<p>Nobody is suggesting that anything unethical would occur.</p>
<p>What I envision is a system that is akin to the way that most corporate legal departments operate. Most businesses engage in activities that have potential legal liability of some sort, whether it’s issues dealing with potential customer personal damage lawsuits, investor fraud, government regulation, or HR policies (i.e. workplace harassment). Hence, when you encounter such a situation, you get your company’s legal department involved and, if necessary, obtain authorization and sign-offs from your company’s General Counsel. In many cases where the legal issues are intricate, the company lawyers will be intimately involved in the step-by-step procedures of product design and development itself. For example, after Microsoft signed a consent decree with the government as part of the settlement of the U.S. vs. Microsoft antitrust case, Microsoft lawyers were (and still are) intimately involved in the engineering and product design decisions of Microsoft products to ensure that the terms of the settlement are being followed, including sign-offs on the developments of new features and software API’s</p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean that your company’s legal department are your managers. For example, Microsoft’s legal department can’t hire and fire engineers. That’s the responsibility of the engineering managers, who are themselves not lawyers. </p>
<p>But in any case, that’s neither here nor there. The bottom line is that I hardly see that sign-off authority is necessary for a manager. That’s a job that can and probably should be handled by the individual engineers themselves. For example, another way to organize an engineering company is simply to have senior engineers who are P.E.'s and who do have sign-off authority to oversee the technical work of all of the other engineers, but to otherwise hold no other responsibilities; those responsibilities being held by the actual manager himself. Those senior engineers can advise the manager as to who is doing good work and who isn’t, but it is still the manager’s prerogative to decide who should be given raises, who should be fired, as well as the profit/loss responsibilities of the group. {In many cases, this is because the senior engineers actually prefer not to have such responsibilities, because they would rather deal with technical matters rather than the organizational and leadership issues involved in actual management. In fact, I used to work for an organization like this.}</p>
<p>From what I’ve read thus far, management sounds like a lot more work than what the engineer does. Coordinate this, contact that, arrange this, order that, review this, direct that. If you aren’t competent, I have a hard time believing that a company would trust you with these duties.</p>
<p>Can I then conclude that to get into a management position, you have to know what you are doing and be capable to direct engineering projects, MBA or not? If this is true, then does sakky, in bringing up the point that many managers are not competent, bring light to the fact that there needs to be a revamp of the way management positions are assigned? Does anyone think there is a problem with who becomes managers?</p>
<p>sakky, it seems that what you’re proposing is adding a middle manager between the project manager and the engineers. In this system, you’d give the administrative responsibilities to the middle manager and the technical responsibilities to the project manager. Correct?</p>
<p>If that’s the case, I question whether the workload would be balanced between the two managers. In the current system, the PM’s spend the overwhelming majority of the time on the technical side, and less on the administrative side. In your proposed system, I see the senior PM’s being overburdened with work, going through all the calculations, and I see the middle manager having little if any work day to day. The tasks that you suggest appear to be passive activities, which are things that the senior PM could do anyway without much of a problem in addition to the technical duties. </p>
<p>In addition to the conflict with the NSPE Code of Ethics brought up previously (one would have to be crazy to take on that much responsibility), there’s also the question of financial feasibility. You’re hiring a middle manager with an MBA… would it be fair to say that person will be earning $100k? How do you justify that cost? What’s the incentive for the company to make such an organizational change? I assume it would be efficiency, but do you really gain enough for it to be worth $100k per team? The senior PMs who are PE’s wouldn’t really have time to take on significantly more projects than they currently are, even with the elimination of the administrative duties. Perhaps it’s different from company to company, but for the one engineering firm that I worked with, I’d estimate the PM’s spent 95% of their time on the technical aspect of the work, and maybe 5% on administrative duties. </p>
<p>Regarding profit/losses… the only thing the middle manager would have to watch is the number of billable hours and the budget for the project. You don’t need an MBA to do that and it doesn’t take that much time out of the week. In the company I worked for, deciding raises and hiring/firing was the VP’s responsibility. Personally, I don’t see the administrative duties as a big deal, but I guess that comes down to personality.</p>
<p>So basically, what my point comes down to is this…is it worth spending an extra $100k on a person with an MBA to manage 4 engineers when currently this can be done without him/her? What would be the day-to-day tasks of this middle manager? What does this person bring to the table?</p>
