Rant:Managing Is Easy Compared to Technical Life
September 4, 2008 by Greg Ferro · 11 Comments
I have been helping with recruiting for a senior network position. We are looking for highly talented technical individual to be the technical or architectural leader for a network team. The network system we are building has a vast amount of technology and only a few people to care for and give it love so that it performs well for the business.
No management skills needed
My organisation is awash with management — project managers, line managers, team leaders, executives, etc etc. We don’t need any more of that. The only management skill you need is time management.
Personality optional ?
When I first started out I had an idea of the person I would like to see in the role. After the seemingly endless pile of resumes and interviews, I no longer care if you have bad personal hygiene, I do however care that you know and can discourse intelligently about HTML and IPv6, you can grip MPLS configuration, you understand spanning tree, load balancing. Just in case you were getting bored I need to you know about ACE, FWSM, Guard and how to use them. And their management tools Cisco Security Manager, Cisco Works, Application Network Manager, Multi Device Manager, RME etc . I also want you to have some security skills, especially in CS-MARS and IDSM. Oh, and Access Control Server and configuring authentication and authorization. And there is more. Lots more. And I don’t have time to teach you if you don’t know.
If you have exposure to those, I also want you to be able to discourse intelligently on security practice and procedure, understand how applications works, argue with developers about why a given application concept is not going to produce the best performance.
Now, (surprise!) I am not finding many people with those skills, but I am getting a lot of people applying who calls themselves Managers, because the role is a senior role.
Why does Senior always mean Management ?
Indulge me here, but why do business people always insist that management get paid more than the workers. In the historical context, there was a sort of sense to this as only the educated and brightest could make it off the factory floor, thus there was a shortage of available managers. But in highly complex data networks, I am not short of management skills, what I need is really motivated, educated and experienced engineer type people.
Indeed, the IT industry is awash with “project managers” whose main role is place purchase orders, make to-do lists and facilitate meetings1 and who want to manage my time to ensure that I am ‘delivering the project requirements’. There are days when I want to shout that you can manage my time, but that does not make any MORE OF IT.
Two engineers are better than one
In recent times, I have been the only resource able to work on certain technologies, and the path to my desk was showing holes in the carpet. For the record, I am not happy about this. I firmly believe that if you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted and it gets lonely being the only person. The ability to turn around and discuss a problem with another knowledgeable person is good for success, and good for the project and its good for me. Its not an admission of failure to ask someone for help, half the time just talking about it will help me to solve the problem.
Two engineers are better than one because I can bounce ideas and review my progress with someone who actually understands what I am doing. I get where I need to go faster, and with better results — and less project management is needed since there is less review, reschedule and reorganisation required.
And jokes about “sheperding cats” are valid, but a worthwhile price to pay for results.
Hard skills versus soft skills
As an engineer, I certainly appreciate a good manager, and there are not enough of those. But those ‘soft skills’ are not hard to acquire, learn or develop. Much of good management technique is about patience and empathy. If you want to see this in action, any largeish company has their ‘management programs’ which is training, teaching and preparing managers from within. There are not usually any prerequisites to get on these programs other than a recommendation from your boss.
But being an engineer is about hard skills, where it either works or does not. The goal is either met or not met (subject to goals posts shifting, of course). I cannot suddenly learn about SSL Decryption by having a meeting or making a decision. I won’t be resolving the routing issue by getting ‘everyone around the table’, I have to configure, test, read and research until the answer is determined and actioned.
Now I am not sure if I am unusual, but I do my forty to fifty hours a week at work, plus at least another 10 hours in study and commonly twenty. I am not developing new skills, I am keeping up. How many managers are developing themselves at that sort of level ?
Can we have more resource and less management
In short, I want less project management and more work. Don’t underestimate the engineering hours, because the only solution seems to be more project managers on the project to ‘manage the delivery’. Of course, this doesn’t actually get the delivery done.
But what I really want is for management to realise that the best engineers, the ones who really shake it down, are rare and are worth more to the business than you are. It’s not a personal insult.
Is Engineering tougher ?
A network engineer works longer hours, is likely to be studying constantly, and have skills that cannot be easily bought, and they take a long time to ‘integrate’ to the workflow. A manager is a person that has patience, understand people and a good communicator. You work it out.
And if you don’t like that, expect to hire the best engineers in the freelance market where they earn a lot more than you anyway. Somehow, companies don’t seem to mind that, and I have never worked out why, but they still complain about it.
Footnotes
- with respect to the really good and senior project managers, but many PM’s are really there to do the secretarial work [back]
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Well said!
Have you ever been a manager, Greg? I’m not one myself — the closest I’ve been is an architect with some management responsibilities due to lack of an actual manager — but some of the statements you make are starkly at odds with what I know of the species.
(1) Managers do *not* always make more than engineers. I know for sure that I’ve been paid more than my boss on at least two occasions, and the only reason I’m not sure about more is that people often don’t talk about salaries. I know I’m far from alone among developers that way, too. Maybe it’s different among “engineers” who are are integrators and administrators rather than developers, though.
(2) How would someone who clearly lacks those “soft skills” know whether they’re hard to acquire? “It either works or it doesn’t” is often much nicer than the squishy uncertainty and nailing-jello-to-a-tree aspects of management. You think it’s easy dealing with passive-aggressive behavior from engineers who know they’re more indispensable than you are, who refuse to exercise due diligence in their work or perform any required tasks other than coding? Getting ten people “around the table” to get the answers you need for a requirements spec or project plan can actually be more work than any one of those ten has to spend each getting their one answer by reading or experimenting.
