The problem is that you can't run a large engineering department based on "Bob says Steve isn't that good". It just doesn't scale, that's the whole reason metrics get introduced.
This is such a defeatist attitude. We're arguing two different things too.
We're not saying you have to personally know 500k people. We're saying that to some people, it's very clear and obvious that someone working for them is incompetent and/or simply doing a bad job (and this is not gut feel). This shouldn't be up for debate or controversy. If you hired that person to manage another person, you expect them to know what they're doing and at the very least see the Red Flags of incompetence (whatever they may be). We've been trying the "systemic" way of ridding ourselves of bias, but here it is, alive and well. What we got instead is a broken system that's full of conflicting priorities and people trying their best to navigate them and doing so badly - all whilst the actual goals and priorities get sidelined as secondary.
If you have a manager overseeing 4 people, and a higher level manager overseeing 4 managers, it takes 10 levels of management to oversea 500k people. That is not particularly daunting.
Fair point - but we've seen how metrics can be gamed and cease to be useful measures of reality. People are smart and they will game them, even if it means hiding it behind a score/checklist/report.
We can either choose excellence and competence, or we get this weird mediocrity that is killing us slowly but somehow we can say "but it's running our large department based on science and scalable metrics".
Maybe we're not supposed to make these departments scale, maybe we need to keep them small and autonomous and "unfair" to some degree in order to function. Have we considered that? Not everything has to be optimized to the N-th degree and made to grow large like an instagram or google.
There's a great scene at the end of Generation Kill where the war reporter asks the commander why he didn't reprimand one of the worst leaders underneath him more harshly.
The commander essentially says that he constantly receives conflicting reports about his leaders' performance, and if he relieved one for unproven reports, his command would disintegrate. Because the good leaders have equal numbers of bad reports about them, from those who don't like them.
Summed up the proper exercise of authority nicely, imho.
That's one answer. Although manager technical expertise has to also come with minimal ego, so you can defer to your people when they know more than you.
The alternative is developing an intuition for bullshit. It's rarer, but I've had a few non-technical PMs / managers who were excellent at their job because they could suss out whether someone wasn't being honest.
Everything has to come with minimal ego. I don't see how that has anything to do with managers having technical knowledge.
And it's great if a handful of people can smell out bs in a field they're not familiar with, but you can't write policy on the back of a few unicorns like that. (Yes, managing ego is hard too, but I believe it's more common to start with and more trainable.)
There is this scene in Das Boot were one of the crew members says that they are going deeper than the sub is rated for and the captain says "don't worry German engineering".
But right now we know neither (Bob or Steve being bad), and we hide that behind some objective metric that gets diluted at every level. We hide it in Steve's reviews, in Bob's reviews, in the post-weld reports, in the weld-quality audit report, the inspection. Heck even NASA oversight inspectors are probably downplaying some of the severity when stating it in their findings report (saying it's partially due to, or the welds "contributed" to the quality, etc.) instead of just saying "these guys got an amateur to weld the exterior". So this "Steve is Bad" property gets spread out across all those various things, when we could just as easily have fired Steve because Bob evaluated him. Or maybe Bob didn't state it, maybe the NASA inspector told him "Bob, whoever you got to weld this thing is an amateur. Fire him before you get someone killed."
And sure, does that mean Bob might get it wrong? Of course, he might even be a petty little tyrant with an ego or he just might not like Steve because he made a funny comment about Bob's tie on his first day. I don't think some things can scale and be optimized away like we're all a bunch of cogs in a machine with our own individual little tasks and performance metrics that get aggregated into the larger whole.
