I suspect that the reason for the perpetuation of this myth is that, if a manager is doing their job really really well then all of that stress and BS is hidden from their directs.
Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!
So essentially managers are people sysadmins. They make sure everyone is working, try to resolve conflicts and ideally make sure that everyone is running the right tools. What would be a people engineer in that vein?
Yes. Although in my case when I was talking about my 'best managers', they were also the people who were brilliant and were really good at the tech side too. These people all just had a natural ability to navigate through the political BS while still being extremely competent software folks.
Yes, as much as I hate that term it really does apply here. And I'm really only thinking of 2, maybe 3 folks. These were the people who managed to be the most productive members of the team while dealing with all of the manager BS. When you find one of those you do what you can to stay under them.
So to continue the IT parallel, that'd be setup (hiring and training) and maintenance/debugging (hr complaints and problem resolving) imo. My personal hunch would be that viewing the whole thing in a systems context, the EOs would be engineering. After all, they decide how the company is run at a top level, and either assemble a functioning "people stack" or set guidelines for doing so. In that vein, components/prospective employees are churned out by the education system as a broader whole, and the raw material for that...alright, i think that's taking the metaphor far enough.
Managers create the BS, so they can hardly be credited with shielding people from it. They also create a lot of BS for their own reports such as playing the "your job is to make me look good" game, or having devs do a bunch of leg work so they can present everything as their own ideas.
Those are stereotypical bad managers, not ALL managers. I know a lot of great managers who are not like that. And even the ones that failed didn't fail due to malice or vanity. Most people I've encountered want to build cool things, even the managers, and they often know their strength is not in coding.
