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."
Unskilled, Skilled, and Specialized Labor (Score:4, Interesting)
Unskilled labor has the greatest disparity between the value, and the cost, of labor and management.
Skilled labor, like data entry or bricklaying, has a somewhat lower disparity.
Specialized labor, like software engineering or acting, compensation ratio runs from something like 10X one way to about 10X the other way.
Many companies in software engineering have high end software engineers who also understand business managing their software engineers, in which case the manager is usually paid more. Some have high end business people running the developers, and the manager gets paid more. A lot, though, have project managers who are actually doing the management of the programmers, and they get paid less.
It is still common in software engineering, in the project manager case, for there to be a high end software engineer or business person as the formal manager. That person gets paid more and is above the software engineer in the org chart, but the day-to-day task management is done by the project manager.
So, in short, if you want to get paid more than your tactical effective manager, go work someplace that has project managers.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
The one variable I've noticed that is a better predictor of success than anything else: how good is the team?
So we can logically conclude that Software Mangement has two very important roles that do correlate with success:
Age discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
The question has nothing to do about leadership and everything to do about age discrimination. What they're getting at is they won't hire you for typical skills (Java, C#) because they can get someone else younger and cheaper. They would be willing to pay more for a manager, but guess what, they're not actually hiring any managers because they only promote from within.
The way to beat age discrimination is to do all of the following:
Re:Leadership Styles (Score:5, Interesting)
Lord Farquaad of course. He sent Shrek on the quest, married the woman he wanted, and did it will all the evil pointy-haired management techniques required by modern business.
His big mistake was failing to invest in appropriate levels of dragon defense.
Wrong. Everything is correct in what you said, except identifying Farquuad as a leader; it shows your confusion between leadership and management. In a very terse statement, the difference is illustrated by:
* management - about doing things the right way (take care about the logistics of the process: time, resource, quality at the least)
* leadership - about doing the right things (if the course/actions are not perceived as right, the team will refuse to enlist their entire support).
Re:Yes and NO (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in similar shoes. I am a creative individual who wants to stay in the creative field. I have no interest in being a people-manager, balancing time off requests in the schedule, and having spreadsheets open all day.
This isn't because I cannot do that job. Instead it is because I have no interest in doing that job.
The OP gives the questions: '(1) Have you been a leader in a project? (2) Why after these many years, you are not in a management? (3) Do you lack leadership skills?'
My answers are: (1) I have been a leader, but I have not been the manager. I prefer to create and innovate rather than monitor schedules, balance time off requests, and ensure others are working. (2) I am not in management because I prefer creating things and the creative process over the process of herding workers. And finally, (3) Leadership and management are different tasks; I can lead and mentor others, but I am not interested in management.
Of course if the OP was applying for a managerial position, there is an alternate take. He might consider answers like: (1) I have been a leader but not a manager, management is always pyramidal and up until now I was content with being a producer; now I'm interested in managing people. (2) I am not in management because in the past I wanted to be a producer. Now I'm looking to stop doing engineering work and start managing people, schedules, and tasks. (3) Leadership and management are different skills; I have never been a people-manager before, but I have been a leader and brought many projects into existence.
Re: Leadership (Score:5, Interesting)
"You've been an engineer for a number of years, why haven't you decided to push paper for a living, by now?"
Sounds an awful lot like miserably married people with children asking people who enjoy their lives "when are you going to get married and have children? Why haven't you squired out children, yet?"
Management sounds miserable, frankly. Since when has liking the career and field you've chosen become a negative? Do we go around asking MBAs "so, you've been a paper-pusher for five years, now, how come you haven't picked up a keyboard and started coding?"
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Being a good manager takes a specific skill set. One of the best development teams that I've seen was run by a person who wasn't an especially good coder, but was a great project manager, protected his people from outside interference, and did all the paperwork that would have otherwise bogged down his staff.
Re:If the music industry were like this (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm the opposite - I've turned down being promoted to more 'management' type jobs several times in my career, exactly *because* I would rather be doing real technical work. In my last job I was the 'defacto team leader' that everyone else would come to with ideas, looking for my input & 'blessing' that it was a good direction to go in... and the boss liked it because I kept a lot of the daily technical stuff off his plate - while he played the politics, managed the budget, etc - and I kept being a technical guy.
Unfortunately there really aren't a lot of paths for things like that in most companies... you reach a certain level, and if you don't go to management you're 'stagnant'. Downside to that last job (which I just got laid off from) is when a new boss came in, he wanted to micromanage everything (even though he had almost no technical skills), my role was marginalized to nothing and I was eventually laid off because I wasn't willing to kiss his butt like others. I actually had the "gall" to tell him when he was wrong and his ideas wouldn't work or were a really bad idea (which they pretty much turned out to be...). And, well, at 'pushing 50' most companies expect that I'd be a manager by now, even though it's not something I've *ever* wanted.