TFA implicitly conflates "leadership" and "management", suggesting that the author is oblivious to the distinction.
Even when the author describes dividing the responsibilities of "leadership" among multiple people, they describe dividing both leadership and management responsibilities between those people.
This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader".
These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because of the leader's limited focus and the departure of team members who feel constrained, the organization develops cracks and holes in responsibility and ability to act on opportunities.
Managers who subscribe to this authoritarian model promote authoritarians, capable technical contributors who want more control over the part of the system they and their peers have been working in.
The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
But virtually all of the job postings you'll see publicly (especially for replacement positions or incremental growth) are described solely in terms of the project and the expected technical skill requirements rather than or in addition to the attributes that make a team more than a collection of extra appendages for a "leader". E.g. team values and non-values, the existing roles and expertise of the other team members and how the open position will complement those, the team's norms around work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc.
I think that the average manager at a tech company is not a good manager, and that the larger the company the lower the average (smaller companies just fail with bad managers). But by far most open positions at any time are positions reporting to bad managers.
One interesting note is that some people actually want an authoritarian leader because they don't want responsibility or more things to think about. I was talking online about how much I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I be doing their job."
>The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
It's also fairly easy to tell from talking to a team if the manager is actually good or not. If many people don't accept offers to your team then you may want to do some soul searching.
> some people actually want an authoritarian leader because they don't want responsibility or more things to think about.
It's easier to leave work at work that way.
1. Show up
2. Do work
3. Get paid
4. Leave
Your brain is freed to think of important things rather than work minutia. Of course, jobs like this often are mind-numbing if you're not the type to think with one half of the brain and do with the other and don't pay particularly great (in general).
> I was talking online about how much I delegate to my team and I got responses along the lines of "the tech lead or manager should do all of that, why should I be doing their job."
Well, that's because there's a difference between autonomy (e.g. "I'm going to let you approach the task in your own way without micromanaging your efforts.") and responsibility (e.g. "Your job is to do X and Y and Z"). What most people want from their leaders is some degree of autonomy, not necessarily extra responsibilities (unless there's a promotion attached...)
I wonder if there's an underlying cause for that attitude. I could see, for example, people working in a culture of high accountability and low trust trying to push decision making uphill lest they become a scapegoat. Meanwhile, places with a better office culture might feel more comfortable exercising autonomy and might value individuals taking the initiative more.
Agreed. Managers are empowered by organization and position. Leaders are empowered by inspiring and creating followers. They are diametric opposites in terms of mechanism and direction of power. Followers GIVE the leader power. Managers impose by force of position and control of organization power/money/etc.
The number of direct reports that function well as managed or led employees or any other organization hierarchy is about 5-7 but at most 10-12. This is a biological, neurological and psychological limit. It's also related to information theory and the UI-limits of the brain. It's related to chunking but also related to other limits of cognition and the finite number of hours in a day intersected with the minimal required cognitive focus/attention required to guide or manage an employee.
The distinction here is between Politician and Technician.
At the DevLead level one is a technician - diving into the complexities and trade offs and making a decision that will meet constraints that are the end point of a political process the devlead probably was not a part of
The politician you seem to be thinking of is someone (possibly the same someone) who is active in the political process that ends up deciding the constraints the technician works under - internal and external to the organisation
So this will be some of email threads or chats amoung some or all other devleads, it will be "being helpful" answering requests, assigning resources or time to help other politicians, or worse architecture diagrams, or it will be speaking at conferences etc etc etc. In the lingo it's becoming an "Authority". But one is only an "Authority" by being accepted by a "constituency" - maybe "all the devs in the company who think we ought to start using git" is your leadership position (ok maybe that's a decade old now but it's an easy example). Betray the constituency and lose the leadership position.
Neither are better than the other. Some political processes are better than others (in a democracy we perhaps appreciate this). Open decision making is likely to lead to long term better decisions - even if it is messy.
Linus Torvalds is an obvious leader example - using one political process (this is what I think - essentially using email as Thomas Paine used pamphlets)
But yeah - "managing" 5 people is reasonable - by the time you hit 12 it's a full time job listening to the moaning and they stop being a devlead. Only some can be a politican and a manager at same time.
> This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader".
This isn't an absolute conclusion, I don't think. I can speak for my own organization -
I lead 2 functionally-aligned teams, meaning they own internal product/systems for two different partner orgs. I also have a technical program management function which owns initiatives related to the above when they span more than a single team or are company-wide initiatives. I also have an engineering team with its own EM who roughly cover the scope of whatever my organization is doing - could be single-function, could be company-wide.
In my model, decisions from Principal/Director/Manager team members don't wait on me. They can if they want extra eyes or extra air cover, but otherwise, my job these days is less about setting technical direction and more about unblocking via executive alignment, budget, people, etc.
So far you might be thinking this is uninteresting and just means that my individual managers are the local despot, but I've done two things to (so far) eliminate that -
1. The TPM is responsible for getting us through the design stage, and they manage no one (or maybe other TPMs). This means they herd the cats and work with engineers and SMEs to get aligned on whatever design will make us functionally and technically successful.
2. This one is more on my qualities as a leader, but I also ask the managers on my team to err on the side of delegating more and letting their staff impress them, and being there as a resource when they need help. I think this is called servant leadership, but I don't read a lot of management stuff.
Team composition (experience and horsepower) plays a large role in whether this model can be successful and how hands on you'll have to be, but in trying to distill a decade+ of experience into a couple of paragraphs, this is generally how I like to run things. YMMV of course, I don't hold myself out as an authority, just offering a counterpoint.
> The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
If you adhere to the standard 1 year non-solicit, this isn't true right away. Hiring in my first year at a new company is one of the hardest parts of my job. But I'm probably a bit of a rule follower when it comes to the non-solicit - moreso than others, I've observed.
The f**ing article. A piece of internet slang that goes back many years, possibly originating on Slashdot and referring to the article that we're discussing here.
Even when the author describes dividing the responsibilities of "leadership" among multiple people, they describe dividing both leadership and management responsibilities between those people.
This is an authoritarian model that makes the local despot the bottleneck for the team: Decisions end up being routed through the "leader", individual growth and development and team value is constrained within the scope of the "leader".
These constrained teams have limited potential, and so, because of the leader's limited focus and the departure of team members who feel constrained, the organization develops cracks and holes in responsibility and ability to act on opportunities.
Managers who subscribe to this authoritarian model promote authoritarians, capable technical contributors who want more control over the part of the system they and their peers have been working in.
The best managers don't have a hard time finding talent for open positions on their teams: They already have networks of former employees and peers that they can use. Indeed, the employees of the best managers recruit for their teams as soon as positions open up.
But virtually all of the job postings you'll see publicly (especially for replacement positions or incremental growth) are described solely in terms of the project and the expected technical skill requirements rather than or in addition to the attributes that make a team more than a collection of extra appendages for a "leader". E.g. team values and non-values, the existing roles and expertise of the other team members and how the open position will complement those, the team's norms around work-life-balance and communication, etc, etc.
I think that the average manager at a tech company is not a good manager, and that the larger the company the lower the average (smaller companies just fail with bad managers). But by far most open positions at any time are positions reporting to bad managers.