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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 re

• deleted 4y ago
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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.
    • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
      The power dynamic is completely different. Managers have the ability to hire/fire, guide technical decisions (usually for the worse) and set the tone for the team since its "their" team. The team itself has very little recourse over a bad manager.
      • ForHackernews 4y ago
        They can quit. I promise you as a manager I spend at least half my time trying to keep developers happy and engaged because losing even one of them will cost the team way, way more in productivity than indulging somebody who wants to implement a perhaps-overengineered solution. I don't know how it is everywhere, but in my neck of the woods good developers are hard to recruit and expensive to lose - they have a lot of leverage and they know it.
        • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
          I've met devs who don't have the self-confidence to leave their current job under a terrible manager because they don't want to go through the equally terrible interview loops. They're stuck in some kind of purgatory.
    • user3939382 4y ago
      Actually I've developed the wisdom to realize that 90% of people are not good at what they do for a living. They don't have that job because they're talented at it, they have it because they needed a job.
    • Koshkin 4y ago
      But the worst thing ever is when a bad dev gets promoted to the position of a dev manager or a tech lead. Armed with “knowledge” and “experience,” and now with a degree of authority, they would put their weight on everything they touch. The damage will be immense (but no one would care).
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • rco8786 4y ago
    That’s silly. Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. These articles are undoubtedly written by people who have never been managers themselves, and frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for. Which is fine - everyone starts that way. But to then assume the job is useless is classic sign of imaturity. > Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary That’s literally the premise of the article posted.
    • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
      The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
      • droopyEyelids 4y ago
        I think this is the sign of inexperience/immaturity. What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
        • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
          And we're honing in on the pain point of that aspect of life. I'm not having a revelation here, I'm lamenting the fact with my peers on a site dedicated to technology/engineering.
        • 015a 4y ago
          I think what you're describing isn't inexperience or immaturity; its idealism in the idea that competent people should hold power. The world may not work like that, but it isn't immature to fight for it.
      • UncleMeat 4y ago
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    There are oodles of terrible managers. There are oodles of terrible everything and we definitely remember the bad experiences more than the good experiences. Especially since a lot of what a good manager does (deflect distractions, ensure consistent prioritization, hire people who don't suck) makes it seem like nothing is actually happening. A very large number of people really are saying that these roles aren't necessary. Larry Page famously fired all of the managers at Google at one point in the past. I regularly see people say that zero management at all would be preferable, both for startups and megacorps. Heck, the article itself is about this very idea.
  • dahart 4y ago
    Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. This applies to managers and to engineers. Turn your argument around and ask what happens when good managers have to deal with crappy engineers, because there are a lot of crappy engineers too. (And note especially that engineers can be bad on many axes. It’s possible for people with excellent technical skills to bring negative value to the organization due to poor attitude or poor communication, among other things.) Do you want good managers to judge you and assume that you’re a bad engineer just because they’ve had to manage some other bad engineers? Bad engineers also taint the role and lead to a certain earned reputation. But if everyone projects their worst fear on the role, then we’re all stuck making assumptions, being pessimistic, and missing the good people because we’re blinded by our stuck ideas incorrectly generalizing individual people to their roles. If we can’t stop to see the good things and what does work, then functioning together is difficult and it drags down the team. What value do you see in good management, and what makes a good manager in your experience?
  • fsloth 4y ago
    'more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do' This is quite hyperbolical. A person can have a life experience of "mostly bad manager", but that does not mean "most managers are bad" or that "most people have experienced bad management". I've been 16 years as a professional software engineer. I would not describe anyone to whom I was a direct report as "bad manager". Quite contrary, I've been quite happy with most of them. This does not mean a life without conflict or misunderstanding, of course. Statistically, bad management is of course a non-neglible problem, but the above makes the situation sound hopelessly pathological.
  • paxys 4y ago
    I'd wager the percent of terrible managers is the same as that of terrible engineers. We all have worked with such coworkers at some point in our careers. Yet no one ever turns around and says "the engineering role is bullshit", simply because that would invalidate their own careers.
    • tayo42 4y ago
      Eningeers get tons of actually effective training and schooling. Alot of people probably spent at least 4 years in school learning a science where there are right and wrong answers. It's easy to evaluate engineers. Most managers seemed to get to that role by accident, or because they knew the right person. I think there's way more underperforming managers. Managers aren't going to school for years, even when they do the degree they come out with feels useless.
  • malcolmgreaves 4y ago
    I’ve had to work with a lot more terrible engineers than terrible manages. A lot of the time, what makes someone good or terrible in their role is maturity and professionalism.
