> You follow your gut. The problem is that this approach can be prone to favouritism.
What's wrong with favouritism ? If a person does his job well and helps you (the manager) do your job better AND you get along well - that's the silver bullet right there.
Like it or not, this is how groups of humans tend to coagulate. All the other considerations are secondary.
Promote the ones you personally like (avoid idiots of course). This how you build a 'gang' of friends and you get promoted yourself.
"Moral Mazes" is a great book which explains the nitty gritty details of corporate power structures (warning: I quit my job after I read this book!). It all boils down to personal relationship between people in an organisation. Technical skills and everything else are complementary but not mandatory (except geniuses - maybe in 0.1% of the cases).
"Corporate confidential" is another interesting book, which is more about the HR side of things, but it also gives some pointers about how teams are assembled
Because "guy I like" isn't a meaningful qualification for a senior engineer. I like everyone on my team. They're not all senior engineers, and I wouldn't promote them all even if I could.
If you promote someone to senior just because you like them, not only are you doing a disservice to the company, you're doing a disservice to the engineer, because at some point you won't be their manager and they'll find themselves failing to actually work at a senior level.
> * If a person does his job well and helps you (the manager) do your job better AND you get along well - that's the silver bullet right there.*
If a person does his job well and helps you do your job better, whether you want to hang out with them seems pretty irrelevant. There is real value in interpersonal/social skills, but that's not at all the same as wanting buddies on your team. If you've got someone on your team that you don't like, but they do great work and work well with the rest of the team, they should be up for promotion before the person you do like who does mediocre work or doesn't work well with the rest of the team. Being a manager isn't about your personal wants.
What's wrong with favouritism ? [...] Promote the ones
you personally like (avoid idiots of course).
Because I can use introspection, look at the gut instincts that make me like someone, and tell that following them wouldn't serve my interests or the company's interests.
I like cycling and drinking cider, and a bunch of my friends are cyclists who also drink cider.
But if there's a guy who works for me and he wants to get paid more, it doesn't help me if he takes up cycling and cider drinking. It helps me if he does his job better and produces more business value.
What you describe is how social circles form, not how working groups designed around producing some objective are formed.
When you're looking for a more "freeform", "directionless" (in the sense of not having a "deliverable") social environment, you tend to gravitate towards people you enjoy being around. This is normal. Ideally, you try to expand yourself some by also looking for people you wouldn't gravitate towards, so that you can gain a wider perspective -- but that ideal is starting to get objective-oriented.
In a business, there is a "direction" and a "deliverable". It's the thing people pay for that the company does/produces, whatever that thing is.
So then companies should recognize that their raison d'être is to deliver that thing as best as possible. That means that a company should seek to comprise itself those who most aid it towards its goal of delivering the thing. Which in turn means that companies should be incentivized to retain those individuals that it finds highly capable of delivering the thing.
How well people get along within the company is a factor, insomuch as having a group of people who get along well (read: "culture fit") incentivizes the people currently comprising the company to remain at the company, so that the decision of whom to retain and whom to release is more often in the company's hands.
It's an ugly cold truth, but it provides some security to people willing to work hard: if you work hard, and you endeavor to aid in the company's goals, you'll be rewarded.
This prioritizes ability and skill over the straight-up nepotism you described, rather than ignoring ability/skill in favor of such nepotism.
The approach you describe sounds like one my current tech lead would cook up to rationalize his every-so-often decision to fire someone that he just doesn't "gel" with socially.
> Technical skills and everything else are complementary but not mandatory (except geniuses - maybe in 0.1% of the cases).
Depends on the environment.
On the one extreme, there are the consulting companies, they just buy whatever human meat shows up and sell it back at $1000 day. Who cares about technical skills, they'd sell ANYTHING, they're insanely good at that.
One the other extreme, there are the hardcore tech companies, where skills matter. A new HFT company just recruited a guy with previous experience in finance that seemed promising and let him handle the trading strategy, well that was fun seeing them loose $10M on the first day :D
What's wrong with favouritism ? If a person does his job well and helps you (the manager) do your job better AND you get along well - that's the silver bullet right there.
Like it or not, this is how groups of humans tend to coagulate. All the other considerations are secondary.
Promote the ones you personally like (avoid idiots of course). This how you build a 'gang' of friends and you get promoted yourself.
"Moral Mazes" is a great book which explains the nitty gritty details of corporate power structures (warning: I quit my job after I read this book!). It all boils down to personal relationship between people in an organisation. Technical skills and everything else are complementary but not mandatory (except geniuses - maybe in 0.1% of the cases).
"Corporate confidential" is another interesting book, which is more about the HR side of things, but it also gives some pointers about how teams are assembled