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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.