Ask Slashdot: Is Development Leadership Overvalued? 252
gspec writes "I am an engineer with about 14 years experience in the industry. Lately I have been interviewing with a few companies hoping to land a better position. In almost all those interviews, I was asked these types of question: 'Have you been a leader in a project?' or 'Why after these many years, you are not in a management? Do you lack leadership skills?' Sometimes these questions discourage me and make me feel like an underachiever. I found an article in which the author talked about exactly this, and I agree with him. I think in this modern society, especially in the U.S., we overvalue the leaders and undervalue the followers to the point that we forget that leaders cannot do any good if they do not have good followers."
Leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a damm good Indian!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Leadership value (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's nearly impossible to over-value great leadership. I think the problem is that some tend to over-value the people in leadership positions (regardless of their actual leadership skills.)
Re: Leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
We always have 'project leads' that are there to help guide development on common path and to break ties between competing ideas. It is more than just telling people what to do, it is about building consensus. That's what leadership is.
So answer the question (Score:5, Insightful)
"I haven't taken a leadership position because I don't want to. I like being a developer, not a manager, and I want to stay as close as I can to the work."
It's not a bad thing to assume that, in 14 years of work, you would acquire skills that you'd be able to pass on to others. You'd naturally assume a mentorship position, with leadership organically flowing out of mentorship. But that doesn't have to happen, and as long as you convince the interviewer that a lack of desire for leadership doesn't have to correlate with a lack of desire for work, you should be OK.
It's a hostile question, sure, but those come with the territory in looking for a job. As with most other hostile questions, the best way to disarm it is to politely disagree with the inherent assumption.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
But the submitter and article aren't even asking whether or to we need managers. This is about the idiotic notion that all leaders should be managers, and that management is the only career option after senior engineer, and that there is something wrong with those whom do not choose that career path (except perhaps the few gifted individuals who become principal consultants or CTOs). This appears to be the case in most modern organizations, but if you turn away an experienced engineer just because he is happy not to be a manager, you are wasting talent.
Re:Leadership value (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Leadership value (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you answered what the FP asked. Yes, truly great leaders have an immeasurably large benefit to an organization. A great leader can take a run-of-the-mill team and get top-notch results out of them... I didn't think much of Steve Jobs as a human being, but if I had ever had the chance to hire him to lead a project/team/company for me, I would have done so in a heartbeat.
But does everyone need to try to lead? TFA makes an excellent example with Jane the furniture-maker - Jane did well because she kicked ass at making furniture, not at managing people; moving into a leadership role actively hurt her company's productivity and the quality of its output. I would say the exact same thing about my own programming skills - I love programming. I eat, sleep, breathe it. In my free time outside work, I write code for hobby projects. At the same time, I have zero interest whatsoever in telling other programmers what to do, or filing paperwork that talks about programming, or trying to explain to complete non-programmers (aka "the board") for the fifth time this year why they can't have a complete in-house replacement for Win7 by next week, no matter how much the CFO didn't like his new laptop that came with Win8 on it.
So I don't think the FP meant in any way to minimize the value of good leadership; rather, he wondered why our culture shuns people who simply strive to do to the peak of their ability.
From a certain point of view (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't leadership, necessarily. The problem is who is attracted to leadership roles.
It's a job that pays more, for less actual work, doesn't require keeping up to date on the latest and greatest tech, and is transferable to basically every sector. You can manage an IT shop or a machine shop, without any knowledge of coding/scripting or how to operate a CNC Machine. And if things go wrong, deadlines slip, code comes out half baked... you can shuffle around the blame on poor workers below you, and upper management above you.
Management also stresses politicking and shmoozing over any quantifiable skills or abilities. Are you a good manager? Bad? Who knows? A good Indian can make a terrible Chief look good, and vice versa. And if that terrible Indian got the job because his/her parent works for the company in an even higher management role, well ...
