

The Promotion Problem - rbranson
http://coroutine.com/blog/3-The-Promotion-Problem

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lmkg
I think the problem comes from promotion being seen as a linear path, which
conflates the two orthogonal values of programming skill and management skill.
Getting managers out of programmers is a good thing, that's how you get
managers that understand programming, which is important. However, manager is
not always strictly an upgrade, or strictly a downgrade, from senior
technician, in any sense. Management should be a separate, parallel career
advancement path, and technicians (including but not limited to programmers)
should have promotions (and raises!) available that recognize skill and add
responsibility in the areas that they are best suited to, be that managing, or
technicianing, or sales, or whatever.

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chris100
Intel for instance has a very well organized promotion track for purely
technical roles (principal engineer and Intel Fellow if you go far enough).
Many companies do not have such deep respect for engineering and management
often becomes the only way up.

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wlievens
Its competitor ARM does too, iirc. In addition, almost everyone (including
many in top roles, such as the CEO) come from an engineering background.

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wlievens
This seems to be a specific instance of the Peter Princple. It's typically
concieved as a joke, but probably often inevitable in a linear carreer path.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle>

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pmichaud
The Peter Principle is darkly amusing, but it's not joke. I wish it were.

