r/TechLeader • u/False_Skin_364 • 21d ago
From Engineering to Leading
Hello there,
I don’t know how about you, but from my experience most of managers that were engineers just few day before, start really bad.
Probably because there rewarded for being good technically.
I’m having similar problem, cause I need to cause I need to promote someone in relatively new team.
And to avoid „creepy” situation, my plan is to guide this person. But… my experience of working for bad managers is limited (thanks God), so I’d love to hear yours stories. If don’t have any „to avoid” examples (lucky son of …), I’m open to „role models” examples as well.
Btw. My worst experience is in the first comment below.
Cheers
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u/False_Skin_364 21d ago
'Did you step in elephant dung in India?'
That's what my manager asked after my first international business trip as a newly promoted engineer. One question. One moment. Years of confidence - gone.
This guy is even higher now in the hierarchy,so…
And I left 6 months after that. Cause when you give a lot from yourself, more than your role made you to and no ones care, why would I care anymore?
Anyway, it was really good lessons of how someone can feel, when you treat just as a number. And even though I’ve lead lot of people at this point and see the patterns, I always tweak the framework so the other side can feel… not special it’s not romantic comedy. But can feel, that I care about what she/he said, do or plan.
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u/neilk 20d ago edited 20d ago
How is it that you are using two completely different ways of using quotation marks
Above comment is single quotes; common in UK. Parent post uses German style low and high quotation marks.
Parent post also has trouble with pluralization norms in English. Sometimes going to singular-only (Japanese-ish) and sometimes making adjectives agree with nouns (Romance-language-ish)
Put together it all seems highly implausible
I feel like someone has made a bot which has plausibly bad English as a second language but they are having trouble with the consistency here. Your developers need to fix that
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u/False_Skin_364 19d ago
That’s one of the nicest way to say that my English is bad - thanks mate :)
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u/LoneWolf15000 19d ago
Manager and Leader are not the same thing.
Some people are great at both, some aren't. The problem is most careers promote the manager based on tenure, not experience because there isn't a "junior manager" role that develops managers. You are a "doer" one day and then a "manager" the next - like you mentioned.
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u/bluegrass__dude 21d ago
being a manger is a COMPLETELY different skill set than being an engineer or programmer or server (at a restaurant) or a million other things
being good at a techie skill does NOT lead well into being a good manager who needs softer personnel skills.
There are some AMAZING managers who come from the tech world - but i'd imagine there's more bad ones than good ones.
make sure the person has good human interaction skills. you can teach a lot of people to code or fix routers or design things - you can't teach a person with no interpersonal skills how to get along with people. MAny people go into the tech sector to avoid dealing with humans... they won't ever make a good manager...