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Comment by larrywright | Hacker News Reader

The most fascinating part of this for me was how deeply technical Craig is. He's more than just pretty hair.

That actually carries over to most levels of management at Apple, the Managers are just really good Engineers with a few extra scheduling skills..

I'm always baffled why it's so common that the person in charge of something is often the person with the least direct knowledge about how it actually works.

It makes more sense to me that companies should be taking quality employees and providing them management training, as opposed to hiring somebody with a "management" degree who has little to no knowledge of the actual work that's done.

I guess that's just a symptom though of workers changing jobs more frequently.

"Doing X", and "Managing people doing X", are two pretty distinct skills—and interests. If you find someone really good at doing a thing, why would you pull them out of that position? Odds are they won't be good at it, and they won't enjoy it. There are people who enjoy both, but they're rare.

Exactly. Find someone not good at X then have them manage a dozen people doing X and pay them 50% more.

I'm reminded of Plato's Ship of State metaphor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State) here whereby the people who come into power are not necessarily the most skilled, but instead those who are most skilled at getting into power. Nobody would disagree that somebody who is both good at management and of a strong technical mind would be the ideal candidate, but usually it is just somebody who is good at getting promoted.

This was also the case with Scott Forstall.

Bertrand Serlet too, who was the original author of OS X's malloc() implementation used during his tenure.

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