Some time ago, I was talking to my mom about Taiwanese (also known as Hokkien, a regional dialect that originates from the Fujian province of China):
Me: I met an Uber driver in Singapore who was an immigrant from Fujian. He spoke to me in Hokkien, and I could understand him! I’m surprised that there was no difference in accent: Taiwanese developed separately from Hokkien around 300 years ago, around the same time the U.S. separated from England. However, American and British accents are completely different!
Mom: That’s because your Taiwanese sucks. Your dad and I can tell apart accents from the northern, central, and southern parts of Taiwan.
While it’s common sense that you need to be good at a skill in order to evaluate said skill, people often forget that fact. For example, this reminded me of a lunch conversation with a previous team a while back:
Sherlock [1]: Hey Ken, so what interviews did you have to do to join the company?
Me: Uh, there were eight rounds total: two management rounds, a coding round, a technical experience round, two architecture design rounds, and two core value rounds.
Adam: Wait, engineering managers have to go through technical interviews? I thought they didn’t have to be technical!
A commonly debated topic in tech companies is: Should engineering managers be technical? We can generalize this as: Should functional managers have domain expertise? Functional managers differ from general managers (GMs), whose job is to manage a cross-functional business unit and who can often delegate functional management to one of their reports.
In discussing this topic, Will Larson, author of “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management,” published an article questioning what it even means to be technical. He states (emphasis mine):
We’ve all heard the one about a manager who was “promoted out of the field” because their engineering efforts were sufficiently hazardous (and leadership was sufficiently conflict averse) that their company moved them into the “safe” role of managing their peers’ careers. But that story, if real, is the stuff of exception. Most folks I’ve seen painted as “not technical” have an extensive background in software engineering.
I agree with Will that the term “technical” can be confusing and can mean different things to different people. In the case of my fluency in Taiwanese, I was “technical” enough to communicate with others, but I was unable to distinguish accents across regions. Given the differences in various contexts, I prefer to reframe the questions above as: Does the functional manager have relevant functional expertise that is needed to support their team members?”
Before we answer that question, let’s take a look at what a manager’s job entails:
- Develop the team and its people
- Support the team to deliver business (or technical) impact
Develop the Team and Its People
There are roughly three parts to developing a team: recruiting, retaining, and growing the team and its employees.
I would argue recruiting is possibly the most important of the three: If you recruit the right talent, everything else — business outcomes, retention, morale, and culture — can largely take care of itself. It all starts by identifying the right talent for your environment and convincing them to join your team. Such recruitment greatly benefits from a manager having prior in-domain experience, as it provides you with an extra level of empathy to connect with your candidates and understand their concerns.
Similarly, empathy is a prerequisite to the retention and growth of employees. While it is possible to have deep empathy for your employees without shared professional experience, it is difficult and rare in deep-knowledge work domains. For example, I once worked for a VP of engineering who had never worked at a tech company before, having only worked in finance and consulting. Although he was “technical” in the traditional sense because he had coded in the past, he did not actually have the relevant experience needed to support the engineers at the company.
At a tech company, engineers build products for the long term, while in finance and consulting, engineers primarily respond to client requests on a daily basis. As a result, the VP modeled product development efforts on independent, two- or three-month projects. No consideration was given for the ongoing maintenance costs by the engineers because in consulting, you hand the project off to your client and start a brand new one after three months!
Retention became an issue: It was impossible to change the VP’s mind about balancing long-term needs with short-term asks. He was constantly frustrated at engineers who would not prioritize every late-breaking client request, whereas the engineers fought hard to prioritize building a reusable platform for all customers. Needless to say, the growth of employees stagnated as they disagreed with his prioritization, and retention dropped because the engineers did not sign up to join a client services consulting agency.
This pattern extends beyond tech: The Harvard Business Review also found that hospitals managed by medically trained doctors are much better run than non-M.D. professional managers in terms of quality of patient care, work environment, and employee happiness.
Support the Team To Deliver Business (or Technical) Impact
A big part of a manager’s job is to ensure their team delivers on its promises. In order to do that, a manager needs to be able to accurately assess the progress of their team’s projects. This is where the lack of relevant IC experience may make the job that much tougher.
For example, if the company is behind schedule in recruiting, the recruiting manager needs to understand the seasonality of candidates and diagnose what went wrong. Are we sending out enough offers? Why are candidates rejecting our offers? Are the offers not competitive enough, or did we not market the role effectively? Without having been in the trenches, it is extremely difficult to diagnose the root issue, much less devise a solution to fix it.
Guiding a team is incredibly difficult without relevant domain experience, even in companies where managers partner with senior ICs to co-drive projects. For example, an engineering manager with no development experience might partner with a strong senior engineer who functions as a tech lead and takes care of all the technical aspects of the project.
However, the manager must always be in lockstep with the tech lead. The moment a disagreement happens — for example, if the tech lead insists that a project cannot be completed by an extremely important timeline — the manager will be left in the dark. Because the manager is unable to properly guide the team toward a collective decision due to the manager’s lack of domain expertise, either the tech lead makes all the decisions or the manager makes a bad top-down executive call, both of which typically end with disastrous results.
Even when the project is going well, the functional manager also needs to understand each person’s contributions in order to fairly assess each person’s performance. In many companies, senior ICs are not involved in performance reviews, nor are they trained in performance assessment. This leaves the non-technical manager at the mercy of each IC’s peer review, which may be prone to bias. For example, many people, especially those not calibrated in performance evaluation, may subconsciously provide more positive reviews to peers that look like them.
In summary, while it is possible to be an effective functional manager without previous experience as an IC in that domain, you will need very strong partners to fill in the gaps, as seen in the tech lead example above. You’ll also inevitably end up relying on others much more to achieve your own goal. The more common (and effective) way is to hire a functional manager with relevant IC experience, as it will be much easier for them to have empathy for their reports.
After all, there’s a reason why Genghis Khan, one of the greatest generals in history, organized his army into units of various sizes, in which the prerequisite for becoming a leader of a small unit was proven success as a footsoldier [2].
If you do decide to hire a functional manager with no relevant functional experience, be very careful about the tradeoffs you’re making, as well whether or not a support system is set up to ensure the success of the manager and their team. As for me, I personally don’t think I’ll be up for heading the Taichung Taiwanese Cultural Association any time soon!
[1] Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
[2] Genghis Khan also took this a step further by requiring leaders of larger units to have succeeded as leaders of smaller units.
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
