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> I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this? Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the time

This is a feature of a well run business, you want to be able to change your executive teams without negatively impacting on the rest of the business in the short term.

> These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

Sure in the early days of the product this is the case, but these are exceptional individuals who have transitioned into executive roles over time. They have spent the time since building up a management culture and organization capable of running a billion dollar company, which is not easy to do, and is more than a full time job.

I think you grossly misunderstand what executives do, both long term and day-to-day. At the end of the day a company is mostly just a group of people, with a set of assets. To grow and evolve beyond the current products you need to cultivate this group into a team that can consistently bring success.

Ok, so if team can work without suit then it was because suit was doing great job. So you are saying we need to pay suit 20 times an engineers salary so he doesn’t have to be there and team keeps producing. I get it now.

Right on - although most execs don't get 20x the comp as an engineer these days.

> if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group

For a short to medium time, sure (and I think the better the exec is the longer his team will be able to work successfully without him). In my experience most successful execs build teams that build good products.

Remove the exec and the good team still builds good products, but it usually starts rotting (e.g., good technical people are frequently not good at handling people issues), then snaps as good people leave and what is left cannot build anything anymore.

Most good exec contributions are not visible at the technical level (there are some exceptions as you cite), but they still create an environment where smart engineers find it fun to work productively. It feels like some magic is involved in this -- I do not have this skill, but I have seen it in action a few times. Just my 2c.

> These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

Jobs isn't a great example to make because he wasn't an engineer either and he very much "took the credit for the work of others" (as you put it earlier).

However Jobs is a great example of the value of "suits" when you have an exec who is actually bloody good at what they do. I've worked with project managers and CEOs who have been excellent at their job. I've also worked with some who haven't. And some of those who didn't work out was more down wider company politics than their own ability to perform.

You see, you cannot make accusations that all execs are the same pedigree of worthless cannon fodder. In fact many of them are developers and engineers, like ourselves, who have risen through the ranks (either via successful startups like Musk or through the more traditional "hard grafting"). Some are project managers et al who have proven themselves. And yes, some are just useless - but you get good eggs and bad eggs in all industries.

Jobs was a GREAT engineer. He was hired to do electrical circuit work for Nintendo and despite the fact he smelled horribly (because he rarely showered) and wore flip flops, he was still called on by customers to solve their problems reliably. All great managers are deep down in details and know their products inside and out, probably better than any individual engineer. My definition of suits are managers who feels knowing details of their products should be left to engineers and their job is, you know, “managing”. Scully was a classic suit. Jobs wasn’t.

Jobs was hired for a Breakout game for Atari and got Woz to do most of the technical work on that job for him.

"Steve didn't ever code," writes Wozniak. "He wasn't an engineer and he didn't do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs."

You're providing the perfect type specimen for what OP was describing...

To try another avenue to convince you: Presumably, Jobs(?), Musk, Page, and Brin were, once upon a time, technologists just like you. It's somewhat certain that at least some of them shared the mindset you're showing.

Considering they ended up hiring lots of managers, it stands to reason they changed their opinion at some point.

I tend to value the opinion of people who have shown the ability to change their mind over those that never have. Add the credentials these people bring, and I'm tempted to accept the idea that managers have something to add to the success of software companies.

I am not against having managers and hierarchy. I am against the idea that one can hire a random suit and that suit doesn’t have to know much about either the sausage or how the sausage is being produced. And all the credit of producing sausage will still be attributed to the suits for their “leadership” and “vision” along with salary worth 20 people who actually put in the work.

You are clearly an example of what I was talking about.

You judge the utility (or lack thereof) of these positions while never having had one yourself. Luckily, it's the top management of a company that choses who these are and not engineers.

It's clear from claims like "if 80% of those people disappeared you would see absolutely no change" that you have no idea what their role is.

When you say "most suits had no clue where source code existed" you just fail to realize that that's good. It's not their job to know this, it's an engineer's job.

You talk about their "known contribution" as if it's a general sentiment, but show no proof of it being other than your personal opinion.

In fact, it's clear from statements like " Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners" that you have no idea about how valuable talking to customers is for a company.

And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.

DeusExMachina speaks the truth.

Bad leaders can ruin great teams and great leaders can turn around weak teams. I've seen/done it myself. Without fail, when I switch out a weak manager for a better one, the team improves. When groups have no manager they might produce, but usually not well or as well as they could.

Management isn't around because some conspiracy made by managers to perpetuate themselves, but because it works. No effective group of people is truly leaderless.

Pure managers (ie non technical managers) tend to hire other pure managers. They tend to over-amplify role of management vs technical problem solving. They often believe later is just “commodity” while projecting management skills as rare mysterious abilities. It is not an accident that pure managers at CVP+ levels are able to command more compensation than entire team of 20 people. This phenomenon is purely because pure managers keep projecting management as some sacred priesthood. In all teams I have worked I have known people who can easily do CVP job at quarter of the cost and twice the efficiency and technical chops. Despite this you see these inefficient people taking away massive funds. Why do you think there is no conspiracy?

That's bad managers hiring other bad managers. It's not a conspiracy; it's incompetence.

The problem likely goes all the way to the board of directors who should hold the CEO accountable to build a culture that doesn't let bad managers exist in the org (by coaching or removing them).

A lot of companies have this problem, and it's a major dysfunction, but make no mistake, it's :bad: managers you have a problem with, not "pure" ones. I know a ton of great non-tech leaders who do amazing work of leading technical teams because they build the team around that. You get the lead engineer(s) to run the tech leadership while empowering them with autonomy / resources / support and holding them constantly accountable to well defined goals.

Management isn't rocket science, it's just a lot of hard work and discipline. It is its own craft and a very challenging and rewarding one if it suits you.

You are exactly the type I am talking about. For some reason these management types think of themselves as worth 10 engineers bestowed with some mystical powers called “managing” while having little clue about what was supposed to be produced. This is typical MBA culture and interestingly you also fail to enlighten all of us low links about what your role was supposed to be. Also, noticed that I talked about meeting other suits at customers/partners. This is not same as actual customers. Suits typically only meet other suits. Have you seen how badly designed and almost unusable some websites like banks and Fortune 500 are? That’s typical example of suit never using his/her own product, let alone meeting actual customers.

BTW, knowing where your code is and how to build it is important. It tells you basic health about your engineering process. A good technical manager instinctively knows that anyone should be able to build a product or there is something very wrong. A suit will delegate and hope everything is workings out. If you managed sausage factory and if you had no clue where your factory was, that would be odd. Right?

About the “hard decisions”, suits needs to hold them accountable for those results. This could be done either by getting mega salary cuts or even just resigning for producing a massive failure. I have rarely seen suits getting affected when they had to make “hard decisions”.

> And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.

Layoffs are an effect of organizational dysfunction. In which case, the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of management. It’s just that there is a perverse incentive structure in most corporations, so 10% of the team gets laid off to continue to pay for the exorbitant bonuses and lifestyles of management.