Informal Poll WAS RE: [geeks] Laid off blues

[Will Mc Donald]

From: "Kurt Huhn" <kurt at k-huhn.com>
> > > When suits are involved, anything is possible.  Once you get
> > > profitability, someone will decide to hire 20 or 30 more vice
> presidents.
> >
> > Why hire external unknown quantities who may turn out to be clueful when
> you
> > can promote from within and guarantee incompetence? :)
>
> VPs are usually empty suits unless they've worked their way up from
> bleary-eyed coding/admining drones.  Create a Director/manager from a
> sysadmin, and you have a Director that can understand (in technical terms)
> what *actually* happened to the systems, and may even have the knowledge
to
> help fix it.
>
> Lord knows, if someone ever told me I had to stop being a geek to keep my
> Director's title, I might slap them back into reality.


Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that internal promotion is a Bad
Thing[tm]. Promoting the clueful internally is damn good as long as that
person wants to go. I was mocking the ablities that some middle and upper
managers seem to have for promoting people who are grossly unsuitable for
the posts they're raised to.

I've seen this happen in a couple of companies on a few different levels.

I was about to say "In an ideal world *all* management would have a solid
grounding in the field they're managers in" but I'm not sure if that's too
sweeping a statement or not.

Will.