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Is engineering management bullshit?

• usgroup 4y ago
  I mean doesn’t heaving salaries and a sellers market imply that engineering management jobs are not bullshit? Are there any jobs which command big salaries and which companies hire for directly that are bullshit?
• hkon 4y ago
  Yes and no. Depends on the manager.
• RichardCNormos 4y ago
  I'm a manager. This is a low-energy take on management, focused on the part of the job I call "keeping the spice flowing": knocking out tickets, landing key results, and coordinating with other teams. For a manager, this is all low-impact work. High impact management work isn't mentioned here. These are things like developing your people and networking. It's a lot of work to get somebody promoted, even if that person is a well-known high performer. Networking with other managers, product managers, finance, IT... building influence with other parts of the company, this pays huge dividends for your team. High-impact managers focus their efforts around the people on their teams.
  • fisf 4y ago
    Note how everything you categorize as 'high-impact' is basically politics. "Rather than focus on delivering results (which again is difficult(!), might be wrong, and often not easily identified by leadership), these people spend time making alliances and crafting narratives about outcomes instead of delivering. Title acquisition becomes the goal, seeking to maximize the expected organizational rewards, at the expense of direct results, all while working to minimize accountability."
    • namelessoracle 4y ago
      Politics is something you do or something that is done to you is the saying no? Would you rather someone from engineering do your politics for you? Or someone from product or the business? I think the engineering person will look after you better. Where it becomes fascinating is the 10+ year EM. They used to know what to do, but clearly don't anymore. They either accept that, and lean on their leads for technical decisions and just focus on politics, or dont accept it and thats what it can get bad fast.
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    • refurb 4y ago
      I mean, a company is made up of a bunch of people, all with different ideas on how thinks should be done and in the end it’s often influence that decides the path forward. Of course organizations have politics. It will always be that way unless you get rid of all the humans.
      • maxbond 4y ago
        I think the issue is that it's sort of circular, like, "managers provide value when they convince other managers not to be obstacles". I think there's important stuff managers can do, but creating complex hierarchies that they then have to navigate or circumvent is a neutral contribution at best, from a systemic standpoint rather than an individual one. For this high performer who's earned their promotion, having their manager go to bat for them is incredibly valuable. But if the reason they needed a manager to advocate for them was that other managers were either adversarial or ambivalent, that's just adding back value that was previously removed. To be clear, I'm addressing this narrow aspect of management, I've had managers who helped me resolve disputes, get access to resources and opportunities I couldn't have gotten on my own, et cetera, and I see the value in that without qualification.
        • refurb 4y ago
          But if the reason they needed a manager to advocate for them was that other managers were either adversarial or ambivalent, that's just adding back value that was previously removed. But "adversarial" management is just a reality in company that has $X to spend and 12 different ways to spend it. Business decisions often have to made with limited data. A engineers "super cool feature that should obviously be implemented" is not so obvious at the CEO level where there are multiple competing projects. As such there is a need to "sell" ideas internally -> that's politics.
          • maxbond 4y ago
            Just because it is the reality doesn't mean it can't be critiqued though, right? If the CEO doesn't have insight into this situation because their attention is divided - maybe the CEO should provide the people closer to the problem with the information they need to do their jobs, and trust that they've hired good people who will digest this information, prioritize appropriately, and get the job done? If they can't trust that's the case, then isn't that the problem we should be discussing? Maybe the CEO should focus on the strategic direction of the company and securing the investment required to implement it, and not manage projects at the feature level? Generally I find that managers are awesome at facilitating stuff and making sure information gets where it needs to go but that when they dictate it leads to bad decision making because they don't have the proper insight. This becomes exacerbated as you add levels of indirection are between the manager dictating decisions and the people on the ground implementing them. That isn't per say their fault, it's just the dynamics of hierarchies. As information travels up the hierarchy it becomes more essentialized and nonspecific. It loses fidelity. Statistics can travel up the hierarchy, experience can't. So that engineer who's close to the problem has this rich first hand information about the system, and the CEO has a spreadsheet and third- or forth-hand accounts of the situation on the ground. There's certainly a lot of global, systemic insights you can make from that position and useful work to be done. But it's probably not whether a individual feature of a broader project should or should not be implemented. Internal salesmanship is a bandaid, but structuring the organization differently is a solution.
    • beernet 4y ago
      Degrading "developing your people and networking" as "politics" just shows the lack of overall business and people acumen that engineers tend to suffer from. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are aware of this, but these type of statements usually lead to engineers drifting away more and more from the purpose of the company.
      • fisf 4y ago
        It's not degrading or a value judgment (at this point). But OPs post / self described high impact activities pretty much fit the definition of (company) politics perfectly. The many pertinent questions I am asking are: Is it useful or necessary, to have people doing company politics full time, what are the incentives? What does this say about an organisation? Is such (internal) politics healthy for an org, how much is it predicated on, and much does it foster internal tribalism?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • alexashka 4y ago
    > It's a lot of work to get somebody promoted, even if that person is a well-known high performer Is it? Why? Sounds like a problem created by managers to me. > Networking with other managers, product managers, finance, IT... building influence with other parts of the company, this pays huge dividends for your team. I sincerely hope no engineering manager acts or thinks this way, or they will soon be just another MBA manager who doesn't know anything, other than how to navigate among other MBAs who also, don't know anything. Do you not get the problem with people who don't know anything besides politics being in charge of delivering real world products and services?
• halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Most of the "engineering managers" I've had to work under have been utter bullshit. Didn't learn anything from them (technically or in regards to leadership) and were there merely to check a box, play babysitter and/or sit in meetings all day that had zero impact on our work streams. The few who did have impact (1) were skilled engineers in their own right and were able to translate that into more management, (2) understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively. Those are very few and far in-between imo.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    Your last paragraph is basically the gist of it. Managers who make an impact are recognized as such by their team. They manage the team to do their best work possible. The model of manager as a babysitter is, I think, what happens when an organization gets to a certain size. Once the organization gets big enough, management becomes a vehicle for bureaucratic surveillance. At that size, an organization uses managers to give a human face to bureaucratic machinations.
  • namdnay 4y ago
    > sit in meetings all day that had zero impact on our work streams maybe the manager was busy in meetings all day in order to ensure you had zero impact on your work streams :) the role of an EM in a large organisation is in large part to be an "enterprise abstraction layer", ensuring the people in the team(s) can work in a way that is as close as possible to what they could do in a startup/solo project
    • candiddevmike 4y ago
      That abstraction layer doesn't add value IMO, it modifies the message like a game of telephone.
