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  > and do not even have a possibility to grow to management.

Hang on, why should this even be the goal? I really do want to question the premise of this kind of ladder in the first place. You got someone with a really good skill, one that is critical to your operations and you... want to put them in charge of people rather than keep doing what they're doing? You can just keep promoting people with whatever direction you want them to go in. It is all arbitrary and made up anyways. So why not keep promoting them in a direction where you still benefit from those technical skills?

▲ lurking_swe a day ago | parent | next [-]

ever work for a manager that barely understood what you do, or how it’s done? Been there, done that. Never again…

Engineers shouldn’t be _forced_ into management but the option should be encouraged if they have the aptitude for it.

	▲	godelski a day ago \| parent [-]
		You're also making a bad assumption. I'm just saying there should be multiple paths forward. You can promote in any direction you want as long as you decide that your employees can do that. In our fictitious scenario some could go to manage teams some not. Some could focus on their work being a team lead, some just continue doing their thing. My point is literally at the arbitrariness of promotion and how biased it is. There's a very clear bias that being structured by business people who think business people are the most important. The classic "I do x, so x is more important" fallacy. My point is to make people just question if what we do is actually reasonable, and if we could do things better. Besides, I've worked with people who previously knew how to program but lost the skill when moving to management for a decade and they aren't really any better than the manager that never knew it. Neither of these results in smooth operation. But I think to see a solution we'd also need to reconsider the premise. That's what I'm getting at.

▲ sam_lowry_ a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Nope.

I do not say that experts have to be put in charge of people instead of doing what they're doing.

I rather say that experts should be in charge of what they are doing.

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mcv 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is the case with real engineering companies. My wife works at Rijkswaterstaat, and there engineers bear direct responsibility for projects that are worth lives, and they can make important decisions about those projects for that reason. For example, a couple of years ago an engineer closed a bridge because of a lack of maintenance. Big scandal about the bridge getting closed, but the real scandal was that maintenance was so far behind. Turned out the engineer had warned about this several times before, but somehow those messages didn't arrive at the people in charge of planning and funding maintenance. So that was the process that really needed fixing (and the bridge, of course).

	▲	sam_lowry_ 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Heh... Interesting that you bring in Rijkswaterstaat as a counterexample, because I remember it from the story about the Botlek bridge and how they could not fix it for a couple years and when the root cause was identified, it turned out to be rust in an ethernet port [1]. [1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-rea...

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godelski 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think this is a good option. I also have no problem with experts being put in charge of people. Truthfully I think the bigger issue is that there's not more ways for growth. But at this point I'd settle for just ways to grow in the technical side without needing to move to management (being a group lead or having people under you is something I'd consider different when your main job is still doing technical work)