It's an oversimplification to say they "should have never been" a leader. In truth, they could have used specific training in prioritisation, delegation, and emotional intelligence. I find it's rare that this sort of training is provided. Instead, good performers are thrown into the deep end to see if they can hack it.
This might be true in a harm mitigation sense, but really "leadership" itself is a scam invented by the people who benefit from hierarchy. It is a way of mystifying the relationship between you and your boss (or commanding officer, or politicians, etc.), attributing an abstract quality to them that justifies their position over you, rather than the truth which is that the only thing different about them is their position in the hierarchy. It serves the same function as the divine right of kings.
Nobody should be a "leader". Maybe we can't avoid hierarchy (because societies/groups that don't use it tend to be outcompeted by those that do) but we don't have to sprinkle it with holy water and pretend it's sacred.
As I see it, there's management and there's (technical) leadership.
Management comprises:
- Performance evaluation (inc. salary negotiation, promotions etc...)
- General admin (sick days, annual leave)
- Fostering teamwork, communication, and individual learning
- General management workflow (prioritisation, goal-tracking, delegation etc...)
- Hiring and firing
Technical leadership comprises:
- Contributing vision and ideas
- Technical guidance to management (e.g. giving technical feedback on interviews or individual performance)
- Code ownership and responsibility (e.g. maintaining conceptual coherence)
With really good internal systems, you can obviate a lot of the management duties. But companies generally find it helpful to have someone who takes ownership of them for each team. You're right though, those people do not need to be framed as "special" or "higher up" than individual contributors, nor does it really make sense to give them more perks.
I was actually trying to make a larger point about how the entire concept of leadership is a scam, even "technical leadership". People are clever, or charismatic, or whatever, but leadership describes nothing in particular. It's pure propaganda, and we should all feel bad when we use it as if it were a real concept (and I'm guilty of this myself). Here, you've defined "technical leadership" as basically just "being a software engineer". We are eating from the trashcan of ideology.
> Here, you've defined "technical leadership" as basically just "being a software engineer"
I really don't think that's true. Software engineers can spend their whole career just checking off Jira cards, having no overarching ideas about the company's technical direction. And that's great. But leadership is specifically about leading others. That can mean establishing new processes, making global architectural decisions, mentoring juniors, and owning and driving an internal technical product roadmap. It also means having a general attitude of "how can I help the rest of the team succeed". If you learn something slightly obscure from a colleague, or a helpful language feature, document it on your internal knowledge base or make a post in Teams/Slack before moving on.
These are all concrete things! That's great, but to say that they constitute "leadership", as if these are the same things an Army Captain or CEO should do, does not clarify anything, but merely clouds things. If leadership means something different in every context where it arises, it doesn't mean anything at all. Anyway I don't think we're arguing, just speaking at different levels of generality. I admit this is a poor forum to make this semi-anarchist point.
Ah okay. I concede that "leadership" more generally is a nebulous concept. And that it just wouldn't apply in an ideal world because people wouldn't have had their self-confidence and internal drive trodden into the ground through years of authoritarian "education". I do sympathise with a healthy dose of anarchism. All the best.
I have no idea where he's getting it from either. Dude seemed to just stress himself out too much. Organizations encourage it, and promote people that do it.
It's also incredibly exclusionary. If you have the slightest neuroses, never be a leader!
You'll find this is often a race to the bottom too. While presumably not applicable to him, you'd be surprised how many people and organizations have opinions about how impossible it is to hire anyone with mental health problems.
Then it becomes "just flip burgers like a loser and go to prison addicted to stimulants you useless eater, all of you people"
It also makes everyone’s life harder. Engineering leaders who agree to insane and constant deadlines doom the company to be in constant fire fighting mode (at best).
One of the most important things they do is expectations management and explaining tradeoffs to senior management
maybe? the worst managers I've had are expressing real substantive emotional or general dysfunction. I don't know that training is really going to help with that.
its also a big culture question. I personally view the model where the manager is 'in charge' as being fundamentally unhelpful, and alot of organizations as a whole promote this model.
that alternative being 'the supporting adult in the room that trying to help the team do their best work and make hard decisions if absolutely necessary'
My take from the linked article is that this person had the will and ability to grow but they lacked an internalised reassurance that it's okay when things don't go to plan and aren't perfect. Importantly, they were open to learning about emotional reasoning.
In my mind a good training course can provide that reassurance in the form of a statement like
> It is absolutely normal for managers to be constantly juggling a large number of nebulous demands, to finish most days without wrapping anything up, and to feel like there are a large number of unknown and uncontrolled variables. Do not work excessive overtime or refuse to delegate tasks in order to avoid this.
