Is Elon right about technical managers?
The Tweet that has caused an avalanche of reactions in the tech leadership community. And other useful resources on the topic of domain vs. human skills debate.
Hey there,
This Weekly Briefing is some sort of a special edition, not only because its coming on a Tuesday instead of a Sunday (sorry!) but also because of this:
Elon Musk dropped his tweet about technical managers and the discussions in our Slack community are 🔥
So I was wondering if he is right and under which circumstances, so I did some research and here is what I found:
Do good managers in tech need to be technically good?
📰 Web: Should engineering managers be technical? by Charity Majors (CTO and Co-founder of Honeycomb.io)
Top Takeaways: Effectively she agrees with Elon and gives really thought-through arguments on WHY. Charity also checks herself right from the start admitting that this way of thinking may support the manifestation of old snobbery around engineers being just better at everything they do. She describes that it’s possible to be a good manager w/o tech skills but that its very rare and which other qualities that person needs to have. Also she describes the alternative to unicorn managers (non-technical outstanding EMs) or technically skilled EMs in the shape of tech-non-tech DUO EMs. It’s an article worth reading!
📰 Web: Can You Be a Great Leader Without Technical Expertise? by Art Markman (PhD, Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas)
Top Takeaways: Art also agrees with Elon, basically you need to know your market, customer, industry in order to run a business, and similarly if you want to run tech teams you need to know your ecosystem: the codebase, languages, people that write it all etc. He is also pointing out that given that career mobility increased its harder for the new generations to build up that domain expertise and progress on the leadership track (well unless you're an engineer I guess, since you can move around tons and still grow your engineering skills really well).
This was my response to Brian’s response to Elon 👇
👉 Head over to our community to discuss, the thread is growing by the minute:
Tips from the Bunch AI Coach:
This week’s tip comes from Alexander Weber (Chief Growth Officer at N26) “When Your New Team Expects You to Know It All”, and it helps you get started in a new team, especially if you’re not the biggest expert, but work with more senior and experienced people around you.
Hope you’re having a great week!
Darja
PS: Download the AI coach to get 1% better in just 2 min a day