Management Training

[Paul Makepeace]

On 5/5/07, Merijn Broeren <merijnb at iloquent.com> wrote:
> Quoting Nic Gibson (nicg at noslogan.org):
> > People get promoted into a management position because of their
> > professional/technical expertise. Sadly, brilliant programmer X is not
> > going to be brilliant manager X. In fact (s)he might be utterly
> > pissed off manager X because they're now in the position of not
> > using those skills (to some extent).
> >
> I'm sure half this list has just muttered 'Peter Principle' under their
> breath. Wikipedia link for the other half: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

There's quite an easy--theoretically and operationally--way around
this which is to have programming and management rewarded on an
orthogonal basis. I.e. be paid to be an awesome programmer who has no
management responsibility, or paid to be an awesome manager who does a
bit of programming, or just be an awesome manager, or anywhere else in
that space.

Once you make it two dimensional with neither axis weighted (i.e.
management isn't seen as "more important" or vice versa) the problem
is much reduced. I've seen my peers go on management tracks, take on
those roles, do it for a few months and then go back to pure tech
roles after deciding it wasn't for them or they just wanted to get
back down to relatively more coding for a while. So if you allow
fluidity along the axes the problem reduces every more.

P