Soft skills are not enough to be an engineering manager

In your opinion, What is the starting point for someone to get a position as a junior or a graduate developer in any company? My answer is that usually the starting point is that the person spends a long time reading programming books, tutorials and videos, getting education in college or courses, applying this knowledge in some dry run environment like college projects, personal projects, hello world projects, etc. After that there is a chance for this person to start as a developer somewhere, but never before.

Now compare this to the starting point at which someone gets a chance to getting a software development management position, even the lowest management positions, what is the starting point for someone to be a manager in the software industry? In the past this move was usually started by someone who showed good technical abilities so someone higher up the management chain assumed that since he/she is a good developer then this implies that he/she will be a good development manager. That was the wrong answer and naturally we had an era of questioning if being a good engineer would imply being a good engineering manager, so the industry moved to another aspect which is the soft skills aspect: if you are an engineer with good soft skills like communication and social acceptance then this is enough for you to get your first role as an engineering manager.

Again, wrong answer.

Management is a science. There are books, courses, college programs in management: engineering management, software management, project management, you name it. And while I think that engineering interviewing and evaluation is a flawed process across the industry, I think it is 10 fold more rigid process than managers interviewing and evaluation. Try to guess or estimate how many of basic management topics (like different organizational structures, where a team lies in the company’s structure and the effect of this on the team’s operation and method of work, different companies’ business phases and its implication on the software development process, companies’ financial attributes and their effect on the engineering efforts of those companies, different ways of running engineering operations, different forms of decision making process, dual reporting, risk evaluation, etc) that a person was asked before being given his first role as a manager in our industry. Or even try to guess how many of these topics your direct manager was asked before he was hired in his interviews for his role. I doubt that the answer will be satisfactory.

One contributing factor to this is the massive expansion of software companies or engineering departments. With increasing head count the company needs more managers to manage those people which in turn means that companies lower the bar for someone to become a manager. We are not going to wait for someone to finish actually learning what it takes to be a manager and in wild expansion phases the process becomes practically anyone who raises his hand and is socially above average can get his first managerial role.

With very few exceptions, those topics mentioned above and other similar topics are sort of magic or science fiction to most managers that I have worked with, and I have been working in multi billion dollar companies in the last 10 years. Most managers I have worked with don’t even know where to start the conversation around those topics, or they learn them the hard way while on the job, one screw up at a time — some don’t learn even with screw ups. The ones who really know those topics were sort of unicorns and working with them was a totally different experience, and of course the performance of their teams was usually something from another world — at least given the surrounding environment they operated in.

like programming, Management is a science and a skill and it should be treated accordingly. You cannot just focus on the skill without the science and you cannot assume that the skill equals social skills. Social skills being easy to evaluate does not mean that it equates management skills.