Radical Candor

Google’s engineering teams solved this problem by creating an “individual contributor” career path that is more prestigious than the manager path and sidesteps management entirely. This has been great for the growth of these engineers; it’s also good for the people whom they would otherwise have been managing. When people become bosses just to “get ahead” rather than because they want to do what bosses do, they perform, at best, a perfunctory job and often become bosses from hell. When management is the only path to higher compensation, the quality of management suffers, and the lives of the people who work for these reluctant managers become miserable.