      • namdnay 4y ago
        it's more like protecting the team from being shut because some asshole somewhere managed to convince an exec that there was overlap with their team, or raising warnings when some product idiot has a new idea that's obviously going to end up having a last-minute dependency on the team, hustling to get licences to use Circle instead of Jenkins or whatever, etc
• bonecrusher2102 4y ago
  This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an unwillingness to understand, the complexity and nuance that goes into running a business, and to recognize that actual smart people can make real contributions in non-engineering roles. It's just personal and professional immaturity. Every time I ready these comments and articles, I really hope that the folks writing them are able to grow out of this mindset. They'd be a lot happier and more productive.
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  • wikitopian 4y ago
    This mindset exists in every occupation. And it's always superficially true. Everything would grind to a halt if it weren't for people who do X. Everybody else exists because X people are doing X.
  • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do. I would posit a guess that most, if not all, engineers on HN have had to live through at least one terrible manager that has soured/tainted the position. Speaking for myself, I've lived through many and it's a miserable experience to be under these people. Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary, they're saying that the people who live in these roles are overall bad, don't know how to effectively execute these tasks and present an aura of superiority over the technical roles when they're providing very little value at all.
    • gautamdivgi 4y ago
      Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one? I guess a manager could make the same claim that devs are making his life miserable.
• wikitopian 4y ago
  Engineers that have to do management and paperwork stuff cry that they're so busy with paperwork that they can't engineer. So management hires a guy for them and they cry about how that guy doesn't do anything.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    The core problem sounds like the bullshit paperwork you allude to which is unnecessary and adds time to projects but provides leadership a fake status used to drive other decisions.
    • ethanbond 4y ago
      And yet it seems nearly every organization of meaningful scale has a large amount of this “cruft.” Why don’t we see companies that “simply don’t” add this cruft, and accordingly sail off into orbit under propulsion of their own excellence?
      • alexashka 4y ago
        Because organizations of 'meaningful scale' should be separated down into organizations that do their piece well. The reason we don't do that, is because we haven't gotten past being in a famine, zero sum mentality where hoarding power/resources is seen as obviously well and good.
      • 28304283409234 4y ago
        Because they employ humans and humans are flawed.
      • lunias 4y ago
        In my opinion this is because big companies do not want change. They are already big companies. They already won. They care more about understanding how they won / are winning so that they can perpetuate it and extract small percentage increases each quarter. Big things move slow. If you try and move part of them too fast they might break away and potentially endanger the remaining whole.
• switch007 4y ago
  My manager joins our stand up and basically just says “had some meetings yesterday, have some more today”. No wonder why we think the job is BS
  • robjan 4y ago
    In the scrum guide, the scrum master is considered to have a management role. Although it's a management role, I don't believe it's a people management role. That's what the Engineering Manager does and ideally they wouldn't be attending the scrum.
    • switch007 4y ago
      We fought that battle and lost But anyway my point was that he does a bad job at communicating what he does for us.
    • icedchai 4y ago
      I had a scrum master that literally did nothing. He tried to get me to do his work, like running planning poker, updating sprint status slides, and other assorted nonsense, while he literally phoned it in from his kid’s baseball game. I was the tech lead on the team and flat out refused. Eventually he got one of the more junior engineers to do it.
• supernovae 4y ago
  It's unfortunate we think of management as "keeping bullshit at bay". I much prefer "clear the runway". The great teams I've worked on, shared context oozes from the team and managers often don't know what that shared context is, but they protect it. Once one studies complexity science, it becomes less "bullshit" and more "navigating complexity" and that's how i approach it. You're gonna have a bad time in engineering if you think everything not engineering is BS.
• aj7 4y ago
  The purpose of engineering management is to create a buffer between the engineers and the a’holes, who, if permitted to manage the engineers directly, would drive them from the company. This is a critical, but not full-time job, as evinced by the fact that most engineering managers are themselves engaged in technical issues.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    The main goal to staying employed as one is to push down priorities from above.
    • namdnay 4y ago
      i've seen some pretty dysfunctional orgs, but none that has been that bad. a bit of diplomacy, a bit of corner cutting, a bit of bullshitting, some inflated sizings, a bit of politics, and you can buy the team enough time to clean up, get organised, and get back in shape
  • namdnay 4y ago
    yes, an enterprise abstraction layer
• vishnugupta 4y ago
  In a well oiled org managers aren't needed. I know it because I've been part of one. It needs specialised skilled workers i.e., product owner, product designer, project manager, and engineers. There'll be a tech lead among engineers who will be point person for the project manager. That's it. At the top you need execs or business heads liaising with product owners and/or project managers. Managers however become essential when this well oiled machine is thrown off by a sudden expansion of the team or when there's a chronic uncertainty about the work that's going to happen next month. Then you need whose who are good at navigating this chaos through networking, politics etc., to get the work done as well as making sure the team survives should the axe fall.
  • namdnay 4y ago
    all that means is that you're making either the tech lead or your project manager the engineering manager. whoever is between business and the engineers, saying yes/no to the former based on the needs of the latter, is the EM
    • Ensorceled 4y ago
      These things always devolve into the Product Owner or the Project Manager are actually the Engineering Manager without the pay and/or authority.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  I like to think that management is a noble profession if done right. I've seen a handful of examples over a 10+ year career thus far. You get to empower people to be better versions of themselves everyday. What other job allows you to do that? The reality however is that most EM jobs are in fact bullshit jobs. They usually have people who are simply managers/operators, not often leaders nor coaches. To summarize a people manager's job, it's two main things: 1) Get results 2) Grow & retain your people The challenge is that many EMs are also "assholes" so both of these goals are hard to accomplish. They fit into an asshole category in itself: - political assholes master the art of corporate politics but do nothing but take credit for everyone else's work. - controlling assholes micromanage to the point of strangling creativity and joy out of their team while taking credit for others creative ideas and call them their own. - asshole assholes are mean, jealous, and insecure jerks who find ways to lie and manipulate others for their gain. - mission-driven assholes are people who are crazy passionate and trample over how things are "done around here" to see the mission succeed. Note: I use the term "asshole" in reference to Tony Fadell's book "Build". It's a fun way to think about it. Most engineering teams tend to optimize for the incentive of the engineering manager, not the whole team. It's winner-take-all. The good EMs are the ones who see through this and ensure their whole team is empowered at the potential cost of their own incentive. These EMs usually win-win in the long term.
