Not helped by the habit of promoting good engineers _who just want to keep engineering_ into management positions for which they have neither the talent or the interest. Brookes pointed out forty years ago that this was a bad idea.

Neil

When I get tempted to answer questions on Quora from people who ask "how do I get promoted from engineering into management?", my stock answer is "WTF did you go into engineering, if you wanted to do management, you should have gone into management in the first place." It's not as though engineering is the "deliver phone books to pay the bills" job that you scrape along in until your vocation job comes along.

Another of my friends who is a skilled programmer hasn't done any programming for about 15 years, as his company near enough threatened to fire him if he didn't allow himself to be "promoted" into management. Something he didn't want to do, had no skill or aptitude in doing, saw as a punishment, and reduced the productivity of the company by "banning" one of its most productive producers from producing.

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JGH - http://mdfs.net

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It's a twofold problem, I think. The best managers (IMHO) have both management ability (which is indeed a completely separate skillset) and at least a working knowledge of the problem domain, plus a temperament that does not lend itself to vainglory or pique. These people are vanishingly rare, but they do exist; I've worked for a couple.

But between the rareness of triple-play candidates like that and the well-documented tendency of management hiring practices to select for incompetence (since competent managers may hire/promote incompetent managers by mistake, but incompetent managers will always hire/promote incompetent managers, and everything in modern management culture is designed to insulate managers from the consequences of their actions, so they never get fired,) the usual course of events is either that A. managers will be hired who may have management ability, but have no knowledge of the problem domain, or B. engineers will be dragooned into management despite not having management ability - and in either case, it's a crapshoot whether they'll have a suitable temperament (spoiler: the answer is usually "no.")

I was lucky to work for an engineering company for 35 years that has two promotion tracks. One is the engineer into project leader into 1st level management and on up management chain; the second is engineer into senior engineer into distinguished engineer. If you want to pursue management track, you'll need to move around the company a lot, but if you want to stay in the engineering track, you can stay in the same job doing same thing for decades. I picked the engineering track. The entire company management except few vice presidents and the president were promoted from within and all started off as engineers. The company is full of people recruited fresh out of colleges and worked for 40 years then retired. Management have actually complained that the employee attrition rate is too low, that fresh new blood is needed more often than 4% yearly turnover.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It always amuses me when I read a news report, eg: "Train drivers on strike, services kept running by managers". Why don't they just fire all the truculent train drivers, and get the managers to drive the trains, they clearly demonstrated they were capable of doing it in the strike, and the fact they weren't doing their actual management job clearly didn't have any impact.

A bit similar to the Covid lockdowns. Great swathes of public sector paper pushers were paid to barricade themselves at home and do nothing.... yet the organisations still managed to keep going. The very definition of redundancy.

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JGH - http://mdfs.net

I suspect that in many cases, 'environmental concerns' equate to 'not in my back yard'. There are valid concerns, but there are too many people who seem to be 'whatever it is I'm agin it'.

A common complaint in the UK over the last forty years has been 'we're not educating enough scientists/engineers/technologists'. This in a country that started the industrial revolution... it always struck me that the complaints give the government the perfect opportunity to sponsor people to take degrees in, say, engineering, teaching, medicine (whatever they expect to be short of) rather than expecting people to be seriously in debt when they get their degree. A mechanism to require said graduates to remain in the field for enough years to pay back their training costs - no actual payment unless you leave that field of employment, and pro-rata if you leave the field before your time is up.

It's not unreasonable to _enable_ anyone who is capable to get to university; it is unreasonable to get them their to get degrees in comparative basket weaving (thanks, RAH, for the quote). (I saw a meme recently that pointed out that you can get a degree in pyramid archeology. There are however almost no jobs in that field, so your only option is teaching pyramid archeology... it's literally a pyramid scheme )

jgh: managers driving trains is not perhaps a good example: most of the managers are perhaps ex-drivers, and there are a _lot_ fewer of them than actual drivers. Certainly the service is not up to the usual shambles of British Rail (or indeed Deutsche Bahn as we have to suffer over here).

But again, regarding high-tech jobs and skills: what do you expect when your MBAs kept exporting your production to somewhere _that was cheaper this year_; when companies like HP and IBM deliberately sack, er, I mean of course, encourage to leave, their older workers - the ones who developed the processes and systems and know how they work.

IBM in particular wants to replace its workers with AI - and the AI simply doesn't work: https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/ ... ai_talent/ - Is there any reason why anyone wants what might be laughingly called a career in such a place?

Neil

p.s. small world department: my parents were friends with a chap who was the head of a UK university electronics department. Nearly forty years after I last saw him, I discovered he had educated my at-the-time boss.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

No problem at all with useless degrees: I'm all for being educated in interesting subjects, irrespective of the subject. One reason I took a degree at the Open University was because (iirc) six credits gave you a bachelor's, and credits were cheap enough - a couple of hundred quid - that one could do anything that looked interesting. When the UK took their funding largely away some years ago and allowed universities to charge nine grand a year, of course every university _did_ charge that, including them. So credits immediately rose to several thousand quid, and the whole concept of educate for your interest went away... a genius move.

The problem with useless degrees is that there is no concept of them being useless. The joke used to be: the first professional words of a Social Science graduate? Would you like fries with that?

A state should encourage education but not for those for whom it will serve no function. But since schools went from 'are they learning?' to 'anything to keep the little darlings happy'...

Neil

p.s. it strikes me that for the majority of my career, I have rarely had to use maths more complex than V=IR (and its inverses); P=IV; and Xc=1/JwC... but the fact that even after sixty years I can still calculate areas and volumes and handle probabilities and compound interest and basic calculus and trigonometry and simultaneous equations (and...) is very handy in my day-to-day life.

I wouldn't call knowing something of philosophy useless at all. I get quite a kick out of Plato and Hume (among others), but it's also true I read them for myself long after college. And I don't know if it's true today, but when I was there, students were not allowed to major in philosophy unless they also majored in something else. They were required to be double majors, because of the poor job prospects of having only a philosophy degree.

Employers used to train people, and to save costs and duplication they pooled together to form trade schools. And they became institutes and polytechnics, run by and specialising in what the local businesses specialised in. Metallurgy and medicine in Sheffield, vetn'ry in Edinburgh, brewing in Burton. Then the polytechnics became part of local government, and concentrated on what politicians wanted instead of the local employers, and then they became Universities and now concentrate on having Chancellors and fancy hats.

No, the state shouldn't be encouraging *anything*, the state should be keeping its damn oar out.

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JGH - http://mdfs.net

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!