Management also attracts corruption. Or perhaps it's just the power that corrupts, but either way I've seen more than my fair share of managers direct purchases of hardware X over Y because they have a family member who works for company X. Or simply because a friend uses that brand. Regardless of any tangible reasons, technical or monetarial. I'm sure we've all seen the nepotism rampant in certain fields, and in certain companies specifically. (anecdotal : there's a rather large chip manufacturer here in San Diego that will remain nameless, but might have a football stadium named after them : during new-hire orientation, they out and out asked "how many people here have a friend, family member, spouse, etc working for the company that got them this job," to which nearly the entire room raised their hands)
All this adds up to managerial roles that reward lazy, corrupt, blame-shifting, individuals. Not in spite of these traits, but directly due to them. And we wonder why sometimes management roles seem overvalued.
Re:Leadership value (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So answer the question (Score:4, Insightful)
I would argue that any senior developer must have leadership skills- if you think your ideas will be taken up by other members of the team based purely on technical merit, you are sadly mistaken.
Self worth (Score:5, Insightful)
Often the key programmers were damn good and while not project managing would apply project management skills in discussions where features were prioritized etc.
Typically the worst teams had a very structured and detailed leadership org-chart. Junior programmers, Senior programmers, project lead, project manager etc.
Often the managers in these situations had become managers through 3 routes. One was seniority, where they had just put in a bunch of years and then one day they were managers. Were those good years or bad years, nobody seemed to care, did they have a knack for leadership, nobody seemed to care. The second route was they were horrible horrible programmers and just moved into management as a way to not get fired as terrible programmers. And the third were refugees from other departments. They would close the call center and suddenly the call center manager was in charge of development. These last managers were usually the worst. The skills that served them well were usually all political and cunning. Thus they saw all smart programmers as a threat. Some programmer might actually want to manage, would take a course from the PMI and were fired in 3 seconds.
As I said, the best managers were often barely managers at all. They knew exactly what they wanted and that was the bulk of their management style. They would repeatedly ask, "Are we making progress to what I want?" Then they would look at everything, cut through the technobabble and either be happy or not. But the key here is that they knew Exactly what they wanted. This is only a shade different from the aloof manager who sort of knew what they wanted. Those projects turned into a pile of sick in the first week. The goalposts would move daily with feature requests being a classic game of buzzword bingo.
I witnessed a moment that would be hard to replicate; a project had failed around 5 times over as many years. So the head of marketing temporarily took over the development department of around 20 programmers. He said, "You can form into teams of any size and you don't have to have anyone on your team you don't want. Also there is no seniority. So if the two newest guys want to form a team then fine. But whichever group makes me happy before September(5 months) will form the core of a new programming department and I will lavish a bonus on you that will make my top salesmen jealous. Also if I hear any complaining you can clear out your desk. And again, your goal is to impress me. Not anyone else in this company. If someone tells you that you are doing it wrong tell me and I will tell them to clear out their desks."
A team of 4 guys (all with Junior programmer titles) won in just over a week. My favorite complaints from the largest group of soon to be ex-employees (9 were fired) was that there wasn't any documentation, the wrong language was used, and that their coding wasn't to company standards.
So to answer the original question. Often the worst companies are looking for someone to pigeonhole into their complicated org-chart; while the best companies are looking for someone who will fit into their squad. Most companies are crap at development BTW and don't seem to care.
Re:Leadership value (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's nearly impossible to over-value great leadership. I think the problem is that some tend to over-value the people in leadership positions (regardless of their actual leadership skills.)
That's the response that I expect from the majority of Slashdot, but I have to disagree. The concept here is that it's us (the developers) verses them (management). We've all been burned by bad management, and is more the norm than the exception. But a good leader/manager, with technical skills, can be worth 100 engineers. How do you ask? Well one engineer can only do the work of one person. But having 100 engineers working on a project that is pointless, has no potential, has no value, that is a waste of 100 people. A good leader is one who gets those engineers working on worthwhile projects, playing interference from those trying to sabotage it, and make sure that the result is complete and used properly. These leaders are few and far between, but you know the names of those with successful, groundbreaking, and influential products. We use them every day. And those would never have come to being with even the best engineers working without direction and constant interference.