• a_c 4y ago
  I would guess these pieces are usually written by people who sees one side of the story. In manufacturing, or maybe economy in general, states that there are 3 kinds of activity that create value, the idea, the manufacturer and the marketer. Of which the manufacturer has the lowest margin. My adaption of the smiling curve to software engineering is creation, maintenance and marketing. There are engineers out there who sees themselves as "idea compiler" ,which is totally fine imo. Not everyone needs to see the "big picture". But the maintenance and marketing aspect of any software project is not to be underestimated. And it is beneficial to not undermine things that one doesn't understand. You don't know what you don't know. Keeping an open mind helps you to reduce the realm of unknown.
• jschveibinz 4y ago
  Engineering management is not bullshit in my opinion. It is, and always been, an organization-specific role. This leads to the ambiguities that can be frustrating. There are two distinct roles in an engineering organization: staffing, process and engineering resources (indirect), and product/project development and delivery (direct). Relegating staffing, process and resource decisions to non-engineers (e.g. HR) is not the best solution. It takes experience and expertise to build a good staff and engineering culture. That is the job of engineering managers. Do engineering managers act as mentors? Sure, and they can also provide technical input. But that’s just one of their many responsibilities. Roughly 30 years ago, this same discussion was happening around something called a “matrix organization.” It was the same confusion of responsibilities under a different name. Everything works fine when everyone stays in their lane (managers, I mean) and pushes in the same direction. It takes coordination, and it’s not something that people can reinvent on a daily basis. In short: Make a plan for your organization, write it down, show it to everyone (over and over again like beating a drum) and then stick with it. For those who don’t comply, send them packing.
  • ir77 4y ago
    your reply echos my reply and working in a matrix organization. are there terrible managers -- yes, but in a well functioning organization with definitive role a manager should be as you describe and not what is written in the article. what's crazy to me are all the comments here that echo what the article is saying where managers seem to be some sort of rulers and be all in an oganization, which would totally suck and i'm glad i don't work somewhere like that.
• flippy_flops 4y ago
  The best manager I've had described his job as "working for developers". Like a shared assistant that acts as the communication point for stakeholders, gladhands needy customers, completes rfps/security questionnaires/other paperwork, finds talent, etc. Seems like any other position - a great manager is priceless / a bad one is pernicious
• orliesaurus 4y ago
  My take is like this: Engineering management works if EMs are good at their job. According to this tweet: - Startups with managers 33% more likely to develop product innovations - Firing a bad manager and replacing them with a top manager drops costs 5%, since you reduce turnover. - In a car factory, replacing a bad manager with a top manager diminishes the hours needed to build a car by 30%. - In the game industry - good managers means +22% in revenue [1] https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1561408118906568704 https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1561408118906568704
  • pyb 4y ago
    > Startups with managers 33% more likely to develop product innovations If the upside of managers is only 33%, they're probably not worth the added complexity/friction/expense !
    • bergenty 4y ago
      30% improvement is a goldmine in any industry.
    • aliswe 4y ago
      Maybe you are misunderstanding? This number would be the holy grail of any company. Unfortunately the claim made is pure nonsense :)
      • pyb 4y ago
        Put it that way. I pay you $100k to work in a fast-moving environment, or $130k to work in a bureaucratic environment. Which do you choose ? (it's worse in a company as it's the shareholders who earn +30%, not you)
• royaltheartist 4y ago
  The answer is yes all management is bullshit
  • royaltheartist 4y ago
    I guess the managers have found this comment. Once anyone notices when a manager takes vacation, then I'll consider it a vital part of any job
    • jevgeni 4y ago
      Why do you assume that anyone notices yours?
      • aniforprez 4y ago
        Even as an engineer, I hope FFS no one notices my vacations. It means everything is running smoothly and I actually get to have a little down time and not think about work
        • royaltheartist 4y ago
          Every job I've worked at, when a co-worker goes on vacation, it's up to the other engineers and laborers to compensate. When the manager goes on vacation there's no extra work leftover
          • aniforprez 4y ago
            Engineers having to compensate for your vacation sounds like a bad engineering org. Ideally, any gap in engineering should not be missed. If there are fires while you're out, there's something worse going on that needs to be addressed, whether it's bad management or bad engineers
          • vajrabum 4y ago
            Engineers generally don't take over the manager's responsibilities unless they're technical or reporting responsibilites. Generally it's another manager. Most companies require management involvement in P0 incident response for an example. At most companies I've worked at an engineer generally wouldn't be an acceptable substitute. A peer or the manager's boss usually takes it in their absence. It's not unusual that a significant portion of management responsibilities aren't visible to their individual contributor direct reports.
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• jiggawatts 4y ago
  Bell curves apply to every profession. There are a few truly terrible managers, a bunch of mediocre ones, and a few truly great ones. Same with developers, engineers, teachers, nurses, or whatever. For someone in some profession 'A' at the top 5% of their peer group, everyone else seems incompetent by comparison. However, it's easy to ignore the incompetence of their own peer group. There are a few reasons for this. For example, if you're good at 'A' and someone is bad at 'A', you can more easily fill the gaps with your own knowledge and paper over that problem, which makes it seem less important. Similarly, highly skilled people tend to work in teams with other similarly skilled peers, etc... However, when looking at random samples from profession 'B' (whatever that is), then the top-5%-at-A person will typically come across median 'B' people. That's just statistics. So what does a top 5% at 'A' person think of median people in profession 'B', 'C', and 'D'? That they're all idiots and that their jobs are not as complex or meaningful as whatever 'A' is, of course! Don't assume anything about what 'A' is. Could be engineering, science, finance, or whatever. The statistics is the same. Management however gets significantly more flak than other professions, because they're forced onto employees. You don't generally get to choose your manager, you're assigned one. You don't get to fire your "superiors", even if they're clearly in the bottom 5% of the management profession and you're in the top 5% of your profession. This is why you hear skilled engineers grumbling about bad management. So does every other skilled member of every other profession, including skilled managers, which have random managers above them!
• dqpb 4y ago
  I've been lucky to have a sequence of very good managers. Almost all of them changed roles back to Engineering within a couple years.
• scombridae 4y ago
  Finally, an exception to Betteridge's law. But also, a 2,785-word word salad that obscures an obvious one-word answer.
