Ask HN: Can you truly lead engineers without being an engineer? - uptownfunk
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akg_67
Most of my best bosses were non-engineers or people with no technical
expertise in my domain. In my experience bosses who were recently engineers or
technical experience in what I was hired to do to be generally micromanagers.

It sort of became a qualifying criteria. During interviews if an interviewer
asked me technical questions and s/he was going to be my reporting manager, I
knew we will not be a good fit.

Edit: When I was young and inexperienced, I preferred bosses with technical
chops and mentoring mindset. Later in my career, I preferred non-technical
bosses and senior technical team members with mentoring mindset.

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zer00eyz
> During interviews if an interviewer asked me technical questions and s/he
> was going to be my reporting manager

When I first read this, I thought it was a fairly odd stance to take. However,
I realized that I ask non technical questions that should lead to somewhat
technical answers.

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iancmceachern
The key word here is "Lead". I believe (metaphorically) that, in matters of
sight, the blind cannot truly lead the sighted. Yes, someone may be able to
"lead" a camping trip for scouts to the local campground without event, but
that is a far different skill set than leading an expedition to climb Mt.
Everest.

I believe that the analogy holds true. Yes, a non-technical "leader" can
manage a group of technical folks to deliver something that is pre-existing,
something that has a clear path to completion which if you follow, you will be
successful. Civil projects are a great example of this. Repaving a road for
example.

Now onto what I've worked on my entire career - highly complex engineering
driven technical projects - "cutting edge". I have worked for both types of
leader in this environment. I have never seen the non-technical leader be
successful, nor the project being directed by the non-technical leader be
successful. To make the right decisions the leader needs to be able to
intimately understand all the trade offs (technical included) involved to be
able to lead the project to success. If this person doesn't personally have
the knowledge, understanding, wisdom or ability to seek such out to understand
these fundamental trade offs they are required to rely on the information they
are given, to rely on trusting the folks telling you things. This is difficult
because on the most challenging projects there are always different opinions
and the leader must find the thread of truth between them.

This is why Mr. Musk has been so successful with Tesla and SpaceX - he
intimately understands what he is making at the most technical level - and is
passionate about it.

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monknomo
Musk is not an engineer. Leading engineers without being an engineer does not
mean leading engineers without being technical.

Of course a leader must understand, at some level, what their followers are
doing, but sufficient technical knowledge != is an engineer.

Take Kennedy + LBJ and the space program, for instance. Two leaders, less
technical than Musk, and they still made the moonshot happen.

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iancmceachern
Wonderful discussion - thank you.

I think Mr. Musk could be called an engineer being technically trained in
Physics and being a self taught programmer - while not technically under the
engineering umbrella I've grown to accept the folks who are technically
Physicists (especially applied), Mathematicians, Computer Scientists,
Chemists, etc. but whom work together with engineers to develop new products
(including software) as all under the same umbrella. Doesn't everyone? They
all require similar systems approaches the the management and understanding of
complexity.

There is a great book on this - "The Decision to Go to the Moon" by John M.
Logsdon. Kennedy's great contribution wasn't really technical leadership, but
political. To call for and fully support a totally Civilian Moon Landing
program. To this day I am amazed by his honesty and the vision it must have
taken to take such a large step and commit several percent of the Federal
Budget to such a long term, risky and public program. He stood up trying to
sell it and said "we will have to invent metal alloys that do not yet exist".

Beyond the political support to go do it (which is truly amazing in it's own
right), it was really the technical leaders at NASA that made it happen
(Mueller, Von Braun, etc.), I would credit them with truly leading the
program. Sadly Kennedy really only got to kick it off...

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kasey_junk
Too many people think that leadership is a) bestowed upon you and b) single
faceted.

In the context of an engineering organization, leadership on technical tasks
is actually inverted. The person most capable of leading in decisions about
that task, is the person most recently deep into it. That means on some tasks
the new intern is the leader when it comes to leadership in the sense of
"expert on the topic".

Engineering mentorship largely must be done by senior engineers. That said,
there is no reason those senior engineers are necessarily your project
manager, your product manager or your people manager.

At the end of the day, I much prefer working in organizations that understand
that people management can and should be done by people managers and technical
leadership can and should be done by technical leaders and those 2 things
needn't reside in the same office.

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usgroup
Taking a serious engineering team as example (ie one doing something
innovative rather than cutting variants of the same code all the time) the
leader has to be an engineer.

Not necessarily the best in the team but they have to get the mechanics and
prognosis of technical decisions in order to manage risk, know where or who
the problems are, make trade offs, etc.

I've often seen the non technical leader adopt a technical right hand who
defacto does the leading whilst the alleged leader reports up, administrates
and generally takes credit.

Further like someone else said, leading and managing are like chalk and cheese
(superfluously similar). A project manager may happily be non technical
because there job is mostly triage, comms and tracking.

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zer00eyz
Yes you can.

At the point that your in "leadership" it isn't about doing it is about
providing the tools for others to DO. Good leaders remove distractions, focus
on the heath of the group (and the individuals within) act as a contact point
and a buffer from outsiders.

Can being technical help. It depends. Stable products, well established
domains (with experienced people) don't need deep technical knowledge to deal
with the day to day. However, if you systems can be described as a disaster,
if you having major issues all the time, a leader with technical chops is
going to be of benefit. You want an empathetic manager when the shit hits the
fan not a sympathetic one.

