The recent mass-layoffs in big Indian IT organizations seem to be one of the many manifestations of it. This is still just the beginning!
It's a time to ask, "What's the core-competency of your Technology-Company?"!!!
What do you market your company as? A company with an army of managers or that of Engineers?
Whose innovations matter the most to your company? The management innovations or engineering innovations?
What do your customers pay for? The best engineered products or the best managed products?
What does your company boast of? Engineers with as much as 5 years of experience or managers with as little as 5 years of experience?
Why do you burden your technical people with more and more managerial tasks? Why don't you try the same thing with your management staff as well by asking them to start contributing in technology too?
If the managers can't do the technology stuff, what makes you feel that the engineers can do the management stuff? Or do you, yourself, believe that the management is all about just the postman-ship and the time-sheets-filling activity and nothing more?
When is your company going to realize that there's so much more to the management than the mere people-management? People-management is just one of the many skills a manager needs to possess!
Actually, the engineers and managers are two important pillars of any company. While the engineers manage the depth, the managers manage the breadth! This is how they cover the complete area.
While the engineers realize the technological visions by overcoming all the technical hurdles, the managers procure and manage all the resources well to enable them achieve these goals.
The technology companies should have the engineers-friendly, open and creative environment and not the bureaucratic environment run by some autocratic managers!
The engineers should be motivated to stay as engineers and keep contributing as engineers with their technology-friendly brains rather than forcing them to start dreaming of becoming managers by day-to-day subordination that they receive from their managers! Developers racing up to be the managers even before they learn the development well, is really alarming!
And people becoming managers just because of their years of experience or the mere people-management skills too is alarming! These managers move ahead on the corporate ladder and create the army of managers, just like them! Then who's really handling the vision and the strategy of the company? Who's responsible for early identification of risks and their mitigation? Who's really managing your company, while everyone's playing just the role of a postman and are busy filling in the time-sheets?
In large manufacturing plants, most of the times, the core-competency behind the great products is the machinery that mass-produce them, while the workers just oversee or operate those machines. But in IT-industry, the computers, by themselves, do not produce anything; it's the engineers sitting in front of them who create the great software products.
So the workers/supervisor mindset does not apply in the IT-industry. In IT-industry, or any technology-focused industry, the developers/engineers themselves are the manufacturing machines with all the quality, speed and know-how residing within them!
You accept it or not but the managers and the engineers think differently, probably as a side effect of their aptitude or their profession. So it becomes more important to make your management engineers-friendly, if you are running a technology company.
So, it's really a time to ask yourself, "What's the core-competency of your company?"!!!
Disclaimer:
The author is an Engineer by education/skillset. The author himself has worked as a CTO for 15 years, having been involved in "Management" as well as "Engineering" at different levels. He was involved in hiring and managing people from both the streams, viz. management as well as engineering. So the author does not have any prejudice towards any of the two main and important streams in any sizable company.
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