My first job out of university, I was promoted to manager in my mid 20s. One of the senior engineers reporting to me had kids older than me.
Now, they were PAID a lot more than me ...
The first thing they taught me was that it wasn't my job to do the work, because it didn't matter how smart I was, I didn't have almost 30 years experience.
Anecdote, but this was the approximate case on the team I worked on at Google (Manager in his mid 30s, team mostly in their 20s with one in his 50s). It happens. Actually, it was nice to see, as some evidence of non-ageism.
I hope to no longer need to work by the time I'm 50, but nobody knows what the future will bring, so I'd certainly like to have the option just in case!
Not as extreme, but not far off. I believe I'm the youngest person on the team I manage.
I've spent a lot of time in startups - including way too many hours in my 20's working on side-hustles (wife was in med school, so it was kind of my thing to do). I've ended up in a situation where my technical skills are strong (but not the best on my team), but my business/startup knowledge is much better so I can help to ensure everyone is working towards the most impactful/valuable outcomes.
I used to work for a company in which employees in some departments would do 2 or 3 year "shifts" as managers. When your shift was up, you went back to a regular employee in the same department, and someone you had been managing took over. It was not uncommon to have a young manager, but not everyone was eligible, obviously.
I think it prevented the "us vs. them" mentality from creeping in, and I got the impression that most managers were eager to return to production work. There were dedicated managers higher up the ladder, of course.
They're still doing exceedingly well, so it must not have hurt them. I think it takes a small but stable company to pull it off. Maybe they have stopped doing it by now, I don't know.
These people cared about their work a lot, and they enjoyed doing it. Not sure which way the causation goes though...
Edit to add: the rotating managers I'm referring to were doing budgets and performance reviews, not creating business strategies.
I’m also intrigued. I’ve seen this happen several times but always de facto: someone would become a manager as an experiment, try it for a few years, and then (usually) decide to stop.
No mil. experience myself, but I'd say that while the officers may technically 'manage' the NCO's, that with few exceptions it is the NCO's that actually get things done.
It is better if the managers of technical people are technical themselves. Otherwise you wind up with the Dilbert "pointy-haired-boss" syndrome. The non-technical manager is extremely easy to bullshit, so it's better for the company in almost all ways.
An experienced manager is not easy to bullshit regardless. Sometimes a non-technical manager is better for many reasons. Having business domain experience can be just as valuable
Yep; though enough time working for companies tends to instill some knowledge and understanding of the business side of things, and as long as understanding of the business correlates with their own influence it tends to work out okay.
Management is weird in that understanding of the tech side of things doesn't correlate with influence.
When you think you're fooling someone, you're really only fooling yourself.
It doesn't take a genius to know who is doing the work and who is looking for every excuse to be 'blocked'.
Managers simply know that they can't hire or fire and that calling someone on their bullshit would accomplish nothing, so they say nothing.
Managers are masters of soft power. Soft power is very hard for engineering/techie types to understand, which is why it works so well on them, because they don't even understand the game they're a part of :)
It is rather unusual for someone to be called out on their bullshit. I’ve been working for 25 years and only seen it happen a couple times. Most people are conflict avoidant, so the perpetually “blocked” individuals are allowed to stay that way. I know people who’ve essentially done no real work for years. Who’s the fool here? Those of us picking up all the slack.
I have a decorated history of calling people on their bullshit. I have the 'you have been let go' and negative resume references to prove it.
The fool is the person not understanding the game they're playing.
Techies who do other people's work are perpetuating the game they despise - they are indeed fools.
Middle managers who perpetuate the game are smart, because it is their job to perpetuate the game. It is not their job to change the rules of the game - that's the job of the techies who can refuse to 'pick up the slack', let targets fail repeatedly and signal to upper management that the game isn't working, forcing them to change the game, which the middle managers will once again perpetuate, because that is their job.
I called someone out, and pushed back on someone who wanted me to do their work. This was a useless "scrum master" type who couldn't even update a spreadsheet for one of his weekly reports. I explained to him that that updating those spreadsheets was not an engineering responsibility, but I would be happy to provide him with input. I also complained about him to my manager. He was one of those guys who couldn't even copy-and-paste.
They just harassed some other person into doing it. He was a bit passive aggressive about it on some future calls: "Bob doesn't want to update the spreadsheet, so I will have Alice do it!" Anyway, nice guy, but didn't do any work at all, and he's gone now.
I prefer fairly non-technical engineering managers who stick to their lane. Their job should be to help manage the project schedule (in coordination with and guided by technical leads and product leadership), coordinate with other teams, coordinate with middle and upper management, and help their reports with whatever career development they need.
They should not be making technology decisions or specifying how the work gets done. They should trust their reports to not bullshit (and if that trust is broken, those reports should be fired). I think having a technical background can be helpful for these managers, but I don't think it's strictly necessary, and they should be doing essentially zero technical work as a part of their management job.
I've found managers who are like this to be incredibly useful and productive, and a pleasure to work with. Managers who want to get involved in technical decisions just get in the way and cause problems. Unfortunately a lot of newly-promoted former engineers can't let go of the technical work.
The problem with the "non-technical manager = easy to bullshit" idea is that it's basically the engineer's equivalent of the "engineer = assembly line cog who shouldn't be exposed to anything but their JIRA tickets" idea for bad management. It's what you find in poorly-run or excessively cheap organizations, but it's hardly an upper bound.
A few years ago, I was a "team lead" at the age of 27 managing a team that included one developer over 50 at a big TV network company.
We're both at different companies nowadays, but I've been trying to get him started at my current company's team (which I am senior on, but not a lead) for a while now and he's considering it!
I'm ... late 40s. Have been paid for working on software development in some capacity for... 28 years (first paid contract was 1993), and did hobby/amateur for several years before that.
I'm contracting with a couple different companies, and one of them... the others on the team range from ... 27-32. So... I've been doing professional/paid development work longer than most of them have been alive, certainly longer than any of them have been adults. The manager(s) I interact with - one just turned 31, and one is... I think 29 or 30.
The older you get the more common this may become.
I worked at a start up where the founders were 25 & 26 and most of their first 25 employees were their friends who were similar aged. In less than two years, there were almost 100 employees, plenty of which were in the 50s.
The company's last valuation has it worth over a billion dollars now and they have a few hundred employees. A good chunk of the C suite and VPs are still those same early employees who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Some are managing former FAANG employees in their 50s.
I'm a 25 year old managing a global team of 8 people. I'm self-conscious about my age both in my 1:1s with my reports and when talking with customers. That being said, it seems like things are going well. My team is doing great metrics and achievements wise and the company we work for tripled in size in under a year.
In a previous job I was team lead of a team that had a person in they're 40s and one in their 50s, I started as lead as a 23 year old and moved on when I was 30. There are many things I'd do differently now, but it was an effective and impactful mostly high functioning team. It does happen.
I've known people who submitted working patches to the Linux kernel at 13, which I'd say is a reasonable start for "doing this". A 30 year old managing a 43 year old would not be strange at all.
Exactly, I started programming in AppleSoft BASIC when I was 11, picked up 6502 Assembly and Pascal before high school and added C, Rexx. 370 assembler and FORTRAN before I started college. I was 28 the first time I had a manager younger than me. I think the last time I had a manager older than me was when I had a job where my direct report was to the CTO.
In what organisation do 25 year olds manage 50 year olds?