<p>EDIT: Personally, I like flatter organizational structures, unless there’s a really good benefit to an additional layer.</p>
<p>The basic outline of this guy’s (a professor of business) theory about how promotion within a company works. He says it goes exactly how seesys described earlier, except that people stop being promoted once they reach a job they’re bad at. So, say you’re a great salesman, you’ll get promoted to manage sales people. What about your ability as a salesman says you’re going to be good at managing people? Couldn’t it very well be that your best manager is actually a very poor salesman?</p>
<p>So, in this type of system, it’s possible to see how aibarr’s experiences are true, since people that make good engineers there would make good engineering managers (since they’re still mostly doing engineering). However, it’s also possible to see what sakky’s talking about, as companies where management stops being an engineering task and turns into a personnel one.</p>
<p>I agree with that. If the position requires more administrative tasks, then it would most likely be beneficial to have someone with a managerial background rather than an engineering background. To clarify my previous post, I do support the idea of the VP or senior management having degrees other than engineering. In most cases, it should not be a requirement at that level since they wouldn’t have to do any engineering.</p>
<p>Heh heh heh. Boy, we’d all like to believe that, wouldn’t we? Well, all I can tell you is to work for a few years and, unless you are lucky, you are bound to find some incompetent managers. </p>
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<p>To be fair, I think the real problem with managers is the same one that plagues engineering: it is often times quite difficult to tell from afar who really is competent as a manager and who isn’t, as there are no clear and verifiable metrics that can be applied. That inevitably means that office politics ends up playing a strong role. The “best” engineers or managers, in the sense that they are the ones who get promoted, are often times only the “best” in the sense that they are stellar self-promoters and self-marketers, but not because they actually have any skills that are truly valuable to the company at large. There’s a difference between appearing to be useful to the company and actually being useful to the company, and in the case of management, it’s often times quite hard to distinguish the two. </p>
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<p>Actually, I am not proposing anything. What I have stated is a simple reformulation of the ‘matrix’ system of management that has proven to be highly popular among numerous firms and in which employees report to two (or more) managers, one according to their function and another to their project, and sometimes yet another according to other classifications (i.e. geography).</p>
<p>Now, we can debate whether matrix management is truly valid or not, and under what conditions, but the point is, it is a well-established organizational design methodology with a long pedigree and has been credited with numerous successes (and, to be sure, some failures). </p>
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<p>Actually, I don’t know about that. It seems to me that the act of budgeting, of dealing with human relations problems, of interfacing with other divisions of the company (i.e. HR, Legal, Marketing, etc.) would mean that the nontechnical manager would have quite a bit on his plate even if he doesn’t have to oversee any technical matters. </p>
<p>Besides, I can put it to you another way. Just because you’re a brilliant engineer with impeccable technical skills doesn’t mean that you know how to manage and lead people. It doesn’t mean that you know how to adjudicate relationship conflicts. It doesn’t mean that you know how to wheedle and cajole other divisions of your company to provide resources. Let’s face it. Not all engineers are socially adept. We can probably all think of certain engineers who are technically brilliant but who are socially awkward or even antisocial such that they would serve poorly in a pure management role where they actually had to be in charge of human relationships. I think that most of us would prefer that such a person serve in a purely technical oversight role, but otherwise have no formal responsibility over teams. {Heck, such a person probably doesn’t want any such responsibilities anyway.} </p>
<p>But that is, of course, if the nontechnical manager actually cares to perform all of these roles I have mentioned, and performs them well. See below. </p>
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<p>Ok, then let’s have it your way and see what it means. Let’s say that all engineers really are managed by somebody who is himself a highly qualified engineer so that he can do sign-offs and whatnot. Now then, who manages those engineering managers? And who managers the managers of those managers? Etc. etc. In most companies, even engineering companies, you eventually hit a layer of management that is not technical. So how did this guy get that job?</p>
<p>I’ll give you a case in point. Bechtel is the largest engineering firm in the US. Yet CEO Riley Bechtel is not an engineer. His bachelor’s degrees are in psychology and political science, and he has a JD/MBA from Stanford. Does that mean that Bechtel is being unethical? </p>
