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Unpopular opinion: In Silicon Valley, people managers can easily be a waste of time and money, and can cause unnecessary drama on your team. Think about the ki

Unpopular opinion: In Silicon Valley, people managers can easily be a waste of time and money, and can cause unnecessary drama on your team. Think about the kind of so-called developer who would rather manage people than write code. We still need founders, executives, directors, advisors, etc. don't get me wrong. But has anyone ever come across an engineering manager worth their salt? Why did we start deploying people managers en masse to engineering teams? I miss the holy trinity setup: Dev, designer, PM. It worked well IMO. Our industry is shooting itself in the foot with Engineering Managers. The ones I've come across are self-obsessed, as evidenced in these cringeworthy READMEs and this article that was written.

lonelappde 7y ago
Any role can be filled by someone bad at that role. There are -10x developers just as there are -10x managers. What is the difference between a manager and an executive? A manager is an executive of a small part of a large org.
fogetti 7y ago
Your message really needs context otherwise it's just a random rant. BTW no-one is deploying managers out of thin air. At least not in startups. What I can often see instead is that someone in the higher-ups needs OKRs, and he also wants to know your performance (and also others' on the team) so that he can decide who deserves a salary raise, and he would like to read a summary report about the highest priority project's progress during last week. Plus he would like someone to represent the team's technical standpoint next week when meeting a prospective client, plus he needs someone who goes around the team and asks what bothers them and what would the team like to see changed in their work environment, plus he also needs someone who hires new team members, plus he would also like to organize the mentoring of the junior members and would like to see someone be involved in the product roadmap discussions from the engineering side to make strategic decisions, plus he wants to build a new team and he wants to understand who would be the best candidate to participate in it, etc. The list goes on and on. So who will do all these things? Most devs absolutely hate doing these things because it's not technical enough for their fastidious taste. Designers and PMs OTOH have no technical knowledge to make strategic engineering decisions on higher level than the individual level (and not even on the individual level many times).
silvestrov 7y ago
If you are good at bullshitting but not at tech stuff or at managing, then you want to expand the amount of bullshit in the company because this makes it much easier for you to survive. When almost everyone bullshits, there is no danger for the bullshitter. So quite a number of people have a big interest in keeping the talents out of the game, and to have as many layers of bureaucracy as possible as this makes it more difficult it is to point the finger at any one person. The same happends in school classrooms. If you are quite a lot better than the other pupils in class, then you better keep your head down. Don't think you know better how to tackle the work ahead. I think schools educate us into accepting only bad management.
mharroun 7y ago
Without (competent) engineering leadership. - Whos going to push back and sales and marketing for harassing you directly or taking direct blame for failures? - Who will represent the engineering team in leadship meetings to make sure policies/decisions are made with their needs in mind? - Who's going to fight for your raises and promotions? - Who's going to make sure that there is budget for what engineering needs to do and keeps a proper record to keep finance happy? Please thing about it... any company that grows to 30-50 people (even startups) need to have management and processes that eventually lead to (even unintentional) politics. The other departments will have leaders/managers defending/supporting them... its foolish to not understand or respect competent leaders.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dchichkov 7y ago
  The examples that you've given are political (represent, push back, take blame, fight), except for the example of keeping records (which is management). Managements role, technical leadership role and politician role are different roles. The required skill sets and experience are different. The outcome of grabbing a wrong role is usually poor. Not confusing politician, technical leader and manager roles is probably a good idea to improve outcomes. As checking for required experience, to take the role.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    I'm curious what a non-political people manager role would look like. IME, people managers are almost solely political: they mediate conflict and make strategic long term decisions based on conflicting priorities.
    - dchichkov 7y ago
      There are probably examples (I can think of mentorship), but that would not be common. On "strategic long term decisions", I think this needs clarification. There are many areas in which such decisions can be made. To give an example, think of a flying airplane. Would you give a power to make "strategic long term decisions" regarding the flight to someone who bothered to go to flight school, ground school and had been certified as a pilot? Or to someone who hadn't done it, but is an excellent politician, people's manager and could mediate conflict well? To give another example, if a conflict between passengers and crew had happened onboard of a flying airplane. Would you prefer a pilot (say, with no political or mediation skills) to stop flying the airplane and engage into the conflict? Or would you prefer a professional people's manager and mediator to step in?
lacker 7y ago
I certainly have met engineering managers worth their salt. The best place to observe the need for management is in teams like, 20 relatively inexperienced engineers, all reporting to a single manager. I have never seen a team like this that is operating at 100% of the engineers’ capabilities. People end up wasting time on disagreements, building things that end up not needed, jumping from emergency to emergency, not using best practices, all sorts of things. If you find a good manager and split those people into two teams of 10 engineers, that change will make that team much more productive.

