Most managers I encountered sooner or later would get an MBA, particularly as they made it further up the corporate ladder. Yes, it makes sense to get the specialized training being management needs, but an MBA almost never is that training.
And re ex-engineer H1Bs: just because you used to be an individual contributor before becoming management does not imply you retain your individual contributor skills nor that you'll be a good manager.
Most people across my career that became managers did so because the pay was better, workload was lower and promotion ladder more straightforward. Worst managers were usually the type that expected and demanded to be management after X years as an individual contributor; this is particularly true of people from some countries, where it is culturally expected that you'll be a manager within at most 10 years of starting.
Most companies do treat moving to the management ladder as a promotion, which create all sorts of perverse incentives for many to become managers. Reminds me of a blog from a few years back:
I've said this for a while: the solution to the management hell that we currently have is to bring back secretarial roles. The introduction of the personal computer into the workplace basically killed off the secretary, and spread ~50% that work over everybody else, especially management. So we bloated management to cover that. The problem is that when your secretarial work is being done by the people with the power to fire the ICs, you end up putting excess value on the secretarial and organizational work.
So instead, bring back the secretaries. A separate org vertical (i.e., they don't have hiring/firing power over ICs), which handles the secretarial half of your current managers' jobs, and isn't paid more than your engineers. The engineering decision-making half of the job (along with hire/fire power) should be handed over to one or two senior engineers, who are now the actually powerful ones in the engineering branch of your org chart. This keeps your technically talented people working in technical roles. Basically, instead of
C-suite C-Suite
/ \ / \
M M EM SM
/ \ / \ / \ / \
M M M M E ES S
/ \ / \ / \ / \
E EE EE EE E
This is a good direction. To boot, I think ES is the best way to remove administrative work from EM's and IC's plates.
Further, I also think that EMs need to then become more technical aka a real "leader" of the services they are responsible for. So hiring, firing, perf, BS meetings becomes only 5% of their job. 95% of their job is to ensure that services keep running and projects get delivered - like a true leader. ES can help them and ICs with administrative tasks like HR follow ups, OKR tracking, meeting scribing etc.
I can't believe how much work is being done by low level EMs and ICs in tech companies. It is almost exploitative in one way.
And re ex-engineer H1Bs: just because you used to be an individual contributor before becoming management does not imply you retain your individual contributor skills nor that you'll be a good manager.
Most people across my career that became managers did so because the pay was better, workload was lower and promotion ladder more straightforward. Worst managers were usually the type that expected and demanded to be management after X years as an individual contributor; this is particularly true of people from some countries, where it is culturally expected that you'll be a manager within at most 10 years of starting.
Most companies do treat moving to the management ladder as a promotion, which create all sorts of perverse incentives for many to become managers. Reminds me of a blog from a few years back:
https://charity.wtf/2020/09/06/if-management-isnt-a-promotio...