What I find disturbing these days is that a young engineer comes into an organization at a junior level and takes part in an ongoing engineering effort. If he's found to be useful, then he's allowed to participate, else he's relegated to fetching coffee, meeting with salesmen, and other meaningless tasks. If he's been useful, he's assigned a more significant role on the next project. When that's completed, assuming he's still shown he's worth keeping, he's put at the head of a team on the next project. After that, he's no longer an engineer, but is promoted into a management role, where he'll never do another useful thing as long as he lives. This is not only punishment to a "real" engineer, but it fails to allow him to gain sufficient experience to be a decent engineer, and, of course, it puts him in a role he would probably not, on his own, have chosen. I don't think this is an adequate way to manage engineering talent, nor do I find it a good way to select managers.

RE