Petered
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I didn't go into management because I didn't think circumstances were stable enough. I did see four co-workers go up the ladder, with disastrous results. Two of them I tried to warn, the other two would have been a waste of time to warn. By the time I retired, two had been fired, one drank himself into a coma, then passed away. The fourth is still working, but became so hated, the company keeps moving him to different posts. All four of these cases were promoted by management personnel who were "people persons", but were terrible decision makers.
There's an old saying, "Ain't nothing to it, if you're born to it." I know it's too simplistic, but it's based on a lot of reality.
I experienced burnout before but dying because of work sounds very extreme.
Organizations where they get away with this are miserable to work for, and their influence ensures nothing merit-related ever happens again. Literally the source of the famous expression “A-people hire A-people, B-people hire C-people”.
Here is it straight from the source: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_recr-2/
What’s your interpretation? What do you connect it to, if not management?
Both is fine, these are just different jobs. However, the problem is that the manager is 'above' the engineer in the generally accepted hierarchy. Consequently, engineers are pressured to become managers for the development. As long as this hierarchy exists, the problem will exist.
My experience has been that those who are too precious about the only role they've ever had (an "engineer") are difficult to manage precisely because of their inflexibility and lack of curiosity. It's ironic isn't it?
It's not as absolute as you make it sound. Also because managing a team shouldn't require you to make very technical decisions. You should obviously know what you are managing but if there is a decision to be made, the people who spent hours on that subject will be your best experts and their guidance is essential.
In soccer coaches usually handle the strategic side of things and they have dedicated coaches who handle more player-related things. I think this is how a good manager in a normal company should work too. Make sure the team works as a team and take strategic decisions but not handle the nitty-gritty technical stuff.
This is a point I came to make. Different jobs also different skillsets. A good solution taken on by some industries is decoupling promotion and salary rises by having separate engineering and management streams where both have similar opportunities for career progression but you can stick to the actually job that you yourself are best suited for. People who have the people/social/political/organization/high-level-view skills and like exercising them can go into management, and those with focus/deep technical expertise/creative problem solving skills, can stay in engineering. People do usually have bits of both of these, but you know if you are stronger in one or the other.
I would encourage you to try to setup a place where no hierarchy exists and see how it goes. In my experience people have wildly different opinions on multiple (even minor) things and without someone to "take a decision", things end up just going in circles.
Of course, if the person taking the decisions repeatedly takes decisions that have a negative longer term impact (much easier to asses on longer term than at the moment you have to take the decision), something should change, but that can include contributors looking for other companies ...
You put agreements/processes in place to make decisions in a flat hierarchy, and as last resort business (PM) makes the calls.
Senior engineers and above, they need to know all the engineering skills, but they are most of their time not being engineers, they're being a people person. They're talking to others, they're explaining to other developers what's going on, how to do their job. There is somewhat difference as the manager is thinking only about the organization structure and how good people are, whereas the senior engineer is thinking about how to use people to make the engineering parts better.
In others, it's about who you know.
But when it comes to internal promotions: it's a mix of both, and promoting people who are likely to boost your own career is an obvious choice.
When someone incompetent is promoted, people below them see their incompetence. However, the people above the promoter only see the promoter's incompetence.
I have no idea what this is saying. What does “being impostered” mean? As far as I know, “Imposter Syndrome” is all about personal insecurities. It’s not something imposed.
A year in I got the only negative review of my career, and knew I couldn't keep doing this. I was so stressed I developed trigeminal neuralgia. I had to leave. A friend was looking for developers and I jumped at the opportunity. It was technically a demotion but probably one of the best choices I've made in my life.
All these years later, I'd love to take a second crack at it. I am a lot more capable and mature and I think I could handle it better now. Combine that with not really enjoying the work now that everything is AI driven and it might be time to give it another shot.
For example, getting promoted to "senior developer" may mean higher expectations than just "developer". But you may also be expected to architect parts of systems, mentor more junior staff, provide guidance etc. Even more starkly, if you get promoted to something like "team lead" or a more managerial/executive level position, your need to be focus more on prioritization, managing people, etc. Very different skills than writing code.
Further down, the author wrote:
"The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm."
At which point, I have to admit, I said "WTF?" in my head. One could just as easily say the transformation into "syndrome" is rooted in a society that has shifted from focusing on actions and accountability to one that focuses ever more on inner-feelings as what is important.
