| So what happens when you get promoted and are not qualified for the job? What happens to their reports that have to deal with an unqualified manager? What happens with the organization? I work in a half technical (hands on development)/half customer facing role in BigTech - cloud consulting. I was a software developer mostly working at small companies until 2020. There were never any promotion guidelines and I knew to make more money I needed to job hop. For context: a “work stream” is a series of task meant to achieve an outcome. Depending on the complexity of a project, it can have multiple work streams. The expectations are for the first 3 levels are: An L4: you’re expected to be able to gather requirements from a customer and understand their business needs for one work stream. Help implementing a solution and present the solution to the customer. If you can’t demonstrate that you can do that as an intern, you won’t get a return offer. The problem is well defined. You are not expected to design the solution without help. L5: You should be able to do what the L4 does and lead a work stream, design the solution, implement it, and manage your own work and customer delivery. The problem is mostly defined (ie low ambiguity). You are expected to be able to define the solution. L6: All of the requirements of an L5. But you should be able to manage multiple work streams in a project and here the problem is not well defined (high ambiguity). At each level it is about increasing “scope” and “impact”. Do you suggest someone be promoted without proving they work at the next level? How will that affect the customer? Just because you’re good at taking orders when everything is spoon fed to you (L4) doesn’t mean you can design and manage an implementation. Are you going to let an L4 with no demonstrated skill loose on your AWS account? Be responsible for your HIPAA compliant implementation? An L5 that can handle their work well, show a deep technical understanding and can manage their workstream is not necessarily good at managing multiple related work streams (more scope), nor does it mean they can handle pre-sales work unassisted (high ambiguity). |
You learn it as you go. Like some of the most succesful managers and CEOs to ever be (including Jobs, Bezos, and PG)
And if you can't learn, you get put somewhere else.
>What happens to their reports that have to deal with an unqualified manager?
As if most managers aren't already incompetent anyway...