How do we grow? As I wrote in my book Being Geek (O’Reilly, 2010), the curse of Silicon Valley is that great engineers are often promoted to leadership for their hard work. While many succeed in this role, an equal part fails because the skills required to lead are vastly different than the ones required to be an engineer. The curse is that we’re often placing our most valuable engineers in a role where they’re predisposed to fail. Think of it like this: there’s a large population of immensely talented engineers that should not be leaders. There is no amount of training that would make up for
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