  • awillen 4y ago
    I'm a PM, and I've had to live through a fair number of god awful engineers. It's miserable to work with them, too. I don't malign the profession because I've had bad experiences. Engineers should be smart enough to know that experiencing a bad manager, or even a few bad managers doesn't mean that " 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." That's just being irrational and salty.
  • mk81 4y ago
  • ansre 4y ago
    > 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. FWIW, all my engineering managers have been great. > Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" I guess that's just your experience? Just because you've had a few bad apples doesn't mean all engineering managers are terrible. > present an aura of superiority Sounds like you're just projecting your experience onto other folks.
  • bumby 4y ago
    >because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do. The irony is that I've heard the same said about engineers. It's easy to take the cynical point of view, but probably not wise or accurate. Like the OP, in my experience the people making those types of claims tend to have an overly simplistic view of the problem.
  • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    I don’t know. I think what some people complain about here when they talk about bad management has nothing to do with management. Most seems to complain they have to do reporting which is not fun. While that’s generally true I wouldn’t call that bad management. I had a relatively bad (inexperienced and overwhelmed would be truer) manager once when I was still doing engineering years ago. I know he was bad because I had to do a significant part of his job for him notably regarding smoothing interpersonal issues in the team and cross-team communication in the org. I don’t see most people here complaining they have to do too much management.
• fezfight 4y ago
  I think you're being as disingenuous as TFA. There are just as many useless managers as there are useless reports. The reason you see so many 'managers suck' posts is because they're in a position of authority over the talent they manage. That's all. Management shouldn't mean authority, it should be like HR or IT, a support role.
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    Who should be held responsible for engineering projects or initiatives that require more than one engineer? Who should be tasked with originating and prioritizing and staffing such projects?
    • Victerius 4y ago
      "I should be paid 300k for only 3 years of experience, be able to work remotely without location-based pay, work 25 hours a week. Oh, and my managers should support me, not wield authority over me" I'm gobsmacked by the entitlement of these people.
      • fezfight 4y ago
    • fezfight 4y ago
      The technical team leader. Staffing is management/HR at the behest of and under the direction of the team lead.
      • bradyd 4y ago
        > The technical team leader. AKA the manager.
        • Jensson 4y ago
          No, they are different roles. Technical leads makes technical decisions, not staffing decisions. Managers makes staffing decisions. They can be the same person, but often aren't.
• drstewart 4y ago
  One of my least favorite things about being on the technical side of things is this overarching smug sense of superiority that every other role is bullshit and doesn't do anything of real value. Or that other roles are malicious and/or incompetent and if engineers got their way the product would be perfect and free of defects of errors. e.g: "Don't blame the developers for X, we only put it in because of product or sales!" Well product or sales probably don't like stuffing the product with ads, they only put it in there because you like collecting a paycheck every month.
  • sumtechguy 4y ago
    Good way to bash that down is to ask 'would you want their role?' It makes them stop and think what does that person really do and they usually do not want to do it at all.
    • noneeeed 4y ago
      This was the question I asked myself that totally changed how I thought about sales and marketing people. I cannot do sales, I do not want to do sales, but if I want a job someone needs to do sales. To me sales looks like an awful job, but some people really get a kick out of it and I'm glad they do because otherwise I would earn a lot less than I do. We love to think that "if we build it they will come" but the reality is very different, and most of us work for companies that would struggle to grow without some form of sales or marketing operation, no matter how good the product might be.
      • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        > To me sales looks like an awful job You meet new people. They tell you about their problems. You explain to them how your product can alleviate them. You work on finding a common position regarding what you could bring at which price. When it works, you get a big cheque. It’s pretty fun really.
        • noneeeed 4y ago
• jrm4 4y ago
  Nope. They most typically result from the fact that "you mostly can't learn business or management in school," period. There is no meaningful correlation between title, schooling, and/or effectiveness in management.
• nine_zeros 4y ago
  You are right. Running a business is nuanced and smart people are required for it. Imo, the real problem is that engineering work is disproportionately difficult compared to management and yet, management gets recognition, visibility and power to control engineer lives. This happens in every step. Engineering interviews are insanely harder than management, engineering promos are opaque and need grinding for years as opposed to management promos in growing companies and these days, senior engineers have to manage politics as well. Engineering managers are not useful in any way but yet, get higher compensation and recognition. Why? The only manager that engineers like are those who have previously been strong engineers themselves. It's the earned respect that lets people be ok with bosses. Not titles themselves. Certainly not people management or glorified assistants managing spreadsheets for upper levels.