However, one thing to note is the senior level positions, the higher you go, the more you're a people person. A low-level developer can think about architecture all day long, but because they never talk to anyone about the ideas, discuss if it's really good or bad, understand the pros and cons of the ideas that others have, they're going to remain a low-level developer. This is why senior developers move in and out of management very often in a lot of companies. The jobs are not nearly as different as people would imagine. In both cases, you're more a people person than a technical person. It's just that as the senior developer, you still keep that developer hat on and write code, whereas as a manager, you're only a people person.
This doesn't contradict the Peter Principle, which doesn't imply you're increasing competence on a single axis.
In its most bare form, the principle states that people get promoted until they get stuck at a role in which they cannot adapt and do a bad job at. It never states it's a single dimension of competence or incremental over their last role.
Only when I’ve reached a position that I can’t learn to do, I will stop being promoted
Competency is about you, but it's also about the competitiveness of the organization.
Not every business has the ability to promote to satisfy everyone's ambition.
The book mentions the case of the guy who "accidentally" parked his car in the big boss's spot once a month or so, to forestall promotion.
I feel like actual competition is severely lacking leading to people not having an reward for success or consequence for failure.
That's very different from company environments.
The Peter Principle is also unfortunately an overly simplistic model. Yes, some people can get promoted to a level where they technically can't cope anymore, but ability is rarely the measure by which people advance (except at the lowest grades where your political power is almost nil).
Really feels shoehorned in.
Indeed, the more transparent a system is, the better it works toward its goals, since issues can be identified and fixed quickly. Of course, the nodes within the system that profit from obfuscation are determined to avoid real transparency across the network, as it would easily upend their parasitic game.
If we apply this to the global economy and society, we can see how billionaires, monopolistic companies, and other rent-seeking nodes wrap themselves in layers of obfuscation: PR, propaganda, media relations, politics, NDAs, patents. They then use those obscured resources to maintain and expand their illegitimate resources further through methods like lobbying, politics, tax loopholes, specialized laws.
Therefore, transparency is fundamental for any operating system to stay healthy, distribute power evenly, and avoid succumbing to the exploitation of a few power-aggregating parasitic nodes.
Very often, the cause of imposter syndrome is that there is, in fact, an imposter. It just ain't YOU.
It sounds like you're saying that someone else is making you (the receiver of the advice, not you, jrm4) feel incompetent. How are they doing so? Shifting the blame for their own incompetence? Trying to push work on you that really should be their work, but they can't do?
And, how would you detect this? By realizing that it shouldn't be your work? But that takes knowledge of how the organization should run that a person with imposter syndrome isn't likely to have. Even more, isn't likely to be confident that they have.
About the first, being manager is not inherently a more difficult job than being a senior IC. It's just a wildly different skillset.
About the second, reaching a position you can't do does not at all mean you'll never be able to do it. We learn.
The right insight there is that the switch to management as a necessary step to grow is horribly handled. But "leader as a profession" sucks as well, managers fundamentally ignorant of the kind of work they're managing.
I think what we need is a more fluid relationship between work and learning. We assume a college->work pipeline, when maybe we should have career stages at which we go back to further learning.
I personally like self learning, but I've met way too many cases of managers that were great engineers and awful at people management. At the end of the day the truth is nobody explicitly taught them the new required skills.
We shouldn't base the system on their first reports being guinea pigs while the manager wings it.
This seemed always baffling if someone openly "confessed" suffering from the imposter syndrome.
It is like calling yourself a "skeptic" and taking joy in dismantling other people's beliefs, yet reacting with extreme sensitivity the moment your own convictions are touched upon. Or if you were really paranoid, you would be unsure of everything (even of your paranoid state) so you wouldn't just confidently drop that label in conversation doing so usually serves as a polite excuse for being a "control freak" which in turn serves as an excuse for something else and so on.
In a broader sense this touches upon a deeper cultural issues around appearances and self-identification. In (a lot of) different cultures one rarely talks about an internal state in an abstract, systematic almost clinical manner instead a wide breadth of colorful almost childlike language is used to describe rising and ebbing feelings while at the same time one's actions are observed very diligently and somehow quietly tallied over time.
Under those circumstances, you can bluff, obfuscate or outright lie and it matters very little so long as your actions are deemed good conversely if you present yourself as genuine, "authentic," and vulnerable while your actual deeds are horrible: out you go. So overall there is less "flexibility" and more "accountability".