On 23/04/2015 11:00, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
Chris J Dixon writes:


However, the other end of the scale, where promotion is based
only on engineering ability, is not without snags. There was a
time when my chief engineer and engineering manager, whilst both
excellent engineers, had no management skills. This was such a
shame, as their real talents were wasted, and their ineptitude
diminished the work of those in their charge.

Yes, this is common - people keep getting promoted until they reach
a level at which they are not compitent, and then stay there. It's
not helped by most companies having a structure where you can only
be promoted a little before becoming a manager. I was lucky to work
at Sun Microsystems, where there were equivalent management and
engineering roles at every level up the hierarchy, which is how you
retain the world's best engineers without forcing them to do
something else they are often no good at, or losing them.

At one point in my career, we had a management team from Westinghouse
parachuted in to run a "technical support" group made up of a couple of
hundred high quality UK engineers and scientists.

We waited for this with considerable skepticism. They came from all
sorts of backgrounds, only one of them was Ivy League, but they were
outstandingly good managers. If you went to one with a problem, they
found a way to fix it. Like Sun, they had parallel hierarchies for
engineers and managers. I have no problem being managed by someone half
my age (and probably on a lower basic salary) provided they do it well!

(This was in the days when BNFL owned Westinghouse Nuclear, before they
sold it off).

(One of them had been a captain of a nuclear sub. He had a nice story
about being asked by a Russian if he had ever visited Vladivostok and he
was able to say no, but that he had sat off-shore spying on it for a while).