• dxf 4y ago
  Very long time Engineering Manager here. Engineering Management is not bullshit, though there are many bad Engineering Managers out there, even at companies (like Google, where I've been an EM for over 6 years) that strive to build and support Engineering Managers. Google itself did research into the question of, "Do Engineering Managers matter?" The answer was Yes: Google set out to determine what makes a manager great at Google. But first, a research team tried to prove the opposite: that managers actually don’t matter, that the quality of a manager didn’t impact a team’s performance. This hypothesis was based on an early belief held by some of Google’s leaders and engineers that managers are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, a layer of bureaucracy. The team defined manager quality based on two quantitative measures: manager performance ratings and manager feedback from Google’s annual employee survey. This data quickly revealed that managers did matter: teams with great managers were happier and more productive. https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/managers-identify-what-makes-a-great-manager/steps/learn-about-googles-manager-research/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/managers-identify-what-... Google currently asks Engineering Managers to focus on three areas: Leading work, developing people, and building community. What are some ways I spend my time? 1. Making sure my people are supported in their lives and careers. This can mean giving someone a task they will take a long time to finish, because it's the right thing for them (and the team) to have that person learn about that area. You are trading off project/feature delivery for personal and team growth. It can also mean helping someone find ways to still have impact when they are struggling with some aspect of their job. 2. Clarifying strategies and priorities. There are only so many things the team can do successfully, and someone needs to be the person who says No. I am also the person best situated to look outward to other groups and teams to identify areas of collaboration. 3. Making sure we are organized appropriately and effectively, and that we are following good Engineering processes. I hate unnecessary process as much as anyone -- I've always said process should be something that helps you get your job done properly and effectively, not a hoop you need to jump through in order to do your job. As an EM (and when I worked as a developer), I have had my own share of high-quality and poor-quality managers and Directors above me. If you feel EM is bullshit, I'm sorry you've never experienced what it's like to work on a team with a good, supportive manager.
  • scombridae 4y ago
• jevgeni 4y ago
• nxpnsv 4y ago
  So workers increase their output by 3.5x to get +70% wages. I wonder why they complain about management bullshit...
• deleted 4y ago
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• Thursday24 4y ago
  I'd say: No, not at all! Read about Admiral Rickover. He built the first practical nuclear submarine in the world, for the US navy, in record time of 3 years. He cleared bureaucratic hurdles, played the politics when needed, kept tight control, delved deep into the technicalities of the project, recruited and trained a large number of people into the program, and ultimately made the project successful. Dig deeper into any other large scale projects, you'll find great engineering management. The Manhattan project is another example (It should be categorised mostly under engineering management & not scientific management, according to some of the members in the team).
  • Thursday24 4y ago
    However, Rickover was deeply against non technical people managing technical people in the organization. One is reminded of the Newton quote: "Errors are not in the art but in the artificer"
  • AlwaysRock 4y ago
    I think there is a huge difference between managers who can get a project over the finish line and ones who can get multiple large projects over the finish line. I'm not saying that Admiral Rickover didn't/couldnt do that but many managers are effective at cracking the whip and making X happen but at the expense of their teams health which leads to burnout and turnover. I'd also say military management is significantly different than civilian. If my manager tells me to jump I'm not going to say how high. I'm going to say why are you asking me to move its early and i havnt had coffee yet.
    • Thursday24 4y ago
      Rickover was near the top echelons of US navy for ~60 years, as far as I know. Definitely, he knows a thing or two about burnout and turnover. He executed many, many sophisticated projects throughout his life. That's why he had such a long & successful career. I'd recommend reading his book - The never-ending challenge of Engineering. In my readings, this has been the best book on Engineering management. Secondly, about burnout and turnover. Let's discuss from an empirical standpoint. The number one proximal cause of turnover is lack of "commitment". There are longitudinal empircal studies which demonstrate this. Job satisfaction is important as well; however commitment dominates every other factor. Hence, it is important for managers to generate commitment, one way or another. I believe from these aspects, Rickover truly understood engineers and technical folks... In fact, he went against the US military books, and emphasised Individual initiative and judgement, regardless of what the rulebooks said. In a way, Rickover was able to work around the navy rules to create sufficient commitment to get complicated jobs done.
• cwoolfe 4y ago
  Agile Software development done well is a good way to combat BS because it makes building a product into a team sport where everything is out in the open. Grooming, planning, sprints, standups, retrospectives, demos are all ceremonies which increase transparency and accountability. They also provide a way where development productivity can be measured against the collective assessment of the team.
• ir77 4y ago
  when i think most people complain about managers it really is due to their oganization promoting very talented but absolutely socially awkward people into management positions. there is probably a struggle in many organizations with bad managers, simply because in a typical technical organization the only mobility path for very smart people is to be promoted to a manager to bump up their pay/role in their company. many of these managers have no business being responsible for managing other people. what a good manager should be is simply a good people person. being technical is not a requirement, a good manager when asked for technical question should be cognizant enough to realize their limitations and put the direct report in touch with a technical mentor. a good manager should manage his resources within the direction of his organization and ensure they have the tool sets, support or anything else that the direct report need to successfully complete their task. the engineers take tasks from project/program and the manager is there to ensure that the engineer has the bandwidth to support his tasks and milestones and has all the tools to complete those tasks.
• temptemptemp111 4y ago
• dqpb 4y ago
  Management is ruined by hierarchy.
• betteridges-law 4y ago
  [flagged]
• erdos4d 4y ago
  My experience with managers is they exist to put pressure on engineers for social reasons. They never do anything useful and within a short time I tend to resent their interference in my work, so I start fucking things up and generally slacking to screw their metrics up. If I could find a company that honestly wanted work done, they would just give me tickets and I'd power through them. But nobody cares about work, it's all this weird social game. I don't understand it.
• onion2k 4y ago
  An effective manager cares for their team, their work, and its effect beyond the immediate organization. I agree with this take, but with a whopping great caveat - the 'team' is far bigger than the manager's direct reports. Once you accept that the team includes people like product leads, QA, and the leadership team then you start to understand why engineering management is hard. You're trying to get the best work out of your dev team of course, but you're also wrangling a whole bunch of things that intentionally make the dev team's life more difficult, whether that's discussions about the broad direction for the team to go in relative to the wider scope of the business, or the minute little nitpicky bugs that QA won't let slide.