  • edmundsauto 4y ago
    As someone who has switched between management and IC work, I’ve found management to be much, much more difficult to do well. Management should be managing people, which is much harder than managing code. Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.
    • nine_zeros 4y ago
      > Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well. I believe that the job is nearly impossible to do well. Which leads a lot of people to suspect that the role of Engineering managers is badly defined. Which leads to all the complaints above. Nobody is happy with the current org structure.
    • abc_lisper 4y ago
      I have seen many (extremely smart too) engineers cry at work, but never managers. Make of it what you will.
      • adra 4y ago
        People with emotional issues aren't as likely to be promoted into management. Management is often way more stressful as you're getting dumped on from above, from peer managers, and all the negative feedback from devs all at the same time (plus needing to actually facilitate getting things built). Maybe you work at some poor company that can't promote devs high enough so they're forced into some form of management role to get a promotion. Those companies suck because they steal good IC talent for roles they're less suitable/valuable for, and causes the company to have perverse incentives to over bloat their management pool than necessary.
• deepGem 4y ago
  I think these comments come mostly from engineers who have just started their software engineering journey or somewhere in their early stages. When you are at that stage, your odds of coming across an inspiring figure in other areas are very low, unless you have a natural proclivity to other areas in your life. As you grow, you do realize that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and you mellow down and start to learn the interfaces with other functions. Even then your superiority bias won't away but will mellow down for sure. This is simply because your success as a mid-senior engineer is no longer a function of just your engineering skills. Its a function of how well you can sell your ideas, how you can articulate your messaging so that every other function can work with you, how do you get buy-in from competing parties etc. But again, engineers will brush these aside as 'politics' unrelated to software engineering :)
  • feoren 4y ago
    When I was just starting out as an engineer, I was very interested in what management was doing. I went to every town-hall type meeting I could, every business planning meeting, every financial meeting. I really wanted to be steeped in it to understand the role. Year after year after year I learned again and again that there's something truly toxic about middle-management and up. It's like the higher you go, the worse the air gets, and your brain starts to get clouded and fuzzy. Technical people stay in their roles for decades and get better and better over time; management plays musical chairs where they change roles every 2 or 3 years. The new role has almost nothing to do with their old role. If you saw a whole group of people randomly switch every couple years between being an Aerospace Engineer, then a Software Engineer, then an Environmental Engineer, then a Structural Engineer, you'd rightly go: wow, all these engineering jobs must be super easy! They just throw anybody into those roles. They don't take any time to learn, etc. etc. So why, when people randomly switch every couple years between product manager, director of operations, financial director, project manager, sales manager, director of internal innovation, director of digital growth, director of New-Techy-Buzzword -- why do you not conclude the same thing? All those jobs are stupid and worthless, clearly, because they come and go with the wind, and anyone in the mid-to-upper-management sphere can take on any of those roles. Clearly they require no training. Clearly they are not hard. Having an MBA degree does not qualify you to do all of those roles, unless those roles have absolutely nothing to them. Note that I intentionally excluded anything having to do with "legal" in there, because that's an actual job that takes an actual expert. My long-winded point is that I did the exact opposite of what you claim. I used to believe that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and that all these other functions are an important part. But I learned, time and time and time again, that the primary driving force in corporate America is the Principal Agent Problem and that all these roles are just titles to be shuffled around among those in the Business Caste for their own personal benefit. Entire companies are nothing more than pawns in the game these guys (and it is mostly men) are playing with each other, jockying for the most impressive-sounding titles, extracting as much money as they can from the public sector into their own pockets. If they're actually doing their job well, they're losing at the game. You have to switch jobs every couple years to keep up.
