> Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator.

I was thinking like this for a while but, now, I think this expectation is majorly false for a senior individual contributor. Especially when someone who can push out a detailed series of blogposts and has tried step-wise escalation.

Communication is a two-way street. Unlike the individual contributors, the management is responsible for listening and responding to risk assesments by the senior members and also ensuring that the technical competence and experienced people are retained in a tech company. If a leader doesn't want to keep an open ear, they do not belong there. If there is a huge attrition of highly senior people from non-finalized projects, you do not belong leadership either. Both cases are mentioned in the article.

Unfortunately our socioeconomic and political culture in the West has increasingly removed responsibilities and liabilities from the leadership of the companies. This causes people with lackluster technical, communication and risk assesment mentality being promoted into leadership positions.

So outside of a couple completely privately owned companies or exceptionally well organized NGOs, it will be increasingly difficult to find good leaders.