[tgma]

> I'd say that good engineers becoming good managers (esp. upper managers) is the exception, not the rule.

Good managers are exceptions, period. Still, good engineers are leaps and bounds more likely to be effective as managers, even if they make managerial mistakes. This is probably even more true for high level executives than line managers.

There's a common bigco school of thought that does not say this explicitly, but believes "nerds are bad managers," so if you are good at engineering you're less likely to be good at management, so let's go hire pro managers (that end up being schmoozers and less technical). In my experience, the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management.

[lnsru]

Technical founder sold a company (where I currently work) to a big corp. Big corp sends here regularly directors with MBA to fix things, but things are worse and worse every year. People ask me why I joined a company in free fall every week. The thing is that technical understanding of MBAs is close to zero. Result will not improve throwing away 15% of the employees (the guy before current director did this). It’s obvious to me as an engineer with experience in operations - the products are not designed for easy production and manual testing takes too long and has bad error coverage. I have experience to fix obvious technical problems. No MBA will see them in first place. No MBA with their arrogance will listen to an engineer. Let’s wait for recession to end and look for new jobs.

[oneshtein]

Talk to your manager manager. Talk in manager's language. Be rich. :-/

[silvestrov]

It's a very common business school line of thought that managers are always smarter than the people they manage. Employees are seen as "resources", not as talents.

So by definition nerds (and other non-business school people) cannot be as good.

[packetlost]

I had a conversation today about that topic sorta. I find the abstract tradeoffs of writing software (ie. efficiency vs flexibility) to be inherent to company social structures as well. I suspect the intuition that engineers build up of knowing when to favor either side is applicable, just with different error signals.

[YZF]

There are a lot of similarities between software and organizations. But being a CEO also requires people skills. Many of us software folks have good intuition about how to make technical projects successful but the way to get there often involves getting other people to cooperate. AKA leadership. That's the tough one.

That said I agree that a CEO of a company like Intel has to be technical. I mean we saw what happened to Apple when the CEO came from Pepsi. But you need someone technical, in the domain, who is also a strong leader and a visionary and those people are not that common.

[PittleyDunkin]

Reminds me a lot of Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[bjarneh]

> the less technical managers have been bozos AND bad at management

The golden combo.