• Test0129 4y ago
  Here's the thing. At the end of the day all of the "complexity and nuance" of running a business doesn't matter. The only way you even get to execute on that is if you're flanked by good engineers. All roads lead to the engineer. Bad managers can be worked around. Mindless PMs can be worked around. But if every engineer at apple suddenly stopped working there would be real economic consequences. If managers and PMs stopped working they'd be replaced by engineers who are by and large more capable at adaptation anyway. Engineers should hold all the power. In most orgs management exists to prevent what is effectively an artificial union forming among engineers. Most, I'd argue even 99%, of engineers do not want to be sitting in meetings and spending 9 hours a day building CRUD. Without the guy cracking the whip over your head you wouldn't. I wouldn't. Anyone wouldn't. The power dynamic favors managers - hence all the hate. MBAs take a lot of flak because much like the kid engineer coming out of school who believes he's legitimately God's gift to man the MBA does the same. The difference? The MBA controls your salary, whether you keep your job, whether you get your job, the direction of the company, the marketing of the product, the features that will be worked on, the finances of the company, etc. The MBA holds legitimately all power that is not engineering. As such, by generalizing and blaming "the MBA" you are more right than wrong on who is the real problem. I believe most engineers should go back for their MBA. Not to get better at business but to understand their enemy. An entire career is boiled down to a few excel formulas. Do you know what makes me happy? Not even knowing my manager exists. Not even knowing my PM exists. In my a little over 10 year career I can name two managers and one PM that actually made a fundamental difference to me. I'd be infinitely happier if PMs and managers were replaced by robots that let me do my job and enjoy what I do. Instead, even something as trivial as "I'd like an extra day to optimize this because I can see it having problems under load" needs to be "scoped" and "talked about", then it needs to be "put into a future sprint", then it needs to be "pointed", "tagged", "etc". This is borderline tyranny to someone who is creative. Only a spreadsheet monkey sees value in this nonsense because at the end of the day I'm right (because I built it) but I won't be given time to do it until it breaks (because the MBA), when it does I will be on pagerduty and probably hearing about it (from my manager), and then I will need to ask for time and a meeting will be called to discuss and do JIRA nonsense (by the PM). You see? As an engineer it's always my fault. Even when I'm right. Who are the people who will arrive at my desk to blame me? Them.
• felizuno 4y ago
  I work with a lot of technical founders who struggle to accept the inevitable truth that taking the time to specify, coordinate, and resource what they want to do leaves no time to be the one doing any of those things. They eventually solve this problem by hiring other engineers to focus on the implementation step while they keep everything on the straight and narrow. When the company grows and they run out of time to directly supervise every engineer an engineering manager is born. Engineers who don't appreciate the role of the product/marketing/management layers don't seem to understand that if they had to take on those responsibilities it would leave them with no time left over to write any code. If nobody takes on those responsibilities then our company won't make money to pay anybody to write code. It's not chicken and egg, it's cart and horse. If you don't want to become a marketing expert as well as a product design expert for the sake of doing all these things simultaneously consider being glad others are taking things off your plate and coordinating work without you so you can focus on writing code.
  • mrits 4y ago
    Over the first 10 years of a an engineers career they might only be exposed to a few different management roles. It's possible that the manager isn't fulfilling the actual role so what you have left with is just the distraction. Regardless if the manager is helping the team they almost always drain resources to aggregate information that they can synthesize upstream. It's a system that is so fragile it's not hard to see why we have an industry full of people that experience this.
    • Swizec 4y ago
      > they almost always drain resources to aggregate information Here’s an idea: Provide this information before they have to ask, when it’s convenient for you. Like between tasks. Took a 5min break? Move the damn story over to done. Got stuck and seeking clarity but are blocked? Leave a quick comment. If your manager has to ask what’s going on, you’re not communicating enough.
      • mrits 4y ago
        That is technically an idea.
• titzer 4y ago
  You clearly only read the first third of the (admittedly) somewhat roundabout and meandering commentary. I know because your comment was what I was thinking until about a third of the way through, when I realized that that was not at all what this person is saying.
  • wiredearp 4y ago
    He only read the headline and now we're all discussing his feelings instead of reading the article which is about something else entirely. I recommend anyone still following this dysfunctional thread to go ahead and read it.
• randomdata 4y ago
  In fairness, the Agile Manifesto is about pushing developers to work directly with the business people and each other in order to cut out the 'middlemen' you speak of. Each of the twelve principles highlight areas where developers need to pick up the slack when product/program/project management is cut out of the picture. For better or worse, this is what we, as an industry, have adopted and a generation has grown up not knowing any better.
• BurningFrog 4y ago
  I think it's part of the common "I'm surrounded by idiots" attitude of the many jerks in our industry.
• rektide 4y ago
  The complaint about OKRs - using only specific meazurements to destroy the ability to decide/agency to land actual outcomes/results - seemed pretty spot on. It's not even engineering managers necessarily; knowledge working orgs in general, and, in my view, it's not immature to grumble about, it's immature orgs that ruin their best potential, that dont get knowledge work & actively obstruct it. Having these ideas in mind, particularly backed up by some good background as is present here - some discussion on knowledge work, Peter Drucker quotes - is context orgs ought to try to be aware of, prevent from happening. Sad to see such a well written well explained article reduced to "grow out of their mindset" antagonism. There's not any argumentation in this rebuttal, just personal badmouthing & berating. The conflict described is real, but apparently people who feel tensions & dissonance of it all are all just "immature".
