Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

[Mary Barnes <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 8:34 AM, Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 03/03/2013 14:25, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>
>
>>> Clearly the NomCom felt it was between a rock and a hard place; I just
>>> want to assert the principle that balancing both managerial and technical
>>> abilities is within NomCom's remit.
>
>
> Brian
>
> There is a subtly in the manager vs technical expert debate that is
> worth noting.
>
> There are some technical managers who could do the job by leveraging
> the use of experts and coming up to speed on the key issues very quickly.
> However I would suggest that they are at least as rare and certainly at
> least as valuable to their employers as  technical experts pool that
> we normally draw on.
>
> The level of competence needed would put such managers on a xVP
> or C* trajectory, and it seems to me that they are likely to be even
> more reluctant to take a career  gap than the academic community.
[MB] I totally disagree. Not everyone aspires to be an xVP or anywhere
near C* role. [/MB]
> So it's not that the managers concept does not work, it's that it is
> even harder to identify them with some degree of certainly and
> then recruit the ones that the IETF would need.
[MB] I think the issue is that this community has great difficulty
recognizing these folks, because they don't have those skills
themselves and the technical expertise is generally the primary and
sometimes only criteria in appointing IESG members.  The Nomcom
process does not require that the voting members have any experience
at all in hiring - for some folks this may be the first time they've
ever interviewed someone for a position and that's been clear to me in
interviews I've had with NOmcom..   Certainly, the nomcom chair can
try to compensate somewhat for this inexperience since the primary
skill needed by an Nomcom chair is the ability to manage a process and
people. [/MB]
>
> - Stewart
>
>