<p>Nor is Bechtel particularly unusual: numerous engineering firms, and even engineering departments are led by managers who are not themselves engineers. For example, Jeff Immelt is not only the CEO of General Electric now, he had previously held numerous positions within GE heading various technical divisions within the company (i.e. VP and GM of GE Plastics America, VP of GE Appliances, President and CEO of GE Medical Systems). Yet Immelt is not an engineer. So if it’s OK for Immelt to hold these positions in which he had extensive management authority over thousands of GE engineers, is it really so outrageous for a low-level engineering manager to not himself be an engineer? In other words, why would it be unethical for an engineering manager to not be himself an engineer, but it is entirely fine for the managers of those engineering managers to not themselves be engineers? </p>
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<p>Heh heh. Here you are presuming that these firms are always truly acting in the name of efficiency. Yet I think we can all agree that corporate America is replete with examples of massive inefficiency and of certain managers who do nothing yet make huge pay packets anyway. </p>
<p>Let me put it to you this way. There’s a certain firm who I can’t name (but they make vehicles and are based in Michigan, if that helps you). This firm is losing literally billions of dollars every year. Yet somehow - somehow - they can afford to hire the world’s top management consultancies to advise them on how to “restructure” their business, and pay them 8 to 9 figure sums for that advice. How they can be losing billions yet still have the money to pay these huge consulting fees, I don’t really know, but pay them they somehow do. In fact, one of my old buddies, who used to work for this ‘vehicle company’, who quit to get his MBA, is now back at that very same company, but this time as an extremely expensive management consultant (but of course, to his chagrin, very little of those huge fees actually goes to him; most of it goes to the partners in his consulting firm). I ask you - is this efficient? </p>
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<p>I think you’re asking the wrong question, for as I have pointed out, many engineering firms already have their engineers managed by nontechnical managers. </p>
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<p>Ha! Well, if you really believe that to be true, and hence those management tasks are not really that hard, then you should be asking yourself why exactly do those managers get paid so much, relative to the regular engineers?</p>
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<p>Hey, what can I say? I don’t really understand why exactly private equity firms will pay upwards of $400k to newly minted MBA students just to start. I don’t really understand why hedge fund managers can be paid literally billions even when their investors’ returns are not that high. I don’t understand why CEO’s can be given multi-million dollar payouts despite large declines in the stock price (i.e. see Hank McKinnell of Pfizer). A lot of other researchers don’t really understand it either, and some have even speculated that these pay packages exist in order to encourage other people to want to be promoted to become managers; under the notion that if you see your manager not producing strong results yet getting paid extremely well anyway, then that spurs you to want to be promoted to management so that you too can be paid extremely well while not having to produce strong results. {It’s an interesting theory, but far too diabolically ingenious for my tastes.}</p>
<p>Wow sakky, you just blew a hole through any idea I had of what management is or was.</p>
<p>I’m not declaring you as the official person who defines what management really is, but you have a pretty strong grasp about what you’re saying. I fact-checked that data and I was surprised to find it true.</p>
<p>I just don’t understand why students, such as I, get intrigued by the high paying offers we get straight out of college, when in truth that money is zilch compared to what a management position offers, which can be acquired without even having to get a degree in engineering. It’s terribly unfair. Engineers do a TON of work, and those who take alternate and perhaps less challenging routes can supercede the engineer in pay and rank.</p>
<p>I don’t feel bad for those that study engineering with the purpose that they will be more marketable in the job force, like me. I don’t feel bad that I don’t exactly enjoy all my classes, that I will try to get a good paying job that doesn’t involve engineering, even though that’s what I’m studying. No, I feel bad for all these people who actually WANT to do engineering and don’t get the respect they deserve. Engineering, to me at least, is just as difficult as being a top notch lawyer or being a great doctor. </p>
<p>I can’t really think of another profession that is underpaid and requires tons of work. If someone could help me out that would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>I’ll agree with you there. Some people are meant to be managers, and some do a pretty poor job at it, but I don’t think this necessitates an entire new position. Why not promote engineers who have managerial qualities to project manager, and keep the rest at technical experts (as my old firm used to do). </p>
<p>And I never suggested that all levels of management be engineers. I’m only saying the second level from the bottom be engineers. Once you get above that, I don’t think it’s a necessity, which we’re in agreement. </p>
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<p>Well I think in most other cases, managers have more administrative duties, and that takes up more of their time. In this case or a project manager at a structural engineering firm, I think it’s requires much more technical competence than managerial competence. Now if you’re talking about the person managing these project managers, that’s entirely different, and I’ll agree with you there.
