Richard, you and I have already exchanged barbs on management style, but I wanted to expand on a couple of your comments:


I work for a large engineering company. Over the years we've had the luxury of mostly having engineers in control of technical decisions. But it's an uneasy truce. It turns out that really good engineers generally make horrible managers. As you say, it's a personality type.

The true hard core "born to engineer" type simply lacks the people skills. People at my company seem to end up "flunking out of engineering" into management. Those with a high degree of skills end up on their own path that ends with "distinguished engineer" and rarely "fellow". These are tenured non-business VP level positions. They get a few direct reports to do support work, a research budget, office/lab space, and get to go pursue whatever fancies them. Those that make it as a competent engineer, but fail to distinguish themselves in a significant way "flunk out of engineering" at some point. This doesn't mean they were incompetent engineers, just that they never produced any major advancement of the art, or products, etc... They get assigned a group and become a "first level manager". More people depart the company from this position that I care to contemplate. This title is very nearly a death sentence. Why? Because engineers make bad managers, and managing engineers is somewhat like herding cats. Those that survive appear to wind up on a slow promotion path that almost always ends at the director level. I've only seen two engineers make it to the business VP level, and it took them better part of twenty years and an MBA. The true movers and shakers seem to come up thru marketing, and come in via acquisitions. There seems to be a kind of "country club" metric at the very high levels as well. It's not impossible to join the club, but don't hold your breath... You have a better chance if you've run a small company and been acquired.


But back to the personality type... It turns out the technical people are not all the same either. I took a Myers-Briggs personality sorting test a few years ago, and it turns out I'm not an engineering type at all! I'm some kind of "tool using artist". Apparently my brain fails to notice the change UI complexity between a flint hammer and a Unix server. The other handicap I seem to have is my training is in science, not engineering. An engineer seeks a solution. This is often a carefully arraigned set of compromises. A scientist seeks "the solution", which may in fact have little value. I get hammered on this year after year at review time.