• brightball 4y ago
  There’s a lot of roles needed to build a product. As the engineering load grows, the engineers have less time to handle those other duties themselves as much as we might like to. When that happens, other people have to be involved to take over. There are real requirements to communicate with other parts of the business, customers, coordinate who is doing what and triage what is needed when. So generally, I agree with you that the mindset isn’t a great one. At the same time, there are methodologies that aim to alleviate exactly this problem by ensuring engineers directly control more than they often do. Scaled Agile (SAFe) is my favorite because of two core tenets. 1. There are 2 backlogs, one managed by product/business and one managed by dev/ops/arch. Going into planning, capacity allocations are given to each (usually 70-30 product dev). Priority among those backlogs is entirely handled by the group managing it. 2. PI Planning where backlog items are presented from each group and dev is responsible for planning out those priorities over the next 8-12 weeks in the manner that they believe is best. Everybody who could potentially answer questions that devs have is present with their schedules cleared to streamline the decision making process. Plans are discussed with management, risks assessed and finally agreed on. I love this process. It gets everybody on the same page as far as who is doing what, when and why. It reduces friction and lets devs focus for 2-3 months at a time without a directional shift. Planning from product is focused on the next PI instead of the constant “we have to drop everything and work on X now!” situations that so often happen. I wish more orgs would adopt it. I hear so often about devs stuck in orgs claiming to do so that aren’t actually doing any of the things that make it great and it’s frustrating.
• 0xedd 4y ago
  • RHSeeger 4y ago
    > The field is oversaturated with incompetent PMs, team leads and CTOs. The exact same thing can be said of programmers/developers; there are TONS of bad ones. The fact that there exist bad managers/pms/etc does not invalidate the need for good ones.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    > Your ego knows no bounds to assume the entire world aligns to your own experience. Yet, you also used just five examples, presumably from your own experience, to tar entire professions. Yes, there exist incompetent PMs, Architects, Team leads, and so on. There are also competent ones. Just like there are incompetent and competent engineers. No profession has a monopoly on bullshit.
  • zuppy 4y ago
    what you guys fail to understand is that the priorities at the micro level, are not the priorities at the macro level. of course any developer would like to prioritize having perfect code, latest tools, no interruptions, but money needs to come from some place, on time and you have to find a balance in what you put your focus on. that's what a good manager does. it doesn't matter if you have the best product in the market, if the competition releases before you and has obtained all the clients. for the client, the task of moving to a slight better solution may not cover the cost. just because people have other jobs, it does not make them stupid. of course, what i've said in here is over simplified, there are a lot of other jobs required in order to have a healthy, viable product with clients and cash flow.
• KaiP 4y ago
  RTFA before commenting please Your comment added nothing because it was responding to a straw man rather than the article itself.
• consp 4y ago
  My pet problem is not with those roles, they are needed, it is with the overpaying of those roles and downplaying of the requirement of actual engineers and thus lowering their standing an payment. An engineering manager should in my view never earn more than the rest of the team and where I live they do earn more by default.
• disintegore 4y ago
  It looks like you've read the headline and decided to get angry.
• Buttons840 4y ago
  It's hard to identify failing managent, especially from the top looking down, and the burden of management failures fall on those below them. This leads to a lot of frustration and blog posts like this, wondering if all managent is bullshit. It seems really unfair to a developer, who thinks "if I screw up the entire company halts, if you screw up I have to work harder". And so the developer can't shake the feeling that management is bullshit.
• m12k 4y ago
  > the complexity and nuance that goes into running a business Unfortunately one of the side effects of having something so important also be so complex, hard to reason about, and hard to prove causation for, is that there are a lot of empty suits attracted to an area where it's hard to disprove that they contributed, but a lot of money to be made if they can convince the right people that they did. By definition we can't know how many are genuinely hardworking contributors, how many are parasites, and how many are somewhere in the middle (e.g. did some good work but is phoning it home these days, got lucky but misattributed their own success so now just doles out bad advice). Claiming that only one of these three groups exists is of course naive - but when running into people who have a different perspective or make different claims, it's worth keeping in mind that the subset of these groups they've run into might differ from your own.
• vlovich123 4y ago
  Interestingly Musk fired the entire Marketing / PR department. Hasn’t seemed to affect Tesla quite yet. I love how you also snuck Scrum master in there, a role no one needs. Project managers are also often shoved into places they’re not needed (I’ve generally found them to be a net negative vs having the manager be responsible for it).
