I&#x27;ve been thinking about this a lot lately.<p>I think engineers&#x2F;developers&#x2F;hackers tend to undervalue the skills necessary to manage a project well.  Basically considering the work a lot easier than writing code or building something and thinking that anyone can do it (including themselves in your example).<p>I think the reason for this is because a lot of people can do a shitty job managing a team and it&#x27;s not as obvious as when people do a shitty job programming (or at least there are more people that can be a bad manager undetected than can be a bad programmer).<p>It&#x27;s harder to bullshit technical skills, but a bad manager could have good enough social&#x2F;political skills to get power and it&#x27;s probably also more likely to attract people looking for power.  Engineering seems to provide a filter to avoid some of this naturally.<p>That said being a really effective PM, Manager, VP is a skill different from programming and with a similar depth that shouldn&#x27;t be dismissed easily.  This is more obvious to HN probably because startup founders often have to get better at it in order to build a company.  Since it tends to rely a decent amount on empathy and social skills in addition to being able to understand the technical pieces&#x2F;prioritization it&#x27;s also harder to know how good you&#x27;ll be at it when starting.<p>It is something you can get better at though, just takes investment&#x2F;learning like anything else.<p>Reminds me of Tom West from Soul of a New Machine.