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  From a technical perspective perhaps... from a fiscal perspective it is self justified. Consensus planning is often expensive, error prone, and glacially slow. Seen some groups end up navel-gazing in ivory towers, as their company collapsed. ;)
• Tarucho 4y ago
  In my experience Engineering management is essential. But most EM management sucks. Why? Because in our industry management has no legal accountability. Nobody dies if a feature is half-assed. If the feature sucks they just create a ticket and assign it to a dev. And because of that tech management has always been crowded with bullshit artists who promote other bullshit artists like them (which they have to, if not they would get exposed). And the story repeats over and over again.
• agentultra 4y ago
  I’ve been on both sides. I spent a few years as an engineering manager. The majority of my career as a software developer. It’s not a bullshit job. It’s sometimes a bullshit management job. Like working for the benefit of engineers on your team who view your role as bullshit. And dealing with negotiating between marketing, sales, founders, and being the voice for engineering. There’s a lot of bullshit there some times. I appreciate good managers. It’s a tough job. You don’t always know the right thing to say but when you get it wrong people really make you pay for it. It takes resolve and pragmatism to step in front and take the brunt of responsibility for the teams output and shining the light of success on your team and away from yourself.
  • strix_varius 4y ago
    I've also been on both sides, and I think that it is sometimes a bullshit job. I've spent a few years as a BS EM and a few years as a legit one. Your EM role might be bullshit if... - You're managing fewer than four reports. - You were previously a low-performing engineer & you find it easier to hide your lack of technical competency in the management track. - You spend a lot of your time in broadly-attended meetings about topics on which you are not a direct decision-maker. It's easier to coast as a bullshit EM than as a bullshit engineer because your impact is one step removed. When an engineer ships a bug-ridden mess, they get pinged by QA/product/whoever. When a manager hires an engineer who ships bug-ridden messes, the manager rarely faces consequences. When a manager lacks the backbone to put folks dragging down a team on a PIP, they're rarely called on it. When a manager lacks the backbone to advocate for their best engineers, those engineers leave and the EM gets to interpret for their boss "why" the engineer left. I doubt many say, "because I failed to advocate for their career" or "because they were sick of me misinterpreting the technical situation my team is in." So engineering management is an attractive field for engineers who are technically incompetent, and by definition those folks are poorly equipped to manage technical teams.
• mkl95 4y ago
  Engineering management is oddly similar to some martial arts that are plagued by bullshit artists despite having a few legit uses and practitioners. Also, if you don't have solid project management you shouldn't bother with engineering management. Hire a good PM instead. I've seen half a dozen companies make this mistake with serious consequences.
• mring33621 4y ago
  Good management can add tons of value for both employers and employees. Bad management can subtract value. Bad management often results from a misalignment of incentives. Sorry, I'm too lazy to give details and it is a pretty complex topic. Def not bullshit tho.
• Maursault 4y ago
  > Despite years of effort, and a market value for individual software companies of over trillions of dollars, we’ve yet to formalize a way of measuring how effective a developer is or isn’t. I am not a developer, but I studied CS until my eyes bled, and I've been watching you guys. Seems to me you (royal, developers) have already long figured this out with 2 metrics. The first isn't how many lines of code, but the opposite; the best coders will meet programming specifications with the least lines of code, the smallest program that produces the required results. The second metric is how fast this code on a given platform produces the results, and the faster the better. Isn't this how you all praise each other, with how clever and efficient the code is? Perhaps this doesn't scale, but it is measurable.
  • wahnfrieden 4y ago
    those two have no demonstrated correlation with business performance, unlike DORA measures
    • Maursault 4y ago
      Though it certainly seems counter-intuitive that the efficiency of a developer has absolutely no business value, my only point was that developers have their own metrics for praise of their peers, not that business should adopt them. I've never heard of coders gushing over how fast someone got a piece of crap to market, no matter how profitable it was. Adobe development, for example, was one of the first to release their pro applications on Apple's PowerPC platform, but no one was impressed because their carbonized code was known not to be as performant as it would have been if ported natively in Cocoa. On the other hand, they also took a lot of grief for taking so long (wasn't it about 5 years?) to finally release Cocoa versions of those applications, just in time for Apple's platform switch to Intel, to be run in Apple's Classic emulator.
      • wahnfrieden 4y ago
        I wouldn't want to work with someone on a project who takes such a narrow role-based view of success. If the broader business goals seem gross or alienating or irrelevant to an engineer, perhaps they are, though not by necessity unless it's a typically exploitative class-based structure (even with some limited mobility to pmc)
• spaghettiToy 4y ago
  In my 20s I'd agree with the premise. Now that I've seen high performers deviate from their job and make mistakes in the core role, I understand that even good workers benefit from managers. I can even say the same thing about program management. If communication is good, you don't need these as much, but big companies lack the ability to communicate effectively.
• JTbane 4y ago
  Management is largely there to "crack the whip". They don't talk to clients or perform productive work.
  • drewcoo 4y ago
    > Management is largely there to "crack the whip". Even circuses have stopped that, largely, haven't they?
• disintegore 4y ago
  Did anyone here actually read the article? The author is not putting the usefulness of good engineering management into question. He is criticizing the culture around the organization of knowledge work. If the hat doesn't fit, don't wear it.
  • gopuck16 4y ago
    Clearly, 90% of the people commenting haven't read through the article and putting out their feelings by taking it personally instead of adding anything constructive.
• wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Graeber's Bullshit Jobs is a good background context for this discussion. I feel most are replying about individually good and bad managers and taking a lot about our hierarchies for granted as the most productive formations for society. Maybe the hierarchy is only necessary when the workers have to be kept motivated without any financial upside to business outcomes they generate
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Thankfully most of the managers I've worked for were still doing or able to do the job of a senior/lead person of the team who they managed. The few I have had who were not capable of that were really ineffective. They didnt know how to handle top performers. They didnt know how to help low performers. They become managers of micro bits of information that they collected and passed up to their manager so despite the results of their team they can say they were doing xyz. It was hell. I always found they gave useless advice too. Have a work problem that isnt some type of personal problem? Well they cant help because they dont know/understand what you do or how to help.
  • icedchai 4y ago
    Same. The best engineering managers I’ve had were also very capable engineers.