• coldtea 4y ago
  >Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer Cow dung is common too, but not necessarily useful. Maybe for manure... Most actual work happens despite those roles, not because of them... Or even against them - and is dilluted, sabotaged, rushed, and crapped upon all the time by the decisions of the roles above. If you meant "software production needs this role", then no. Software production (from Xerox Parc to the Linux kernel) can be just fine without them. If you meant "a modern corporate bureucracy needs those roles to make a product", then maybe, but that's part of the reason those enterprise products are shitty.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  What may look like cynicism at first is actually just fair criticism. It does not lack maturity, rather the opposite given it has some thoughtful research and examples of why EM can be in fact bullshit.
• ChrisRR 4y ago
  I agree. It feels like half of programming posts are just the same 10 topics discussed over and over Yes we know management metrics can't predict every end date, we know agile doesn't solve every problem, we know blockchain is a solution without a problem, we know code complete and the mythical man month are some of the best programming books.
• dominotw 4y ago
  Managment offers an escape route to people who struggle with tech competency. Just grind it out for a few years a dev, then transition into management. This is a standard formula for years and i've seen many many people follow this.
• mgraczyk 4y ago
  The real issue is that in most software engineering teams, these roles are better done by a SWE who is good at X than somebody who exclusively does X, but especially at big companies the person doing X doesn't really understand software engineering.
• boredumb 4y ago
  Being younger and 'technical' it's easy to feel as if you're a linchpin to the whole process and everything else is peripheral (This happens in every department though btw). I think everyone should try their hand at starting a business or launching a product (technical or non-technical). You will be amazed the labor and efforts that go into even the most mundane things and you will quickly be wishing you could hire on someone to help manage your product/project, help you market and network, help you find out which forms you need to fill out for taxes you didn't realize you needed to pay, what these terms actually mean, how to find capital, etc, etc, etc. If your product takes off I would guarantee you aren't going to hire an engineering manager to 'analyze' your engineers in order to optimize them as much as you are wanting someone to keep up with day-to-day issues and priorities so you don't have a dozen engineers sheering yaks or you aren't spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with a dozen engineers individual issues while trying to run a business and allocate yourself in a dozen other directions. Like you mention you become a lot more happy when you realize the tremendous efforts people on your team make (there are always exceptions) that may or may not be in your department.
• wiredearp 4y ago
  If you click the link, you'll find that the article features text below the headline that deals with literally none of those things.
• bjornsing 4y ago
  > It's just personal and professional immaturity. Not so sure about that. In the beginning of my career I looked up greatly to a lot of people in these roles. The older I get the more that has faded. Truth is I can do their jobs fine, but they can’t do mine; yet they have a tendency to look down on me. (I’m in Sweden though, and the MBAs still have a very strong grip on the Nordics. Might be a different social dynamic in the US.)
• pkulak 4y ago
  That was very well said, but with a few word changes could be used to support anything.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rmah 4y ago
  Heh, a bit harsher than I would have stated it but I can't help but agree. Of course, 30 years ago, I would have disagreed with you. Probably in a few decades the author of the article will agree with you too! So there's that.
• jordanbeiber 4y ago
  I believe the take you see is mostly coming from enterprise developers that have witnessed the immense inefficiency and waste of larger organisations. The solution to a non-engineering savvy manager in such organization is to add more people and more frameworks. Mind you - to "them", these "dreaded MBAs", the development organization is a problem, often regarded as cost, and development is done by... developers. Sometimes the developers is the actual problem and they have gradually sunk the software in to a unmaintainable swamp of crappy code and debt - but this is a competency and hiring problem. It will not be solved by any framework or project manager. But you need the competency in your leadership to understand what's what and this is missing from pretty much any large org I've set foot in. The high functioning teams is these settings are more a stoke of luck, and they often have to utilize guerrilla tactics to keep delivering value. I've seen my fair share of global CIO's talking us through cloud and blockchain, never have to actually deliver and move on to the next company or fancy role. I've seen CIO/CTO not trusting developers and believing no-code and citizen development to be the end all. Guess what - more unmaintainable crazy stuff I've seen large organizations falling in to the "one system" trap on all levels, even trickling down to the software teams - a dedicated 8 person jira team for the whole org! What could possibly go wrong. I've also witnessed amazing autonomous development teams that move at amazing speed with quality. In these settings you have management that understands the process of supporting a business with valuable code. Most of the time IMO it's the business themselves that cause a lot of the problems facing developers by not understanding that it's they who own the processes getting digitized. They buy software from vendors, staff up a project team to integrate, fire and forget. This "fire and forget" project mentality is what accumulates in a shitty org, and shitty orgs start from the top. If you haven't read "Turn the ship around" it embodies all of this. This condensed video is really worth a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8
• gopuck16 4y ago
  Instead of actually reading the article and critiquing what the author wrote, you've taken it personally and really just haven't provided any valid points. The last 2 paragraphs of your comment can be applied to your behavior actually.