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gaius
_Yes you can_

    
    
       Boss: I'm the leader!
       Engineers: OK boss, which way are we going?
       Boss: I don't know, I'm not technical! You figure it out!

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mattbgates
My supervisor is considered a senior in the company, having worked there for
16 years. He had absolutely no experience in knowing what we do, what web
design was, etc. In fact, he "transferred" over to my department and became
the supervisor and I was the one who ended up training him.

While his skillset is that of a perfectionist, in which he is probably great
at catching mistakes and being a micro-manager, he lacks some other skills
that I would've thought necessary to "supervise" us. In the beginning, he was
taking his "old skills" that he knew from his entire time at the company and
trying to apply it to his department and it was like he was miserable...
because you cannot apply the same rules for our department as others. Almost
all other departments work on a "errors made" platform, so if you make an
error, it is caught and counted towards you.. we have a high turnover rate in
all other departments.

Our department, however, has no platform like that where "errors" can be
caught by a computer, and are caught manually. So trying to convince him to
throw out over 15 years of everything he's ever knew.. aside from his
perfectionist mindset was extremely hard for him. It took 2 years just to get
him to a point where he started to realize: We are a whole different
department that cannot be classed in with all others.

Fortunately, he's definitely improved.

Sometimes I think its a good thing and sometimes bad... he's always spying on
our work before it is done and quickly makes assumptions and goes kind of
crazy every so often because he thinks that's what it's going to look like,
but as you're developing something... most things never "stay looking" like
they would in development phase. So convincing him: "Can you let me finish the
product before you start peaking at it?" is something I have to do every so
often.

He can't be doing too bad, after all, there are two main offices that my
company has, and only one person has ever been promoted in the other office,
while we've had about 5 people who received "promotions" ... which basically
just means a little extra money and a new title called "senior", but it must
say something about how he is doing for his team.

He's proof that all you really have to do is know people in the company,
acquire that status of a perfectionist (and manager), apply for the job, and
you can fake it till you make it.

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bsvalley
To "lead" engineers you need to be an engineer because you have to make
technical decisions.

To "manage" people (including engineers), it's totally fine to be a non-tech
person. It's actually even better if you're not tied to any project as a
manager. Because you can focus on career growth and conflicts, which is what
I'd expect from a manager.

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paulcole
Of course! Successful leaders in many fields don't have direct experience in
that field-- although it may not be the norm.

If engineers believe they can't be led by a non-engineer it says more to me
about the engineers than anything else.

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fuzzfactor
Depends on whether you want to be like Microsoft under Gates or Ballmer.

Of course Ballmer could never had grown Microsoft well enough to begin with to
even give Ballmer himself the size of opportunity we would be so aware of at
this point anyway.

Not that Gates actually graduated from an engineering school, but he had the
technical chops to out-engineer most of those who did in the ways that count.

This allowed Microsoft to overcome hurdles that could not have been passed any
other way, even as Gates participated to a much lesser degree in the actual
engineering details of the products over his years.

Cats are best herded by other cats.

At least Ballmer had been with the company almost as long as his technically
qualified predecessor, and that was since almost the beginning.

When HP failed on these points too it was even less pretty.

Seems like from large engineering company scale down to single engineering
project scale, one trend for success might be when the leader is actually
inherently capable of virtually all of the engineering needed for a successful
product. Just when the project, product, or company is too big for this
technical leader to accomplish all or even any of the engineering single-
handedly, is when the judicious delegation of the technical fragments becomes
the valued talent that non-technical operators also have an extreme
disadvantage with.

It's more financially sound if the leader when needed can solve technical
problems that his team alone can not overcome when they arise.

Even if the company is started because of a businessman's vision of a market
he makes come true, if it is largely an engineering company, the technical
leader needs controlling interest or the shareholders will be shortchanged.

This usually works the other way around, which is why we hear about far fewer
of them becoming sizable regardless of how amazing the engineering seems
sometimes.

There simply needs to be a way for the non-technical but gifted business
talents to earn enough to be more rewarding than what they would experience
having more control of a lesser pure sales company without the engineering
talent.

So the engineering does need to be outstanding, exactly what some of us are
here for.

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gaius
No. We see this play out time and time again - successful tech company, the
technical founder retires or is replaced by some other means and an MBA takes
over, then the wheels come off.

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ParameterOne
Who is "we"?

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SirLJ
Absolutely, I for one would prefer a non technical boss to someone who will
second guess half my decisions based on his outdated knowledge from years
ago... All in all it is a matter of trust, the best is to be in a position
where your boss is trusting you 100% and always ask to consult with you on
major decisions...

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kochthesecond
I am inclined to say yes, you absolutely can. I'd even prefer it if said
engineering manager tends to micromanage.

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eeZah7Ux
Define "lead engineers". Is that leading a project and taking technical
decision or managing people?

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matttheatheist
As the owner of a startup, I won't hire you to manage a group of engineers if
you don't have at least the same level of technical experience. I will always
test you. You can never hide from me. You are exposed.

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Bahamut
I hesitate to say no, but I haven't seen this work out too well many times.

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ParameterOne
I don't think you have to be an engineer to lead but I do think the leader
needs to see the vision/goal to properly communicate it to the engineers who
make it happen.

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crispytx
No.

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mars4rp
It depends on how much engineering decisions you have to make!!!

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shortoncash
It's doable but it's not recommended.

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miguelrochefort
Define engineer.

~~~
frou_dh
ENGINEER: An American with a computer, who knows what source code is.