• kypro 4y ago
  I think part of problem here is that there's a notion of a generic right answer to these questions and that typically the "right answers" are those that get passed down from the enterprise world. I've worked at companies with no managers and it's worked fine. At one place I worked we basically just had a sales teams, an engineering team and a CEO. There were no managers. The sales people raised tickets for bugs and requests for features that would make their lives easier, these would then get a glance over and approval by either a lead dev or the CEO and someone would pick up the ticket. As engineers we would also raise tickets when we identified areas of the system we could improve. This worked really well and it was an extremely efficient way to work for us but what we gained in efficiency we lacked in accountability and scalability. But when you're a company with less than 50 employees neither matters too much. For large enterprises and public companies there's clearly far more value in having managers and various other non-engineers roles. For one as an engineer I literally don't want to be responsible for any big non-technical decisions in large companies which provide critical products and services. But in larger companies there's just far more value in having a clear hierarchy of accountability. That said, I do think a lot of small companies think they need managers when they don't. And I think the reason they believe they need these roles is just because that's how it's done in the larger corps. To some extent this might be a matter of personal preferences too. I tend to like working independently and quite like being given fuzzy requirements. I know I've worked with some devs who prefer working with well defined requirements and get uncomfortable when making decisions that haven't been formally approved. Depending on your engineers and culture the value of managers might vary.
  • pid-1 4y ago
    > I know I've worked with some devs who prefer working with well defined requirements and get uncomfortable when making decisions that haven't been formally approved. A thing I teach to younger folks: no one likes making decisions, but that's where money comes from.
• jedberg 4y ago
  I really liked my engineering management at Netflix. They really got the balance right. They sat in meetings with other management to sort out the big picture items and then passed relevant context on to us so we could figure out the engineering solutions to the problems that they had identified across the company (to go along with the engineering solutions to problems we had identified in our own org that we could solve). They really helped the engineers save time in coordination while not getting in the way. I think the key was that management didn't tell us what to do -- they told us what they company as a whole wanted to accomplish and how our team fit into that puzzle, and then we figured out the details.
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  It's a simple test for me: does my manager protect me from bullshit so that I can get high caliber work done, or do I have to deal with bullshit myself because he can't? The former are worth their salt. The latter can get back to coding or go pound sand for all I care.
  • jsmith45 4y ago
    Fair, but on the flip side, the easy thing to notice is the amount of BS that slips though. It is often much harder to quantify the amount of bullshit that the manager blocked, without more visibility of the dumb requests or whatever that the manager in receiving. Even if a manager let nearly zero bullshit make it to you, from your perspective you can't always tell if that was your manager being good at that, or if your manager just received very little bullshit to deal with in the first place because their manager was good, (unless they happen to mention some of the non-sense they are blocking for you at some point or other).
• ElevenLathe 4y ago
  > As someone who cares (you do, right?!), it’s your job to run towards accountability and responsibility. It’s also your duty to be aware of the methods and strategies of sociopaths, along with their strategies for influence and blame. As an individual contributor with no desire to move to management and a deficit of skill in bullshitting and manipulating, I feel this advice ("run towards accountability") is really just self-preservation. I know I can't out-maneuver all the little Machiavellis around me, but if I can be legitimately useful to some of them (my boss, for example), then hopefully I can ride the coat-tails of the skilled Machiavellis for long enough to pay off my mortgage. In other words, no I don't "care" about the goals of the company as a whole, but I still view it as rational to try and produce real value ("results" in the context of this article).
• andkon 4y ago
  As an engineering manager, I read and agree with this guy's critique. Coding is creative, uncertain, and vulnerable work, and if engineering managers are responsible for whatever leads to results (as he reads Drucker as saying, and which I agree is really our job), then yeah, everything he describes as hampering us in doing that job (tools like OKRs, the need to quantify results, etc. etc.) are all indeed real issues! And if you look at how engineering management happens, at really any org big enough to have even one manager of engineers, I think you'll see this stuff really is a problem. But it's a problem because, well, organizations need to find some way to scale accountability over all of their members, which, when it faces the really tricky vulnerable and weird work of engineering, runs into these problems because of how incommensurate that work is with the tools it has to understand how it's going at scale. When EMing is a bullshit job, it's because the engineering manager is so constrained by the bureaucratic needs of the organization that she cannot actually do the work that matters between the lines. Like when you've gotta manage up so much that you cannot find the room to support an engineer grappling with a novel and uncertain task? Well, the engineer suffers, rightfully blaming engineering management -- we were responsible for supporting them, and failed to do so. As EMs, we have to ask ourselves what we wanna do. Do we wanna fit with what the org asks of us, or do we wanna do what we're responsible for: delivering results by supporting engineers as they do the scary, vulnerable work they do? When those things diverge, I think good managers discover ways to keep the people above them happy, while delivering on their responsibilities to their team. But they often do it despite, not because of, the organization they're serving. I'd like to say it's as easy as just always focusing on results, as when they are delivered, the rest of the org will see that you know what's up! But no. If you just do that as an EM, you'll be fired, or passed over for promotions, or have your team cut from underneath you, or be told you're a better engineer than manager and demoted. Ultimately, your job is to do both: to deliver what the people above you say they need, and to help those who report to you. The coda to this is that the people above you are also human, and also probably realize what they're asking of you is bullshit (if you're lucky). So if you're capable of dealing as humanely and vulnerably with those above you as much as your direct reports, you'll also win them over, and you'll win the cover from them to be able to do what matters with your team.
• don_neufeld 4y ago
  [Context: After founding a startup and being a VPE or CTO four times, I now train and coach engineering leaders at vpecoach.com] Engineering management is anything but a bullshit job, the impact of good leadership is very, very high. Knowing where you are going and why, having good processes, and solid communication is a step function improvement in basically every dimension of engineering team performance. But I also understand this person’s take, because just because it’s an important and impactful job doesn’t mean YOUR engineering leader or manager is any good. Like everything, management and leadership are skills, and most leaders have received next to no training during their entire career. What level of leadership do you realistically expect from an untrained person? And if that isn’t what you need, what are you doing about it?
• eranation 4y ago
  Engineering management (when done right) has some key benefits - protect the team from bullshit corporate politics / micromanagement (pad the team estimates with a buffer / push back on management unrealistic expectations) - help team member fulfill their potential and grow outside their comfort zone - give the team credit when credit is due (help shy people be seen etc) - promote good people (and fire toxic / bad performers that drag the team down) - help the team prioritize / prevent going into rabbit holes - help the team get to decisions faster - hire good people - provide training - provide budget / enable / arrange fun activities (offsite / hackathons) - ensure inclusive environment (give room for introverts to speak their mind in a non awkward way / make sure not only extroverts are speaking in meetings by splitting to smaller groups / doing activities that are async e.g. writing ideas anonymously via virtual post it notes etc) All of this can be done by a good peer or mentor, doesn't have to be a manager, but it sure helps if your manager is also a mentor.
• AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  I'll just rewrite this paragraph and it will answer the question for the author: An experienced engineering manager anticipates the secondary effects of every change, and weighs tradeoffs between a multitude of approaches in solving problems. By continuously modeling software systems, the organization they work for, and customer behavior, the most effective managers readjust their approach to problems daily. This is a great example of what good engineering managers do because after a certain size of a project, one person can't build while also keeping all the downstream externalities in their head. But wait! Microservices and self documenting APIs will fix all this right? Nope - people and process management is as important here as it is on a car assembly line. To adulterate a quote from James Madison: If [programmers] were [perfect robots], no [management] would be necessary.
• koonsolo 4y ago
  I think a lot here miss the main point of the article. Managers used to be smarter than their subordinates, so they could steer the work. With knowledge work, as soon as you turn manager, you're away from the knowledge. That means all of a sudden your subordinates are smarter than you. So where does that leave the manager? Well, as the article also kind of concludes, the manager is now at the service of the team. Big difference! Instead of coordinating and guiding the work, the manager now has to make sure the path is clear for the team to do their job. The manager deals with all the bullshit so the team doesn't have to. This also means that it will be hard for you to notice a great manager, but easy to notice a bad one.
  • TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    >I think a lot here miss the main point of the article. People are very, very clearly reacting to the headline and making the same comments we've seen 1000 times before. It's a shame since the article itself is interesting and could stimulate actual novel conversation, but the chance for that is gone.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    I'm reminded of football coaches. Some of them used to play football, but even then were rarely superstar players. They definitely can't suit up and take over for a missing player - yet they're held responsible for the wins and losses more than the players themselves, and the players have incredible respect and deference for what they do.
    • koonsolo 4y ago
      I still feel football coaches bring more expertise on the table. They handle the strategy used and which player does what. For software development, those things should be in the hands of the developers and architects.
  • ska 4y ago
    > you're away from the knowledge. That means all of a sudden your subordinates are smarter than you. This is incorrect in a subtle but important way: Being closer to "the knowledge" as you put it, doesn't change how smart you are, it changes how well informed/up to date you are. That being said, it's always better to hire people smarter than you if you can :) Similarly, being closer to "the knowledge" tends to make you poorly informed about other important aspects of your business, almost unavoidably. This information is often critical to actual success, more than IC's/engineers often realize. To some degree this is zero sum, and reflects where you spend your time. Done well, a good EM will be an interface between the goals (from above) and capabilities (from below) and keeping them aligned. This: > it will be hard for you to notice a great manager, but easy to notice a bad one. is very true. The corollary is that as an IC you often perform much better in a high functioning team with a good or great manager, but it's easy/comfortable to believe this is mostly yourself.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  Engineering management is not bullshit, but there's a lot of companies with a focus on engineering that aren't necessarily good at hiring managers.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Cool it a notch HN! The article is not anti-management or 31337157 —— Summary Paragraph: what is Engineering Managment’s Job? We’ve touched upon a vague set of goals, but haven’t really settled on what an effective manager’s daily job really is. Going back to Drucker, a manager’s job is to prepare people to perform, and to give them freedom to do so. Creative people need psychological safety in order to perform. An effective manager provides this, along with coaching to help reports become more effective versions of themselves. This should then allow them to reap long term rewards. An effective manager builds trust and space for their reports to execute, along with guidance for where their efforts will have the largest impact, helping them to continue growing in their career. An effective manager cares for their team, their work, and its effect beyond the immediate organization. They are stewards first, realizing that much is beyond their control. The ones who care are just trying to keep the bullshit at bay.
• JAA1337 4y ago
  Being in Engineering Management, I agree 1000%. My advice to anyone feeling the pains of that article ... work for smaller companies. The 'operational overhead' of smaller companies is much much smaller. Let me add, ive spent a lot of time thinking about what advice to give my children about their first job in real world. As someone in management, here is my advice to them: Don't choose your first job based on salary, title, or company prestige. All of those can and will come with time. Choose your first job based on who you will be reporting to and what type of person they are. Will they understand you? Will you understand them? Will they support you? Can you trust them? The spirit of this advice is that if you have a bad boss, most likely your day, each day, most likely will suck. Sure, twice a month your check will look nice, or maybe your business card will have impressive branding on it, but will you be happy? My wife gave me an article once, it was something like "you spend 1/3 of your waking life at work". Don't hate 1/3 of your waking life. Enjoy it. I believe the best way to enjoy each and every day of work is to have a boss that gets you, supports you, and empowers you.
• MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Engineering management is only bullshit if the managers are not potential target users of the product, since a manager needs to deeply understand how the product gets experienced by its end users. Note that this does not mean that non-technical people cannot be engineering managers; it just means that they cannot manage technical products. Thus, you cannot have effective nontechnical managers for products intended for technical people (e.g. IDEs, sysadmin tools, etc.), but technical managers for products intended for general audiences (e.g. email, office applications, etc.) are perfectly fine (and perhaps even better, since they provide a much needed nontechnical perspective to highly technical developers).
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  Management is a generic role with many of the same tasks no matter what jobs the people they manage are doing. Engineering manager means you have the software engineering domain of problems which are highly technical in nature but coaching, reviewing people's work, planning work, hiring/firing/perf reviews, etc. are all things that have to get done. Maybe a better corollary is managing surgeons? Highly technical work, highly paid, sometimes the manager won't be better than the people they manage or even be able to perform their role. The way humans organize work is hierarchical. I view my role as manager is more servant leader, doing busy work dev stuff when I have time like patches, bugs, etc. and leaving "fun" feature/product work to the team. Make sure they have what they need to do their work (planning, filtering out nonsense, attending planning meetings, etc.) and get out of their way.
• jbarciauskas 4y ago
  It's extremely odd to characterize all modern management as Taylorism from the outset. The post seems to be flogging a strawperson argument and concluding with a summary of what I think is a fairly broad consensus about what modern management of knowledge workers actually looks like: finding competent people, setting rich context and providing frequent and actionable feedback.
• deleted 4y ago
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• jjtheblunt 4y ago
  super simple answer: "management" is a misleading noun, whereas the useful activity is more like "facilitator". i keep thinking of basketball and setting picks...facilitating others to score.
