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# Leadership
There are a lot of leadership skills needed for managing an engineering team at any scale.
Unfortunately, besides lacking great engineers in the market, we also lack great leaders as well. Huge shortage.
Common mistake: what you thought made you successful as an individual contributor (IC) will not make you successful as a manager.
As the company scale, staff and principal roles are needed to accommodate technical problems, especially around scaling, mostly leading the technical direction of the company going forward.
* There is an IC path (Common in the US), and the management path.
Unfortunately, I would say we have 2 main problems related to engineering teams :
* We have a lot of managers with weak or no track record as engineers, this will introduce many problems we will talk about it later
* We have great engineers that who think as an IC when leading teams, you are responsible for helping people excel and grow, with totally different ROI and objectives
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