[charles_f]

> As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types.

That. Same for all the decorative functions with low value added.

> make management non technical

This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.

> making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding.

There is little that revolts me more than people working in technical companies, and seeing themselves as above the technical layer. I don't mind people not being software engineers, a lot of them are great, willing to learn a bit of context in order to do their job efficiently and facilitate mine. The same way I learn about the other functions. But I've worked with quite a number of managers, PMs and TPMs who talk down to me the moment I tell something even remotely technical, like I'm some sort of amateurish geek only tolerated at the adult's table. I do my best to stay away from these folks.

[vegetablepotpie]

MBAs succeeded in making management a distinct discipline that has been divorced from the work, only connected through metrics and KPIs. If you cannot talk to them on their terms, they are happy to impose sanctions on you.

They’re very effective at solving first order optimization problems. Increasing revenue and reducing costs can all be done in a spreadsheet. This is the value they contribute.

If you’re dealing with problems that are closely coupled, are non-linear, or have emergent phenomena, their contributions are not just ineffective, they’re counterproductive and destructive. You need creative, skeptical, and technical people for these problems. Closing feedback loops and building fault trees help you more than a Gantt chart and flashy buzzwords.

[znpy]

>> make management non technical

> This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I used to have a manager (who later became vp) that was technical, and it’s been the worst. Of my professional life so far. He would dictate the technical solution and shut down every initiative, making people below him mere executioners. No room for dissent, he had the last word on everything.

The problem being, this person worked for like ~5 years as a developer, then became a manager, then got in charge of infrastructure.

And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency.

So prod infrastructure was essentially at a hobbyist level (everything in the same subnet, some dev stuff along with prod stuff, no network segmentation, a number of things implicitly relied on virtual machines not being rebooted or getting the same ipv4 if rebooted, dns was a patchwork etc). In all this he avoided solutions that he wouldn’t understand (no matter if people below him would understand them). Oh and he would have the console access to cloud services and the authority to do all the testing he wanted, we did not (hence perpetuating some thoroughly artificial knowledge gap).

So yeah… having a technical manager can be awful.

[Kbelicius]

GP: "This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business."

You: "And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency."

[hx8]

> But I've worked with quite a number of managers, PMs and TPMs who talk down to me the moment I tell something even remotely technical, like I'm some sort of amateurish geek only tolerated at the adult's table.

You're working with the wrong people.

[pdimitar]

Problem is, there are many many wrong people on management positions out there.

[charles_f]

I'm a terrible judge of character, that's for sure