Let me ask the question a different way… if you were an MBA grad, how would you convince a structural engineering firm to hire you as a middle manager? Everything you’ve been saying so far has been about the status quo in other industries, and nobody seems to be able to explain why that’s happened. It’s human nature to go with the flow and be resistant to change, so you’d have to provide one heck of an argument to get the VP to change his organizational system.</p>
<p>I flat-out balk at the idea of having non-project-team-members sign off on drawings. It defeats the intention of having things stamped at all.</p>
<p>Going back to the other point of conversation, <em>all</em> our managers, right up to the president, are engineers. I actually kind of like it that way, and you’ll find this to be the case in a lot of structural firms. Here, the guy in charge of accounting is an actual business guy, and he’s basically like a close personal advisor to the president, who, in addition to keeping all his PE licenses active, does a LOT of extracurricular coursework on business. But he knows us, he understands us, and he doesn’t treat us like an “engineering staff.” We’ve never had to go see The Bobs, or anything Office Space-esque like that.</p>
<p>So it <em>can</em> work. How we do it, from what I’ve seen, is that we promote from within, and we have fewer than 500 employees, so we can really see how people work with their coworkers and their subordinates. We also invest extensively in in-house training for managers and engineers… We’ve basically created a tailor-made series of crash-courses in management (do engineering managers <em>really</em> need accounting? it would appear that my company doesn’t think so).</p>
<p>I’ve also seen how it <em>doesn’t</em> work. With my former employer, my boss was a fairly competent engineer who seemed like a nice guy, but enjoyed leaving young engineers to fend for themselves without any training, then would call them in, berate them, and insult their intelligence for an hour with the door open when they didn’t magically learn how to be engineers by themselves. We hit forty percent annual turnover when I finally quit. (In my old company’s defense, it was a brand new office, and he was a brand new employee, hired away from another company, so they’d never had a chance to see how he actually operated… I think that was where they went wrong.)</p>
<p>So it can go either way. When it works correctly, I think having engineers as managers all the way up to the top works best (for smaller firms, at least). My current company has experienced just astounding growth over the past decade, and we’ve opened three new offices this year, so I guess we’re doing something right. Just have to increase managerial responsibilities in small increments to see how the candidates fare before you throw them into the deep end.</p>
<p>Well, that’s not really the question that I was answering. Obviously to become a middle manager in any company, including an engineering company, requires that you have moved up the ranks in some function. But that function apparently doesn’t have to be engineering, as evidenced, again, by the numerous engineering companies like GE who will promote people into the management of engineering divisions who are themselves not engineers. Heck, GE claims that its strategic advantage rests on its ability to discover and nurture general management talent from within its ranks such that they can take an employee who started in, say, marketing and, if he has the right talent and if given the proper coaching, can learn to successfully manage the GE Medical Systems Division or the GE Plastics division onto his way to eventually becoming CEO. {Note, lest you think this is merely a hypothetical, let me say that this is precisely the Jeff Immelt story.} </p>
<p>The upshot is that you don’t really need to be an engineer yourself in order to become a successful manager of engineers - not as a starting job, but eventually sometime in your career. We can debate whether that’s optimal or not, but it is the reality. </p>
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<p>Well, one major reason for why this has happened is simple: politics. Every good manager is a good office politician. {Note, the converse is not always true, as some bad managers are nonetheless good politicians, but the contrapositive is true: a bad office politician is a bad manager.} But what that means is that, because good managers understand politics, they will also arrange the institutional organizational structure to favor themselves and their own skills. Engineers, on the other hand, often times do not really understand office politics and in fact, in many cases don’t want to understand it, instead clinging to the (naive) notion that having the right knowledge will inevitably prevail. Sadly it often times does not, as there is a big difference between knowing what should be done and having the political skills to convince others to do what you know should be done. </p>
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<p>To clarify, I never said that such a step was necessary. </p>
<p>What I said is that I don’t think that the sign-off step needs to be performed by the managers themselves, and what I say “manager”, I am specifically talking about those who have the hiring/firing responsibilities. It seems to me that the sign-off responsibilities can just as easily be handled by senior technical staff that oversees the project but do not themselves have any formal hiring/firing responsibility, just like how Microsoft’s lawyers will carefully review all code feature development to ensure compliance with antitrust law, but do not have any formal hiring/firing authority over the software engineers. </p>
<p>Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that these two tasks (sign-off and hiring/firing) always need to be segregated. Like I said, if you have people who are strong technically and managerially, then by all means unify the responsibilities via these people. What I am saying is that they don’t need to be unified, as apparently quite a few engineering firms really do succeed with technical managers who are not themselves technical.</p>
<p>Exactly. Perhaps what we’re not agreeing on is how many engineers out there that do have both qualities. I don’t think that every engineer is suited to become a manager; only some. I don’t know enough engineers to make a generalization, but do you think there are fewer than 1 in 5 engineers that have managerial abilities? That’s really all you need. The others, when they are promoted, don’t have to be pushed into managerial roles. They can be purely technical experts.</p>
<p>Segregating the two types of tasks is a good idea if you really have nobody in your company that can handle both and you can’t hire somebody with both managerial and technical expertise. Surely this route would be better and less expensive than having 2 middle managers, with one handling administrative tasks, and the other handling technical tasks.</p>
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<p>Not sure what you have in mind, but you would need the same number of senior technical staff members as project managers. They really have to be quite involved with the design, so they wouldn’t have more time to oversee more projects than they currently are.</p>
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<p>Yes, it would be best to promote from within the company, but it would be even better to promote an engineer who does have the managerial qualities (see your last paragraph / my first paragraph).</p>