The ability for people to give away their Legos is one of the most important ways I guage an organization's health. If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems, it's usually an indicator that:
- the leader cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work. This signals a lack of maturity.
- there is some other serious organizational problem preventing delegation from happening (weak engineering IC hires, lack of clear processes and ownership patterns, etc)
I don't think "engineering work" and "leadership work" should be a dichotomy, especially if you're trying to follow a promote-from-within mentality.
Sure, after N years, you might be career-tracked from development into management, but you probably also know where all the bodies are buried. If you're not doing code reviews, trying to mentor new developers, or just butting in and saying "We tried that in 2006 and it has huge non-obvious compliance/performance/maintainability costs!", it lets all that knowledge go to waste.
Was Henry Ford a bad CEO? I have more faith in a CEO that's involved to a degree and understands the engineering side as opposed to some out of touch MBA.
I think people like Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, are the exception that proves the rule. It is astronomically rare for a CEO to be that involved at a micro-level and be successful.
Having been a bit closer to the action (through secondhand reports from colleagues), it was not at all uncommon for Steve to propose detailed technical solutions, but (1) many of them were no good (2) his teams got pretty good at working around him on such matters and (3) I think over time he developed the good sense to trust his lieutenants on matters like this instead of being overly insistent on seeing his bad ideas implemented.
In contrast, in UX/Design, Steve generally had very astute insights, knew so, and it was much harder to get him to change his mind.
I worked at a multi-billion dollar company (not Tesla) where the CEO considered himself chief engineer and tried to prescribe low-level technical solutions from the CEO level.
It was terrible. CEOs don’t have the time to keep up with technologies and understand the low-level requirements that drive good decision making. A person doing a CEO job can’t possibly keep up with someone doing full-time engineering work in any fast-moving field.
The only way we could make progress was by subtlety seeding our ideas to the CEO and waiting for him to claim them as his own directives after he realized they were good ideas. It was an exhaustive way to get things done.
I've talked to some folks from Tesla whose stories absolutely reinforced the parent's point. Some of the silly things Musk has dictated turned into massive wastes of resources for the engineering team.
And I'd say Tesla is successful despite and not because of that. Examples include: Tesla's shot at an in-house ERP and the drive to fully automate production. Both cost them a lot.
I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a black swan, you can point to him and say "proof X is possible" but you can't point to him and say "proof X is normal"—you've got to wait for "half of Fortune 500 CEOs do X."
(Nothing personal colordrops, I've just seen this take a lot lately.)
I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company.
It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade.
It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives.
In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.
Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent.
If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.
Shouldn't it also make you sick to read about prescription for exceptional hypergrowth from 500 to 5500 employees? It's not like everybody here will experience this kind of rapid growth. We also don't know how much of it is survivorship bias. What if there are cases where this approach contributed to failure, ie. because people were shifted from where their expertise actually was?
In context it reads as parent disagreeing with grandparent's statement that a "leader [who] cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work… signals a lack of maturity" by saying "[Musk shows] it's not true in every case."
So my quibble is simply that "proof leaders do X" doesn't disprove "doing X is bad leadership," despite parent's implication to the contrary.
> If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems
That 'established' part is key because early stage companies require wearing so many hats. And knowing when and to whom to let something go it's crucial IME.
There are some bounds on this, I’ve seen plenty of situations where VPs may not be prescribing technical solutions because they are so far out of touch they can’t even understand the solution options in play.
- the leader cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work. This signals a lack of maturity.
- there is some other serious organizational problem preventing delegation from happening (weak engineering IC hires, lack of clear processes and ownership patterns, etc)