leaders. It's a skill, and it is useful to an extent, but it isn't worth the "2x-10x pay because boss has to be paid more than reports"

[Balgair]

I remember Obama talking about this. I'll (poorly) paraphrase:

'When I first got into politics, I thought it would be like the rest of life. You know, when you see a great NFL player, he's a lot better than the college guys, who are a lot better than the high school guys. Same with pianists. The guys in the concerts are some of the best of the best. But that wasn't true in politics. The people that were really good at politics had no bearing on being senators or dog catchers. It was all a mixed bag.'

My apologies for butchering that.

But, I think that management is a lot like that. Peter Principle, yadda yadda yadda. We all know. But it's the expectation that your boss knows anything that really gets you. Gotta stop expecting your 'superiors' to know how to fog a mirror.

[hgsgm]

What did Obama think "good at politics" means? He conflated management with elections.

[ss108]

? I'm not sure you really get how the government works if you think it's susceptible to the kind of "management" we would like in the business context, or if you think winning elections to ram through various policy ovjectives isn't the entire point to a lot of people (of both/every political stripe). The system rewards quick wins, not governance.

[throwawaylinux]

The other thing that would probably help engineers is that business and management is extremely difficult, in a way more than engineering, and that whether or not a particular person or decision is good or bad is often times not something that many engineers have the information or capability to evaluate.

I'm a cynic about business and management, not a manager and will not be one, am an engineer, also partake in the usual bitching about managers and business decisions that we all do.

But a lot of the hate is not too rational, and a lot of times the decisions that engineers would prefer would be disastrous for the company. Also, engineers really hate to share any responsibility for commercial failures. It must be a soul sucking job to run a company or sell a product that is uncompetitive. Talk to any engineer about their pet company or product or industry with some notable failure (Boeing, HP, DEC, Sun) and the story is always the same, management and bean counters sucked the life out of it to feed wall street parasites. You hear very little about how their products were sub-standard, too expensive, or out-competed by other companies despite their also being beholden to MBAs and shareholders and pointy haired bosses.

[tw98521358]

The product suffers when resource priority shifts in the wrong direction. Often times management infighting and empire building becomes the business priority and the actual product is a secondary evil that needs to limp along to fund the empires.

[throwawaylinux]

The right and wrong direction are up for debate. Everything is an opportunity cost, so if the product is not successful or making money, then shifting resources away from it to something more productive may sink the product faster, but might not have been the wrong for the business.

I've not known many executive decisions like that (right or wrong) being made without any input from technical side of the business, perhaps not Joe shitkicker in the trenches but technical leads. and I've very rarely encountered a technical person who concedes that their project or product or team should be given fewer resources. Almost always the complaint is that if only they were given more resources, they could have been successful, which rarely understands business and market realities and often confuses cause and effect.

And the egos and empire building and infighting and so on are definitely a thing that happens, and they are definitely not restricted to management. Engineers and technical people are some of the worst offenders!

I'm not trying to absolve executives and managers here, but I do think some engineers need better perspective and yes some empathy with the business side. Almost no new engineer needs to be told that their leaders are poor -- they'll hear it from their coworkers in their second week on the job and continuously after that until they retire. What I've rarely if ever heard is "damn we shipped a real piece of crap here, it must be embarrassing for our executives and sales people who have to sell it and answer to our customers, we could have done much better".

[analyst74]

I have a very similar observation.

My belief is that when you have a group of extremely smart and hard working people competing for promotions, the ones focusing on managing perception and relationships will do better than those focusing on the business or product.

[nugget]

Big companies are all about politics, all the time, in my experience. Smart business/product decisions require many quarters, sometimes years, of discipline and commitment to pay off. Whereas a shorter term focus results in less headache, possible promotion, and guaranteed bonuses. If/when the company craters, you can just bail. The sign of a great executive is somebody who empowers their organization to think ahead of the next earnings report, and backs it up (and doesn't get fired themselves in the process). They're an endangered species.

[coffeebeqn]

It’s also harder to attribute something you did 4 years ago as paying dividends now. Heck you probably won’t have any people with context on why that was a good decision on the team anymore.

I joined two years ago so that’s just how things are done here as far as I’m concerned!

[andsoitis]

If the executive isn’t great, then yes the company won’t be great either. That, however, begs the question why you (one) would work there. Why accept low standards, average colleagues, meaningless work.

[tarsinge]

But perception and relationships is what will ultimately drive sales, because customers are people too. What's difficult is finding the balance between product, marketing/sales, and tech. An easy example but I find Steve Jobs really personified this, the marketing vision was an integral part of the product. The failure is favouring one over the other, and yes naturally in big companies the relationship people will take over, but startups too tech centric without customer culture regularly fail too.

[taeric]

There is no exception. Don't fool yourself. Nor should you fool yourself into thinking this means management is inferior/inept. Or that it is sales.

The reality is dumb people do not have a monopoly on dumb things. Nor smart on smart things. Timing and circumstance are impossible to separate from any situation. Are lucky people also skilled at taking the correct risks? Almost certainly. Is this a learned thing? I'm not sure.

My gut is it is learnable. But not if others are learning the same thing. What makes a smart choice is influenced by what everyone else is doing.

[WalterBright]

> most leadership/upper management is poor

Most everyone who is not in leadership/upper management has endless complaints about what idiots they are.

[pas]

I am doing management and I'm an idiot at it.

Because it's like child rearing, or teaching, or vim vs emacs but there are more choices and many more dimensions, oh and there's almost no data, big cargo cults (from Toyota Improvement System, Deming, Agile manifesto to endless books by those who made it in the last decade), uncertainty is high, general intelligence is low, the interpersonal skills deficit is mind-boggling, burnout/disillusionment/fanaticism are rampant, perverted/misaligned incentives too, and of course all of that is driven by fundamental business constraints and various other sources of path-dependence.

[ClumsyPilot]

Well, maybe they are right.

[tw98521358]

It’s because they are using the wrong metrics. The technical ability is not a strong contributor to success in leadership roles.

[tootie]

Everything in this guy's takedown of Google management is more or less endemic to human nature. It's not a Google thing. It's not a Silicon Valley thing. If you have a group of more than 25 people doing almost anything you'll see some version of the same story play out. A truly inspired and energetic leader can slow it down as well as a foolish one will bring it on quicker but it's still inevitable.

[ElevenLathe]

> most leadership/upper management is poor.

Further than this, I think the concept and framing of management as "leadership" is very clearly a scam. The people in charge are in charge -- fine, give unto Caesar and all that -- but we also have to pretend that they have a quasi-mystic property that makes people /want/ to follow their orders.

The average manager is average at being a manager. Lots are below. Very few are at the top end of the curve, at there's no particular reason that they would be the ones at Director/VP/C*O level.

[jensensbutton]

I'd broaden that to say most people working at these companies are poor, including the engineers.

Reality is most people are not the awesome standouts they believe themselves to be and truly strong leaders/engineers/sales people/product manager/etc. are extremely hard to find.