• giantg2 4y ago
  When it comes to managers, it's hard not to say their role is BS for many of us. I've never had a truly good manager (19 in 10 years). Many of their perceptions don't match with mine or the other team members.
  • titzer 4y ago
    A good manager is often invisible. If you forgot they were there, you were either lucky that everything in the org was going right (or was so far away it didn't matter), or they were really good at shielding you from the fact that everything was not going right (and making it seem like that didn't matter). :)
    • giantg2 4y ago
      They've all been very visible.
• udev 4y ago
  I bet you read the title only, and not the article. There is way-way more to it than the title. Nowhere did the author reduce the contribution of non-engineering roles. An excellent read!
• johnfn 4y ago
  If you have something to explain about the roles of non-eng professions, then do so. All this post does is argue how you’re more mature and superior to everyone else in the thread (without explaining exactly how that is, or giving any particular insight).
• gerash 4y ago
  What is your take then? You seem to have been offended but don't provide any counterpoints
• feoren 4y ago
  Instead of an ad-hominem attack against a strawman, can you actually address the points made by these people you're labeling as professionally immature and unwilling to understand these non-engineering roles? Can you actually provide anything that illustrates your point at all? Just calling us all immature children does nothing to change my mind; it only makes me think you're defensive because you know deep down that your role is actually truly worthless bullshit. How many hours per day do you spend in meetings?
  • orev 4y ago
    Every other part of a business runs on politics (i.e. bullshit). If you don’t want to be dealing with that 100% of the time, you need someone else to do it for you. And they will necessarily have to expose you to some of it, sometimes, to get info from you so they can communicate what’s going on to the rest of the business. Without the rest of the business doing what they do, you have nowhere to work. And sorry, unlike a program you’re writing, you don’t have any say in how the logic works (or doesn’t). The rules are set and you’re in the system. You might be able to find some variations in other companies.
• mcguire 4y ago
  "...actual smart people can make real contributions in non-engineering roles." Can they? Certainly. Do they? Well, not as often as you might like. I used to work for a government contractor who had what I liked to think of as a "butts in seats" strategy. The contractor got paid by taking something like 50% off the top of what the customer paid for the employees (back when I was a contractor in industry, that was more like 15% but that is neither here nor there). The "complexity and nuance" that goes into running that business for a maximal profit involves keeping the direct customers happy---and they're managers, not users---while having as many employees as possible. You need to ride the line between leaving money on the table and having so much broken that higher levels of the customer start to get upset. Laying down narratives is a very important part of that process. This isn't, however, limited to government contracting. I've ridden quite a few projects into the ground in industry because the goals and incentives of Product Managers, Program Managers, etc., were not aligned with the goal of a successful project simply because there are many ways to be a successful manager and a track record of successful products is not the easiest. Yes, they were all smart people. Many were even likable, skilled leaders. But if your goal as an engineer is to be part of a successful product and not to be a well-rewarded part of a successful manager's organization, then you will not be happy. Is that what you mean by "professional immaturity"?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• johnnymarr666 4y ago
  this is just personal and professional immaturity. bonecrusher2102's empty comment does not respond to any of the arguments in the blog post. instead it's repeating the same tired prejudice that the commenter inhibits against anyone who is trying to articulate a critique of business management. i really hope bonecrusher is able to grow out of this mindset. they'd be a lot happier and more productive
• lunias 4y ago
  This sounds like a generalization to me. During my time writing software professionally I've had good, bad, and neutral managers. I've found most of my good managers at companies that produce software as a product. These managers were technically trained and rose to their management roles through working as engineers at other companies. In two cases these managers were actually the CTO. Most of my bad managers have been at companies that rely on software to facilitate their business, but do not consider software to be their business. These managers knew little about software and our teams were usually bloated by non-technical roles and often unproductive. Every idea ultimately had to be passed through engineers for validation / refinement and engineering became a very constrained resource. Neutral management is where I would place most of my managers. They don't really aid in or detract from my productivity. They're there and doing things (even if those things are not always visible to me). They demonstrate enough value to dispell the feelings of: "If you weren't here then we could hire another engineer to actually work on this problem". That said, you are 100% correct that if I didn't think about these things at all then I'd be much happier. After all, happiness is reality minus expectation.