lonelappde 7y ago

Any role can be filled by someone bad at that role. There are -10x developers just as there are -10x managers. What is the difference between a manager and an executive? A manager is an executive of a small part of a large org.

fogetti 7y ago

Your message really needs context otherwise it's just a random rant. BTW no-one is deploying managers out of thin air. At least not in startups. What I can often see instead is that someone in the higher-ups needs OKRs, and he also wants to know your performance (and also others' on the team) so that he can decide who deserves a salary raise, and he would like to read a summary report about the highest priority project's progress during last week. Plus he would like someone to represent the team's technical standpoint next week when meeting a prospective client, plus he needs someone who goes around the team and asks what bothers them and what would the team like to see changed in their work environment, plus he also needs someone who hires new team members, plus he would also like to organize the mentoring of the junior members and would like to see someone be involved in the product roadmap discussions from the engineering side to make strategic decisions, plus he wants to build a new team and he wants to understand who would be the best candidate to participate in it, etc. The list goes on and on. So who will do all these things? Most devs absolutely hate doing these things because it's not technical enough for their fastidious taste. Designers and PMs OTOH have no technical knowledge to make strategic engineering decisions on higher level than the individual level (and not even on the individual level many times).

silvestrov 7y ago

If you are good at bullshitting but not at tech stuff or at managing, then you want to expand the amount of bullshit in the company because this makes it much easier for you to survive. When almost everyone bullshits, there is no danger for the bullshitter. So quite a number of people have a big interest in keeping the talents out of the game, and to have as many layers of bureaucracy as possible as this makes it more difficult it is to point the finger at any one person. The same happends in school classrooms. If you are quite a lot better than the other pupils in class, then you better keep your head down. Don't think you know better how to tackle the work ahead. I think schools educate us into accepting only bad management.

mharroun 7y ago

Without (competent) engineering leadership. - Whos going to push back and sales and marketing for harassing you directly or taking direct blame for failures? - Who will represent the engineering team in leadship meetings to make sure policies/decisions are made with their needs in mind? - Who's going to fight for your raises and promotions? - Who's going to make sure that there is budget for what engineering needs to do and keeps a proper record to keep finance happy? Please thing about it... any company that grows to 30-50 people (even startups) need to have management and processes that eventually lead to (even unintentional) politics. The other departments will have leaders/managers defending/supporting them... its foolish to not understand or respect competent leaders.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dchichkov 7y ago
The examples that you've given are political (represent, push back, take blame, fight), except for the example of keeping records (which is management). Managements role, technical leadership role and politician role are different roles. The required skill sets and experience are different. The outcome of grabbing a wrong role is usually poor. Not confusing politician, technical leader and manager roles is probably a good idea to improve outcomes. As checking for required experience, to take the role.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  I'm curious what a non-political people manager role would look like. IME, people managers are almost solely political: they mediate conflict and make strategic long term decisions based on conflicting priorities.
  - dchichkov 7y ago
    There are probably examples (I can think of mentorship), but that would not be common. On "strategic long term decisions", I think this needs clarification. There are many areas in which such decisions can be made. To give an example, think of a flying airplane. Would you give a power to make "strategic long term decisions" regarding the flight to someone who bothered to go to flight school, ground school and had been certified as a pilot? Or to someone who hadn't done it, but is an excellent politician, people's manager and could mediate conflict well? To give another example, if a conflict between passengers and crew had happened onboard of a flying airplane. Would you prefer a pilot (say, with no political or mediation skills) to stop flying the airplane and engage into the conflict? Or would you prefer a professional people's manager and mediator to step in?

lacker 7y ago

I certainly have met engineering managers worth their salt. The best place to observe the need for management is in teams like, 20 relatively inexperienced engineers, all reporting to a single manager. I have never seen a team like this that is operating at 100% of the engineers’ capabilities. People end up wasting time on disagreements, building things that end up not needed, jumping from emergency to emergency, not using best practices, all sorts of things. If you find a good manager and split those people into two teams of 10 engineers, that change will make that team much more productive.