You can't expect managers to have the same level of technical expertise as the people they are managing. In your view of the world, specialization doesn't exist.
Considering I have worked with extremely talented and extremely stupid people I believe I know what I’m talking about (within the limits of my experience).
There seems to be absolutely zero correlation between organisational role/level and ability, instead using years of service as a proxy.
Even if this is true, it will be the low-level grunts and support staff who feel the burn, not the high-level people who actually run the show. Operating at the pinnacle of those professions requires the ability to form strong personal relationships with the right people - not a skill that can be replicated by machines just yet.
I don't like the general premise of this. Cooking dinner, driving a car, paying taxes, and doing laundry are all VASTLY different tasks. Yet we can trust most able-bodied adults to do these things without much trouble. Just because tasks are different, doesn't mean they require a specialized human to do them. Humans are quite capable of being competent in many areas.
Hyper-specialization, while probably useful at Google, NASA, and Honda, is just not something I think most business software needs.
I don't think these skills scale up to larger levels of human organization. Heck, the Agile folks often make that point specifically with regards to team and corporate structure.
We cannot be equally understanding and empathetic with everyone.
In complex technical environments, it often doesn’t make sense to have an in-depth expert assigned to every system. You get a consultant in to set it all up and get the gears moving, but you can often get less experienced, or more versatile, people in to keep it running.
Also, the demand for skills has been silly for the past 20-odd years, so there’s less incentive stick around, other than money. Loyalty rarely pays off, unless you’re talking shares.
I'm going to be pretty frank - if you are a "leader" trying to hire a "skilled" AI worker, you are probably an idiot. It's literally a brand new field - the only skill you are going to hire for is the ability to lie on a resume.
Unfortunately, I think this myopia extends to the entire breadth of the "skills gap". Any executive complaining is kind of admitting they lack the skills to actually manage humans.
What actual leaders are doing is the same thing they have always done - hire smart, enthusiastic people and give them the resources they need. But this requires trust, and flexibility, trial and error, and actual knowledge.
But this kind of leadership is hard and requires admitting failure occasionally - so for some reason spending 3 months cross-training a programmer to be an IT Operations specialist is seen as inferior to waiting 9 months to overpay a specialist.
In particular, people who never really figured out how to do more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards into primarily "collaborative" roles.
As long as we continue to associate systems-level thinking with high status and ridiculous remuneration it will be impossible to identify the folk with the skills to actually do this work.
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