  • kodah 4y ago
    This is most accurate to my experience as well. While I don't think it's helpful to disparage management as a whole, I do think it's beneficial to talk about where bad management exists, why, and how frequently. On the flip side, people talking as if bad management doesn't exist or is some minority I think are forgetting not every SWE works in the valley at a FAANG or bootstrapped to-be-unicorn company.
• warcher 4y ago
  The MBA is for people who want to skip right to "being in charge" without having to learn how to actually do anything first. The scary part is, if you went to a selective enough school, it kinda works. The Ivy League undergrad -> elite MBA -> management consulting -> C-suite pipeline is especially frightening.
  • bumby 4y ago
    My issue with the converse is that being a good engineer and understanding how to do things doesn't necessarily make you a good manager. I've worked in plenty of orgs where they don't treat leadership as a skill unto itself and assume just because you're a good engineer, you'll be good at managing an engineering team.
    • warcher 4y ago
      I think if you have to pick a base for leadership, doing the thing you're managing other people in is probably the best. The worst in my opinion is finance-- it's like driving using the rear view mirror. No business has ever succeeded or failed because their accounting was really tip top.
      • bumby 4y ago
        No doubt, I just think too often leadership is looked at as an afterthought to the skill they are managing? It's akin to the Peter Principle. Just because you are a good developer does not mean your skills translate to great leadership. People would laugh at the idea of a good leader being thrust into a SWE role based solely on their leadership skills. Yet we often think transitioning from a SWE to a leader is just picked up. I'm asserting that they are different skillsets. Will being a good developer help lead a team of SWE? Absolutely, but that alone doesn't provide the requisite knowledge and skills to perform a manager role, but we often think that's the bulk of what's necessary.
• erikpukinskis 4y ago
  I don’t discount the importance of Managers. The thing I struggle with is Engineers trying to do the job of Manager without having any training or even really identifying as a manager. They still think their job is to supervise technical decisions. Meanwhile there are numerous process and personnel challenges that go completely ignored, because these Engineering Managers think their primary responsibility is as some kind of overseer preventing employees from doing their jobs wrong. I would love if software companies started hiring dedicated, trained Managers. But that doesn’t seem like a thing they do. Instead they just promote an Engineer to Engineering Manager and hope for the best.
• 015a 4y ago
  Some of you people strawman like a murder of crows is attacking your field. Coordination is necessary. Communication is valuable. Running a business is complex. Product managers do valuable work. Designers do valuable work. QA does valuable work. Leadership does valuable work. Engineers do valuable work. The core of an EXTREME number of complaints about modern professional software development lies in the pervasiveness of Career Management; and EMs are an extremely attractive entrypoint for people into this kind of track, who have no experience in any of the IC-facing roles, yet now they're managing ICs. Just go look at the vast majority of job postings for EMs. The requirements are extremely bare on actual, hard engineering experience; maybe you see the last requirement read something like "built an app in java or c++", and it never gets covered in the interviews. You can't manage a role you haven't held, I will die on this hill. Senior leadership is fucking hard; that takes specialized skills, MBAs maybe, a little bit of crazy as well. EMs are not that, and anyone who tells you what EMs do is remotely as specialized as what the people higher up do is probably an EM. At their best, EMs should have an engineering background (or at least PM/PO; having worked with engineers as peers); they should know what it takes to build modern software systems from the inside; they should know how to mentor. At their worst, EMs who don't know any of this, but know management, spend their days as a Jira parrot and can make the lives of the people they manage miserable. Its actually astounding to me that this is controversial, and that people don't recognize that the only reason companies change the requirements bar for EM positions is because, if they made the bar what I describe, that candidate would also make a great engineer; and companies are short engineers, not short "people who manage people". Its not out of some grand design that the best managers live on the management track. Many, many other specialized disciplines don't do what Big Tech does. The tracks for Engineers and Engineering Managers shouldn't be separate; they should be one track. But Big Tech companies don't want their engineers leaving the IC role, so they make do; and the irony of it all is all this does is lower the average quality of EMs in the org, which causes engineers to leave anyway; just to competitors. That's why Engineering Management is bullshit. It doesn't have to be. Much of what that role does is necessary; its just overwhelmingly filled by the wrong people, who then morph the role into some bastardization of what it should be, get promoted, then write the job spec for their replacement. [1] https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/engineering-manager-payment-processing/1938093 https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/engineering-manager-payment-... [2] https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/77396557743170246-engineering-manager-google-cloud/ https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/77396557743170246-en... [3] https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/3135805?gh_jid=3135805 https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/3135805?gh_jid=...
• signal 4y ago
  How are you reconciling your take against the actual content of the article?