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> Most engineers when "empowered" and left to their own devices without much accountability go off on their own side quests that often add no value to the busin
by synu 4y ago
> Most engineers when "empowered" and left to their own devices without much accountability go off on their own side quests that often add no value to the business, but scratch that engineer's curiosity. These side quests also tend to not contribute to business aligned goals.
Is this actually true? I know it’s a common fear of managers who are in over their heads in one way or another, but isn’t it a bit of an infantilising view? I would never want to work at a company where this was how the leadership saw engineering (and I’m a product manager, not an engineer).
- sirsinsalot 4y agoI think it is a fair view that a manager is in over their heads if they can't stop this happening. Sadly ultimate autonomy of many ICs without proper leadership results in this and good processes prevent that. It is the sign of a team being lost, due to bad leadership, and good management prevents a team being lost. A good way to prevent a team being lost is, in my experience, processes that keep everyone integrated and moving in the right direction ... scrum being one approach (not always the right one). At the end of the day leadership is needed and a framework that lets everyone know where they stand without it all turning into design-by-committee nightmare.
- synu 4y agoI tend to think you’d have more success having no manager at all vs the bad manager who thinks his team is going to go off and start making a video game or something more fun instead of working on the business if they don’t crack the whip. It’s a kind of paranoid fantasy coming from insecurity, it’s not actual reality.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoI think it's a fantasy to expect that all teams are capable of self direction like that. I've had teams that were, who embodied the idea of building teams smarter than ones self. I've had team where given more freedom, they just went in chaotic directions. They just intrinsically were a composition of people who couldn't care less and wanted to work on whatever they found interesting. Usually because they didn't have any stake in the business, interest in what it wanted or respect for its goals. And yeah, I didn't blame them, but I still had to move them in a unified direction writing boring software for a boring industry with no interesting challenges. It's really more complex than black/white.
- synu 4y agoThere’s so many normal people out there who are basically motivated to do a good job, even in boring industries.. why would anyone go out of their way to build out a team of uninterested people who don’t want to be there? Seems like we’ve just found another path back to bad management.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoI agree, thinking back to one project I led though, finding engineers who would have actual interest in the domain we operated in was tough. It was dry, tedious code in a legacy language (for sound business reasons!) It's sometimes tough. I managed to find compromise by working with ICs to make it interesting by engineering our way out of the boring through seriously cool automation. I can see how, in hindsight, that was a lucky move and I don't blame other managers in similar situations for hustling teams along with more process. It's the right call.