Somebody else woke this thread up, prompting me to read it. Rather than reply to individual comments I thought I'd just add the thoughts that were provoked by them here at the end.
One of the problems with promoting engineers into management is that many very good engineers make lousy managers (and very occasionally lousy engineers make good managers). The reasons are manifold and it doesn't advance the argument to enumerate them here. The problem is that most organizations don't have a way of promoting or rewarding good engineers that doesn't involve pushing them up the management ladder until they eventually reach their level of incompetence (cf the Peter Principle). Sun microsystems had a way around this. They had a parallel structure that allowed them to promote engineers, give them higher salaries, a flashier job title (Distinguished Engineer was the pinnacle IIRC), more rank, better toys, more playtime on their own pet projects and yet still keep them doing the work they were good at. This had the useful side-effect that a several times promoted engineer might out-rank someone that they nominally worked for and thus have the formal power to say "no" to a bad management decision about an engineering subject.
Somebody mentioned British solicitors and barristers and clearly doesn't understand what they do. Someone made it sound like solicitors did all the desk work and barristers did the standing up in court. They both do both. The principle difference between them is which courts they have a 'right of audience' in, the higher levels of the courts system being reserved to barristers - although relatively recent changes to the law are moving the line where you must have a barrister to represent you in a particular court.
On the subject of being useless unless you have also seen the frontline/production/service environment. One guy I've worked for, let's call him John, had a clever and very effective policy. John was the CEO of a company that had been in the retail mobile phone business back when this was relatively new and potentially very lucrative. John had been in the right place at the right time, been lucky and had built a very successful business. Eventually he sold his customer base to a bigger provider for a boat load of cash and was left with an almost empty company, buckets of cash and a huge tax liability if he didn't plough the money back into the business pretty quickly. This was the mid nineties and he picked, correctly, the Internet as the next big thing and decided to re-invent his mobile phone service provider business as an Internet service provider business. I was brought on board as the senior technical bod.
Like many business leaders he attributed his previous success to his skill and not to luck. Unfortunately this was not true and John was a lousy manager. Nice bloke, but lousy manager, and he kept thinking that repeating things he had done successfully in the past would be successful in the context of a new, different business. For the most part he was wrong. However, one thing he had done in the past was insist that all managers, no matter how senior, including himself had to take a part shift every week on the customer support phone lines. This meant that every manager in the company knew what customers real problems were and also what a problem some real customers can be. This worked so well that I've tried to incorporate the idea into every business I've been involved with since. It only works if there are no exceptions and that no manager is too important to be forced to do this on a regular basis taking their turn with everybody else.
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