The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly (opens in new tab)

I remember seeing a paper that showed that at moderate correlations of "Good as an X -> good as a manager of Xs" you are still better off promoting people randomly. The reason being, promoting your best X eliminates your best X and does not replace them by a great manager of Xs, so you take a definite loss, at least some time transition until they become a functioning manager, and then a risk that they will never be as productive in their new role as they were in the last.

Definitely the solution is to decouple reward hierarchy from managerial hierarchy. Unfortunately, the people who would make that decision in most situations stand to lose from such a decision. There is too much focus on leaders when the best a leader can ever hope for is to allow the formation of a gestalt out of all the team members including themselves.

I have never seen this “parallel IC track” work well. Basically the problem is, it is dramatically harder to advance on the IC track than on manager track. A demigod of compilers could easily be making less than a director, and there are a lot more directors than “demigod” ICs. After some point, the atmosphere becomes so rarefied and criteria so fuzzy that most people would be much better off in terms of both money and organizational influence if they just bit the bullet and became managers earlier. It’s a different job, to be sure, but it’s not actually that hard once you focus on it and emphasize the people aspect of it.

So my advice to those considering the switch is: if you are motivated by money and influence, management is basically the only option to advance without killing yourself. If you are motivated by technical challenges and couldn’t care less about the “people” stuff, however, be an IC, with the understanding that your growth will stall well before that of your former peers who went into management.

My favorite thing is seeing people I wouldn't hire to be a low level IT tech as CIO/IT Director because they're a "network guy".

So not only do they end up not understanding 90%+ of IT's functions in any real sense, they are typically not even trained on how to manage.

I work with one such moron at my current job. The entire company goes around the fool, yet they keep him. Why? The acting CEO is likely embezzling and competent IT might shine a light on it. That and the CEO outsources work to her husband's company for 10s of thousands a month with no deliverables or results (beyond what I suspect is the normal embezzlement in other areas).

I've been in this field for ~25 or so years. Maybe I'm jaded by working in consulting/contracting for most of that (and working for myself). I have never worked with an IT Director or CIO that I would personally hire for my own business in that entire time. Being technical enough to make the right decisions and having enough managerial experience/knowledge to be a good manager at the same time is extraordinarily elusive.

Another question is, how do people hire a CIO, when they themselves don't understand IT (or even want IT it seems). They guess or outsource it. I've never seen that work either.

> One problem is high-contributing ICs who think they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason

Because traditionally that's the only way to get better comp' once you reach a certain point. In most companies, regardless of your IC and management skills if you don't step on the management track you're going to cap out pretty fast.

I don't care about status so much as compensation. With most IC roles, you cap out pretty quickly in salary and equity pretty quickly regardless of performance.

If you want better money, or just to get paid the equity you're worth, you are forced into management roles.

Good management would also mentor and coach people who get promoted. Being great at an individual contributor role is a good start to being a leader, but there are additional leadership and business skills and knowledge that need to be added on to successfully move up the chain. A leader who actively gives his newly promoted people those skills will help them grow to their full potential and avoid the Peter Principle. But if you just promote them and walk away... you are setting them up for failure.

> Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy.

Yeah, but the flip side is that "has an MBA" is equally sloppy. Anybody who's ever had a paper manager that "doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground" knows that while hiring an MBA might get you someone who is good enough at managing people, if they have no understanding of the core business -- or worse, no capacity to understand the core business -- then they can't lead.

Leadership and management are two very different things just like leadership and expertise or management and expertise are two very different things.

There really can't be, since people leadership becomes more and more required as you go up.

But if you can handle the amount needed, you can still rise. Just seems to be a lot slower and harder to rise as an IC.

That certainly fits what I see. Managers are a separate class in larger companies, similar to officers vs. enlisted in the military.

> similar to Google's observation that success in programming competitions is negatively correlated with job performance

I find it very interesting that Google then interviews with programming challenges...

If Google knows that success in programming competitions is negatively correlated with job performance, then why Google organizes codejam and invites participants with good results to a job interview? Also as mentioned above Google interview questions looks like problems from programmings competitions.

True, and someone who is a great salesperson probably has skills that are optimized for the context of sales. But another aspect of getting promoted is that a person is given oversight of new kinds of activities, where teams work with different cultures and different rules. I've seen some sales manager succeed by being bullies to their sales team. But I think it is a disaster when someone attempts to bully a tech team. So what works in one context fails in another context. I've tried to describe this previously:

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Every industry has certain euphemisms for the least savory aspects of its business. In sales, there is the secretly ugly phrase, “goal-oriented.” That sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? If I point at a woman and I say, “That entrepreneur is goal-oriented,” then you probably think I am complimenting her. But if I point at her and say, “That entrepreneur is a lying, manipulative, soulless psychopath who brutally exploits labor from the eleven-year-olds she employs in her sweatshops in Indonesia,” then you probably think I am insulting her, unless you are a libertarian. And yet both statements mean about the same thing: that she is someone who is willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure the success of her business.

When I read about Milburn online, I’d seen testimonials from his colleagues in which he was often described as a goal-oriented salesperson. That probably meant that he was a master of manipulating other people’s emotions. He knew all the tricks: praise, shame, laughter, anger, promises, guilt, threats.

Whether his use of these tools was conscious or unconscious is, of course, unknowable. But it doesn’t matter much. A lifetime as a sales professional left him with an arsenal of psychological ploys that had become second nature to him.

...Milburn truly had a genius for the strategic use of anger. If he sensed the risk of losing control of the conversation, he would indulge in another outburst. If I were to ever switch over to the Dark Side, I would want to study with him. His techniques were fundamentally dishonest and manipulative, but that is probably what made him so good at sales. And his tactics were probably an effective way to drive a sales team, but I sincerely believed that such tactics were the wrong way to run a software development team. Especially when doing something cutting-edge original, like we were doing, I think open and honest communications were extremely important. (I have worked with many companies where the sales team was both friendly and successful. One does not need to use abusive tactics to have success in sales. Indeed, the sales manager who relies on abuse is typically more interested in aggrandizing their own success, rather than the success of the company they work for.)

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

Most devs going into management need to spend less time coding and more time communicating. Another thing is I've found doing testing is a good way to see the quality of what people are doing.

A big thing about management is knowing how to keep people engaged and motivated, with freedom to be creative but enough oversight so they're kept on track and not lost. You'll have to experiment with this. Also importantly different people need different guidance, so the experienced old hand needs little advice just steer them in the right direction, where the new guy needs daily help.

Pay attention to people. Assume technical competence until proven otherwise. Ask your people where they want to go, and then figure out what they need to do to get there. If they want your job bring them to all the training you need to take now. (there is a lot of training out there are on how to be a good manager, the good stuff is backed by science) If they want to be a better developer help them in that. If they want to retire as a software engineer, make sure there is something meaningful for them to do.

Wow, indeed! That outlier at the 5-ish% sales mark needs more study.

Individual Contributor, i.e. most of the value you are creating for the company depends on your individual work, by opposition to a manager, which rely on a team.

Individual contributor