Should Eng Leaders at least be from Science

Sounds pretty elitist of you. Good talent can come from any company and many different backgrounds. Good tech people often make very poor leaders. A good leader understands where their experience might be lacking and relies on people smarter than they are to make deeply technical decisions.

I personally have a hard time respecting my non-tech leaders. I am happy to explain things but 99% of the time it comes down to me making the actual decision and they taking the credit/big money.

Are you talking about engineering management or management generally? Degrees don't really matter at all. Tier of company also doesn't really matter. The best engineer I've ever worked with went to a no-tier foreign college. Same for the best PM. The worst PM I've worked with had a tier 1 MBA, and the worst engineer I've ever worked with had an MS in CS from an ivy. 2nd worst was a Facebook/Google/Square alum. If someone has work experience that shows that they can do the role or can otherwise make a case that they can do the work that's a much stronger signal. If you want to be a coder and not develop communication skills, that's fine, but your career growth will definitely stall out. Soft skills become more and more important as your career progresses.

I can tell you that being a leader and being an SE are two totally different careers. Business and technology decisions are very different. You need a different skill set to do each. I have seen some of the most tech savvy leaders crash and burn because they were promoted up to their level of leadership and bureaucratic incompetency (Peter principle), and I have seen non tech leaders damn near rescue an org from collapse. On no planet should tech skills (that won’t be used anyway) be a prerequisite for a leadership role, unless it’s a startup and they’re also writing code. GTFOH with this naive (or god complex/ego?) bs.

It’s not necessary that you need to have a degree in CS or science . But what matters is if you have invested time and energy to understand the bare minimum needed to know what is a right direction. Even if you don’t have the bare minimum knowledge could you ask the right questions to make sure you get to understand the trade off and ok with it. In cases you don’t even have the knack to do that and are super high up the level, do you have a technical right hand to take care of such decisions. If a leader doesn’t cover any of the above criteria, it’s matter of time before they fall flat on their face. It doesn’t mean that if someone is super technical then they are a capable leader. There is some hurt and annoyance to see non technical leaders calling the shots. It’s hard to avoid it especially by an engineer who loves the craft and made his way through life by being a good engineer. If that is allowed to look at all non technical leaders as not fit to do their jobs, it will seep into your work and just troubles you to do your best possible job. Unless the higher up isn’t making any stupid decisions putting the business or team under jeopardy, chill and live your life.

I wrestle with this question a lot and I can see both sides to it. I do not have a CS background and can barely write a line of code. I didn't even have a college degree until 15 years after my first semester because I had enough units laying around. But somehow I continually outperform everywhere I go and now skirt 7-figures annual TC as an engineering leader. My strong skills were never about writing code, pairing, or any sort of CS mentorship. Where I provide value is three-fold: the experience that has come from nearly two decades working in tech, a natural, proven ability to see how decisions we make today have long-term impact, and a deep, personal investment into the human side of my team. It's these factors that has allowed me to succeed. I make it very clear with my team as well as in interviews that you don't want me anywhere near your code - yet in the regular anonymous employee surveys, I rank among the highest in the company with almost 100% scores for every manager category. The problem I have seen is that there are incredibly talented SWE's who are shit managers. For me, I'm a shit programmer who invests in my team to make them incredibly talented. Success is in the results of our project work and I'll brag for a minute and say we do some amazing shit. Always pushing the bleeding edge which has led to speaking sessions at conferences, cross-industry contributions to our open source projects, and overall a near perfect retention for my team. Just don't expect to find me behind the podium - I'll be there in the front row cheering you on and making sure you get all the credit.

I would quit a company if my engineering group was not lead by an engineer. Better companies are out there.

Food for thought: Do you see engineering folks becoming head of finance at banks, or head of art collection or director of sales or so many more. Then how come others are able to become head of engineering in tech firms? Is tech not specialized enough? Or we have growth to a point where nothing meaningful is happening and your ability to do BS has the most value ?

Depends how far up the org chain. First couple managers surely should have engineering background. As you go higher up, I don’t think it’s as necessary anymore because all you care about is the vision and high level direction, not tech details.

Depends if they delegate decisions requiring technical expertise, or have an advisor.