(3) I’ve worked with a lot of really good engineers, and I’ve seen companies survive the loss of even the best. I’ve worked with only a couple of really good technical managers, and I’ve seen companies fail because they didn’t have any. Lack of focus or discipline can kill a project, as can attrition and bad morale, and those can all be the result of having no or bad technical management. Of course, there’s an important distinction you fail to make between technical line management and project or product management. I’ve only met a couple of people in the second or third roles who provided any positive value at all, and even they were far from indispensable; the rest were just total wastes of everyone’s time. As far as the line managers go, though, the good ones are rarer and more valuable than 99% of engineers because they enable those engineers to apply their skills to maximum effect.
Try hiring people according to their actual level of knowledge and ability, even if it’s not exactly the same knowledge and ability as yourself. Not only will it be easier to find such people, but they’ll be more likely to accept an offer if they’re not put off by the waves of “only my skills matter” arrogance you’re sending out. Try reading Joel Spolsky’s “Smart and Gets Things Done” series on hiring engineers.
I think that the best engineers are engineers who have the technical prowess *and* effective soft skills / management ability, and this is what’s really hard to find.
The management / technical discussion is something that’s always contentious but I guess the problem is exacerbated if you happen to work in an environment where the number of managers is disproportionate to the number of implementers.
1) managers have a tendency to employ more managers.
2) I choose not be in management. I have done so, but it didn’t make me happy as it wasn’t really challenging for me. I look forward to retiring from engineering to a management role in the future.
3) your point is moderately relevant, but out of scope of the article (you do understand scope and context don’t you ? ).
My points are : more engineers is just as viable a solution as more management. The trend to project management is now overdone. This is called a generalisation for intent of the article.
Line managers are easy to find compared to really top notch engineers. Honestly.
Brilliant.
If by “top notch” you mean “scrupulously exact clone of someone we already have with a limited but specialized and even locally unique skillset” then yeah, they’re probably very hard to find, but that’s neither a reasonable definition nor a reasonable way to conduct the interviews. If I were looking for a top-notch engineer, even to replace myself, I would look for someone who has significant depth and breadth in my particular relevant areas of expertise (e.g. networking, storage, HPC) and good technical-leadership skills, even if they didn’t immediately know the precise and detailed answers to the last five questions anyone has actually asked me on the job. That person would be hard to find, certainly, far harder than anyone you’ve ever tried to find, but by not defining the position as “only someone exactly like me could do it” I make the search possible.
By contrast, finding someone to facilitate and organize the work that needs to be done by a group of a dozen uber-senior specialists and head cases really is darn near impossible. That person would need sufficient technical depth across a broad area just to avoid being snowed constantly. They’d need the ability to earn trust and apply persuasion to some very “diverse” people who tend to do what they want instead of what’s needed but get away with it because everyone knows they can cand will find another job instantaneously if anybody gets too heavy-handed. They’d need other skills as well, but the field is already narrower than that for any reasonably-defined invididual contributor position.
I contend that you only think top-notch engineers are harder to find than good engineering managers because you have a ludicrous notion of what either looks like. You’re applying far too many requirements to the former, and far too few to the latter, in what can only be interpreted as an effort to puff up your own image of yourself as the most special person where you work. I have far more experience than you as an architect and developer — not just an analyst or sysadmin in drag — to justify my own contempt for those engaged in management and marketing and other non-technical activities, but that experience has also taught me that those other activities do involve their own kinds of challenges and sometimes it’s hard to find someone who can meet them.
Jeff
What a load of tosh. I once worked for a young woman with no technical expertise at all, and no great depth of management expertise, do a very good job of managing a large team of ‘uber-senior specialists and head cases’. She was moved form a customer service team, of all things.
She learned from a couple of courses and a mentor. Some natural talent helped, but thats about it.
I can assure you that finding people who have technical skills os getting harder and harder. Possibly because there isn’t much training, and there isn’t much motivation, but there is more and more options for jobs.
As for “image of yourself as the most special person ” I have already stated that if “you can’t be replaced you can’t be promoted”. I ain’t special, there just isn’t enough of me for the workload, and having two managers to manage my time doesn’t increase the output. In this case, one plus one still equals one.
Greg
PS. Love your gravatar — now thats kewl.
Yes, I’ve seen people without a lot of technical depth succeed in a management role too, but only so long as they had someone else they could trust (sometimes it was me) to call the technical staff’s bluffs. I’ve also seen such managers fail miserably, and all but go insane, when they lost that support. Hiring is always dependent on the personnel already available, usually to complement rather than duplicate, and if you already have some good senior staff who are willing to provide that kind of support then hiring half a technical manager for their people/organizational skills can work, but I was talking about the general case where such cooperation cannot be assumed.
It’s great that what you need at your particular workplace is more workers and not more queens. It’s a common situation, but it’s not the only one. Anyone who has ever worked in a group characterized by great technical skill but poor discipline and focus wouldn’t even need to be told that good managers matter too. You can certainly have too many managers, but sometimes it’s possible to have too few.
My personal experience has taught me that you are rarely going to get the skillset you’re looking for in one package (as a manager). The skills you are looking for in this article are going to be a fairly rare combination.
Before I got out of management (and ownership), my best success was to find someone who had technical ability/interest, and could troubleshoot. They could understand the basics and learn the rest. Sure, you run the risk of teaching someone only to have them leave. I had FAR more success going this route though. It gained me life long friends and contacts for future jobs.
Focus on specific skills instead of ability to learn and adapt is going to get you most of the best candidates thrown in the circular file. The hard part is figuring out who has the ability. I suppose I got lucky with that.
Great article Greg!!! I have to say as a person who has spend 3 years in this trade a consultant, you hit the nail on the head. Just from my experiences, I have seen far to much “management overhead” on projects I have worked on. Technology is more a form of art to really good technical people.