• didibus 4y ago
  The article was so much more interesting than the headline or other commenters seemingly commenting on the headline itself, I recommend people give it a read. It explores a lot more what would make a good manager and what does that mean and what is it supposed to be a good manager does. > The minority of people who deliver results are drowned out by the people focusing on controlling the narratives. And for those who stick around, the operational overhead of the ineffective management only grows
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > Scientific Management There's the problem, right there. I'll just leave it at that... I was an engineering manager for 25 years. I hated almost every minute of it, but I'm pretty sure that I was able to justify my existence (indeed, as I worked for a Japanese company, I had to do a weekly QCD report, and I called it my "Justify Your Existence Report"). Way too much to go into detail, but the post seems to be the usual "Post something inflammatory, and watch the clicks come in" kind of thing.
• gerash 4y ago
  In my experience a good chunk of engineering managers were simply the greedy engineers who did not want or were not able to contribute technically and preferred to jump into management for an easier life and higher pay. That worked out for many of them which is one of the reason for dysfunction at some large tech companies.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  > ’ve yet to formalize a way of measuring how effective a developer is or isn’t. This is generally not true. Although there's no etalon SWE in Paris Chamber, it is extremely easy to measure relative performance of engineers in one team. Saying that, the article itself is off the point and very click-baity. It's a pity to see links like that on HN's first page.
• drc500free 4y ago
  The author seems to be using "Sociopath" in the Gervais Principle sense, not as a general slur. Always worth a read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  • burningion 4y ago
    This is a good point to call out. I'm going to add a link in the article.
• elnygren 4y ago
  Oh my sweet summer children. Feels like the author has perhaps never worked on a complex, big product or with any capable engineering management. The worst and biggest messes in software engineering that I've seen have been situations where there was not enough engineering management. And those situations were fixed by... introducing proper engineering (and product!) management. That being said, it is perhaps possible to survive with less engineering management in a situation where everyone is behaving and performing at senior or above level. However, realistically, that is very rarely the case.
  • feoren 4y ago
    Similar to the other top comment, you're saying everyone who believes this must be naive and/or immature. Except that's the opposite of my experience: the most capable, longest-tenured technical people are the ones who are generally most jaded about management. Myself included. I believe that there are probably a lot of problems out there that can be fixed by "proper engineering management". The problem is that 95% of what's out there is improper engineering management, which makes everything even worse. The whole point is not that engineering management is completely unnecessary, it's that in actual reality it's a trumped-up support role with false authority and completely swamped with utter bullshit. It's not done properly; that's the whole point.
• bearjaws 4y ago
  This reads to me like a spiteful piece due to a manager thinking this particular engineer was under performing, and maybe they were or maybe the manager is wrong. To then declare that all engineering management is bullshit because measuring isn't a discrete number really makes me think less of the author. I've had both good and bad managers, the good ones are able to identify dead weight, provide career growth and balance company needs against staff needs. The bad ones are yes men or never fire anyone. Some of this may be company culture, I left my last job because firing people who didn't even show up to work was a 2 month process (amongst other culture problems).. HR only wanted discrete numbers in terms of performance, which to this articles point, is not 100% accurate. Clearly some are able to measure, and sure its not a discrete number but its possible and currently its a skill, which is why most good managers are also engineers.
• ska 4y ago
  Betteridge's law of headlines.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  I know the rank & file almost universally consider management to be morons and how could anyone be so incompetent and stupid. Naturally, in the businesses I've run, I'd get regularly informed about how incompetent and stupid I am, and how a squirrel could do better. Yet anyone can start their own business, and thus prove how much better they are. Some do (even though their employees think they're incompetent), most fail. I remember in particular a woman who worked at Microsoft in the 1990s. We knew each other through mutual friends. She heaped ridicule on how I ran my business. I'd just bite my tongue. One day she quit Microsoft, having made a fortune in MSFT stock options. She invested it all in her startup. A year passed, and she lost it all. While I gave her a lot of points for putting her money where her mouth was, it was a brutal lesson in how difficult running a business at a profit is.
  • SilverBirch 4y ago
    One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that counter to the old adage "Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan", the opposite is almost always true. At every successful company I've worked at there's been probably 1 thing that drives the success, and a thousand things that hinder the success. But just that one thing driving success can overcome the thousand hinderances. It's because that one nugget of success is so strong, you can afford to fail in lots of other ways. The core driving success of a large company almost always spawns a load of other problems which would sink any smaller company, but it survives because the good outweighs the bad, and when the good is massive, the bad can be pretty enormous too. The problem is, it's often almost impossible to really know what's driving th success. And by hacking away at the problems you can endanger the unique combination of things that drives success.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  I’m an engineer, and even I know that the technical solution is only like the 7th most important thing for a successful business endeavor. We shouldn’t think too highly of ourselves.
• csours 4y ago
  Knowledge workers have to manage so much of their own workflow that they should be treated like managers. Developers starting their careers should be trained on how to manage their own work. I have worked in an automotive assembly plant, I have read about the rise of scientific management and later the Toyota Production System. In a physical system, you have to respect the production environment and the product. If there is an oil leak or fire hazard you must address that if you want to continue producing. In knowledge work, the factory is inside someone's mind. They have to be ready, willing, and able to manage their own mind. They have to bring that to the job. It is also imperative that management methods do not damage that production environment. Fear, shame, frustration, and anxiety can all shut down that factory. Some of those emotions can be used to force production, but that is like running a motor over it's torque and power spec - you can do it for a while but you're damaging components that you can't see and it will have to be replaced or rebuilt before it's stated service life. Also we're talking about humans not machines. Humans can choose to leave.
• deleted 4y ago
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• channel_t 4y ago
  I'll go on a whim here and say that all roles in the software industry are bullshit in their own ways.
• sakras 4y ago
  I've become convinced recently that the role of an engineering manager is to act as a nanny for the engineers. Managers act as an intermediary between engineers and upper management and soften any blows that come from above. If something upsets an engineer, it's the manager's job to calm them down and tell them they're doing a good job and offer solutions to the engineer's problems. A happy engineer is a productive engineer.
• hbrn 4y ago
  One litmus test for a good manager that I found: do they ever make decisions that are optically bad? If the answer is no, what do you think are the chances that optics are the main factor in their decision making process? An example from personal experience: one of the downtime post-mortem action items that manager was pushing for was a complex alerting system (we already had a good amount of monitoring in place, but it didn't catch all issues). The right action item should've been: we got extremely unlucky, but despite downtime we're not going to change anything, because likelihood of that happening again is extremely low. It takes balls saying "this is a risk I'm willing to accept".
• naikrovek 4y ago
  engineering != management bullshit
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  No, but many engineering managers are. The key is not to be one, or work for one.