I guess you must have worked for completely different companies than I did, because in my experience it's not the smartest people who work their way up into management, just the loudest ones that don't have any specific skill that would make them hard to replace elsewhere.

IMO the smartest people I know at my workplace are the engineers who manage themselves into a position where they can work on interesting projects without getting dicked around by managers distracting from the real work all the time, and make a good living doing it.

Others include sales, politicking (or "managing up"), managing a team, empathy, oratory, etc.

The best technical minds don't necessarily want to become suits (I'm going to avoid using the term "managers" since engineering managers are very different from "suits" imo). Even if they become one, they may not have the negotiation skills or willingness to smooch that is required for a suit to succeed.

>how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots".

For #2, a good counterexample would be, "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches".

I'm not saying you don't need managers, or that no such thing as good managers exist. I'm just stating my observation that more often than not, who gets into management is based on the Peter principle, rather than how 'smart' or capable someone is.

In most corporates management really is book keeping. Managing vacations, leaves, holidays. Filling up appraisal sheets, expense documents, coordinating with HR, forwarding Information, arranging meetings and all these kind of assorted chores. This classifies under what you can call as 'running the affairs' as they are.

This has nothing to do building something awesome. That is a different territory. What managers in most companies do ideally is enforce sanity by bringing in mediocrity. Much of their work is in bringing in a process so that their life gets easier. They need numbers, so they have to deal and force people to do things like fill in time sheets, constantly update some system to keep the their managers alerted. You get the point?

Situation only gets worse because, sooner or later all managers realize- they hit a career dead end unless they are politically well connected within an organization to get that next promotion or a travel opportunity. In many ways they are forced to, their position encourages them to. Imagine having no coding skills, no ideas, no ways to show that you got something real done in years. Over time your own value in the market will fall down to point you know you can't really get any real work done any where. This is the story of many middle managers in big corporates.

Most managers are really cost and work accountants.

The Dilbert principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.

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

This can leave you in the awkward situation where the person in a higher position within the organization is not as intelligent as his employees. But given limited resources, as most companies are subject to, it may be the optimal structure for an organization, despite whatever "Dilbert" moments come out of it.

I don't believe for a second that there are no good managers, or that they are not necessary. Apple and Google produce the kind of software that they do because they have good managers (for the most part). The thing is, no one complains about his/her awesome manager. (In an episode of the Debug podcast, Don Melton describes his life as a manager and gives a little more insight about what goes on on a big company).

This is not to say that you couldn't have a system in which the engineers managed themselves, as in Valve.

Having said that, the quality of Samsung's software has not impressed anyone, so I kind of believe that they have a management problem.

Most smart people aren't.

There are many smart people who are good talkers. But I only know them from the Internet.

The top scientists and engineers of our time. The leaders of the biggest companies are often engineers themself.

But they don't make the mass of smart people.

It seems like many managers have a network of mighty people, which just lets them float over the real world. They get fired here and a new job (as good paid manager!!) somewhere else in no time.

But you definitely need be somebody who gets the job done in whatever their area of expertise is. Those are the kind of people you quoted in your example.

There are somethings you can't teach a person. They have to learn by doing or go through the grind.

I've had 7 managers. 6 of them were good and 2 of those I'd even classify as stellar. Only one was a bad manager. As a result, I simply don't talk about management very much. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation.

Look, for an analogy, at the theological incompetence seen in many cases of religious colonization ca. 1500-1914. The good priests stayed in the mainland. A lot of idiots were sent to the outposts.

What you have in colonization is the worst people of one society being put over the best of another. That's true even now. Who are the Americans and British who flock to Dubai? People not smart enough to get executive-level positions in their own countries, who want the upper-class lifestyle (that comes from living in a slave state as not-a-slave) but can't get it on their own steam in their own land.

In Managerland/MBAistan, the good ones end up in $5 million per year private equity jobs or running divisions in investment banks. The bad ones get stuck managing nerds (us) and they get really resentful as time goes on. A 40-year-old top-notch programmer is a badass. A 40-year-old Partner at Sequoia is also a badass. A 40-year-old who manages a team of 5 programmers on some project defined by an executive two levels above him (i.e. he has no creative control either) is probably a bitter, terminal middle manager.

The thing is that the best technologists don't want to be managers. They want to be great at their jobs. They don't climb the ranks at all. Managers, on the other hand, always want to climb, and the capable ones do. Top technologists end up answering to people in Managerland who never got out of middle-management and are bitter/resentful.

If we answered to the $5 million per year top-notch businessmen who can actually sell and motivate people, maybe we'd like our jobs better. Or maybe they'd be even bigger assholes; who knows. I think the Colonization Effect (technologists being the colonized people, Managerland being the father country) is worth looking into, though. It might explain why technology management is so terrible. We end up answering to the ones who failed because they don't have any social skills, and who therefore suck at finding a way to motivate us to do the work.

The quality of people who do sales in an investment bank is just much higher-- they can actually convince people to do what they want instead of ordering them around-- than that of the people who manage software engineers in a traditional "tech" company. I've seen both.

To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too.

The more intelligent managers don't complain that employees are "idiots". It's more that low-level employees don't care enough. They don't have any authority or autonomy so they're not conscientious. The mismatch comes from the fact that the manager obviously believes the beauty contest is worth playing (he played it and won) while his underlings are often disengaged outright.