Leadership is a valuable skill (Score:5, Insightful)
After close to fifteen years of experience, it is a reasonable expectation that a competent developer has enough experience to contribute to a team effort. IT is very much a technical trade. There is an expectation of a master / apprentice style of relationship between senior team members and their junior counterparts. It is strange to have fifteen years of experience and not having demonstrated some quantifiable leadership traits.
You are at the point in your career where you are going to hit a salary cap if you do not want to step up and be a bigger contributor to the teams you are a part of. I know guys in that position and they are comfortable there. They are making six figure salaries and are okay with the trade off between a smaller paycheck and not having to deal with all of the project management and personnel / mentorship expectations that come along with leading teams.
Leaders are over valued because there are so few of them. Good leaders are hard to come by. There are plenty of people in leadership positions who should not be there. There is an old saying, "The person who wants the power the most, is the last person who should be trusted with it." There are plenty of people with degrees in "management" who do not have experience with the work the team they are managing is doing. In IT, those people are deadly. They have no idea what it takes to really get the job done, because they have never done it, do not know how to do it, and do not have any interest in learning how to do it.
Look at yourself. You do not have, or do not seem inclined to manifest, leadership attributes. There are a lot of people like you. A lot of followers who want others to lead. I just hope you are not the kind of follower who complains about other leaders, without being willing to be a leader yourself.
I moved into a management position after thirteen years in the trenches. I now have a staff of three (and growing). I provide guidance and advice to the CIO, and to IT staffs at Fortune 50 corporations. At this point in my career, my experience and ability to articulate in why the company needs to pursue a given IT initiative is significantly more valuable than my ability to push buttons, develop scripts and deploy a specific technology. My ability to vet vendors and see through the smoke and mirrors because I have enough successful implementations under my belt is more valuable than my ability to implement a given technology.
Management sucks and it requires some specific skills to deal with the levels of suck inherent in management. There are so many "leaders" who cannot even meet deadlines, or develop project plans, or articulate what their team spent the last week doing, and what they will be doing for the next week. There are plenty of leaders who say YES to everything because they cannot understand risk or do not know how to define the scope of a project.
Given your nearlly fifteen years of development experience, if I were looking to hire you, I would expect that you have been on enough teams to know what works and what does not. I would expect you to be able to run a team. I would expect you to be able to setup a source code repository. I would expect you to be able to manage an SDLC. In short, I would expect that you can do more than just crank out good code. What else are you bringing to the table? What good habits are you going to impart into the rest of the team? If your answer is, "I am going to show them how to sit in a cube, do their jobs and not contribute beyond that." the odds are I am going to pass you over for someone else who wants to be a senior level employee.
I was once told that a good leader empowers their employees, and then gets out of the way and lets them do their jobs. Can you help the people who you work with be better at what they do? If you can, grow a pair of balls and step up to the table. If you cannot, accept it and focus on what you are good at.
Re:If the music industry were like this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several other skills that definitely matter:
Management is easy to make fun of, but there's a definite difference between good management and bad management.
Software management positions in a company are useful as a place to put the bad people on the development team, without having demoralizing layoffs.
Yeah, umm, I'm gonna have to go ahead and sort of... disagree with you there. The trouble is the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If the boss is a lousy developer, then he'll have no way of determining which of his employees are good developers and which aren't. If you want to keep a well-performing team from being demoralized by a bad developer, first coach, then reprimand, and then if nothing else works fire the bad developer. If you want to kill a good team, promote a clueless person, because that sends the clear message that the path to career advancement is being clueless rather than being successful.
Re:Yes and NO (Score:2, Insightful)
. It is much harder to lead a squad of riflemen than it is to be a riflemen.
There are many squad leaders, but there are few elite snipers.