What is the difference between staying in a more technical career path and moving into projectmanagement?why?

do you agree with the findings of johnson's article stating that the best information technology people make the worst project managers?why?why not?
http://www.softwaremag.com/L.cfm?Doc=arc...

I can tell you from first hand experience. This is all left brain/right brain oriented. I find the best PM's are those that have had significant exposure to direct technologies. They have a business background or even began with liberal arts type degrees as technical writers. They also have good soft skills to communicate internal and externally with clients.

The worst PMs are those that lack skills to communicate effectively with others. Code writers and those, IMHO, that are experienced in the higher sciences....lack certain abilities to socialize themselves beyond what their expertise is focused.

I once worked for an engineer who could carry on multiple technical discussions regarding physics....but could not remember his phone number. I never quite understood why, but have found...the higher the level of intelligence in areas of physics or science, the lower the verbal skills.

Further, if you possess the requisite skills...performing as a successful program manager exposes and often times catapults you into the equivalent of a corporate rock star....or even CEO. We need more of these people...and the breed coming right out of business school seem to think the degree is all they need to succeed. Unfortunately, like all things...experience matters.

Go for it...if you can honestly assess your skills, and are considering such a career move.

Just my observation working in large scale ($100M) Federal IT systems spaces for 25 years.

I agree with the article completely, btw.

You can't paint with too broad of a stroke on this. I have seen deeply technical people become successful sales people, BAs, PMs, etc. The ones who have the hardest time making the transition are the geeks...the ones that are "task doers", and have no business accumen whatsoever...though they can code up a storm at the drop of a hat. The problem is that those jobs, unless you are absolutely blisteringly incredible at it (and can work at Google or Microsoft building their products), are commoditized in our new global market. The Indian, Chinese or Russian college kid can often to the job just as well for pennies to our USD. Anyway, I digress. It all comes down to skills. A project manager who is technical (and I don't mean knowing buzzwords, but who actually can code and understands networks, etc.) is worth their weight in gold. Otherwise they are dependent on their IT relationships to steer them in the right direction. Purely business-centric PMs who work in technical projects have a disadvantage in my experience. They are often very frustrated and spend a ton of time trying to ensure people are not blowing smoke and leading the project to failure with technical decisions.

Don't believe everything you read in articles like that. They have to use extreme or inflammatory titles to get people to read it. The truth is almost always somewhere in between the extremes.

software-http://brotherssoft.net/