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Engineering Managers will also begin to code again [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/1628737303479738368 https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/sta

Engineering Managers will also begin to code again [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/1628737303479738368 https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/162873730347973836...

moomoo11 4y ago
This whole management heavy culture needs to F off. 9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usually awful at understanding business needs too. Get rid of eng managers. Put in a team lead and a few people. If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over. You don’t need battalions when the leaders aren’t even soldiers. Just have fire teams where everyone is a soldier that reports to their team lead. These teams report to a director who is the battalion commander. Managers should be rare. And they should be actually good at their job. People don’t quit jobs they quit shitty terrible managers.
- zactato 4y ago
  Who hurt you?
  - lytedev 4y ago
    I'm gonna go out on a limb here: an engineering manager.
  - moomoo11 4y ago
    I’ve quit jobs before over awful managers. Nobody hurt me because for me at least, I’ve gotten every job I’ve applied to. For example I got bored of my last company and my manager, applied to four companies and got each job, then just picked the one that paid most. I don’t like dealing with incompetent people. It’s that simple. I’m not a bottom feeder lmao.
    - yibg 4y ago
      Congrats, everyone wants you and throw boat loads of money to get you. You're also the only competent person in a sea of incompetence. What would the world do without you?
      - chillwaves 4y ago
        These replies are lazy. HN becoming reddit so you guys can feel smart or something.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- seanhunter 4y ago
  > If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over This is one of the most irrational things I’ve ever read on here so congratulations I guess. The people in the team are not the ones to blame if the teams are too big, you are (if you are in charge). Therefore if you actually want to fix the problem, the person you need to fire before starting over is yourself.
  - moomoo11 4y ago
    I’m ESL and the context of my comment is management and my opinion on what company should do. Get rid of engineering managers. And yes. Fire all the management who caused shit to get that bad. I 100% stand by that.
    - seanhunter 4y ago
      Fire the management who caused shit to go bad != fire everyone. If you actually are sincere about fixing things, actually finding the causes is very important.
      - moomoo11 4y ago
        How do you fix a broken pipe that’s already had a dozen patches on it? Keep adding more and it stays broken? At some point you have to just rip it out and put a new one in. I’m personally fine just leaving and getting a new job if things get wack. Unless I can get to senior leadership level I can’t do much when the culture is already so ingrained. That’s why you need an Elon or someone like that with guts to just come in and fire people.
- mrphoebs 4y ago
  There is certainly scope for a more intelligent and nuanced discussion to be had here than what reads like a junior engineer's half baked rant on the uselessness of engineering managers. Yes there are awful engineering managers just as there are great ones who are force multipliers for their teams. I've known great engineering managers who were great engineers who naturally became an interface for their teams and some who weren't very technical but were great people managers that got great outcomes for individuals and teams. Org design, culture, complexity, needs determine the necessity of an engineering management function. Do orgs and engineering management functions become dysfunctional? Yes. Can this be resolved by just eliminating the management layer? Hardly.
  - moomoo11 4y ago
    Sure, and I'm a staff+ level engineer who has worked at darling unicorns and big media/tech and made a ton of money. I earned that equity payoff. Now I'm working on my own projects and paying for myself to live in SF, so you're free to have whatever opinion. I know what I'm saying, and out of a dozen plus managers I've worked with over just the last 6 years (re-orgs because they have way too much time on their hands) only 2 have been excellent, and 1 somewhat all right. It isn't my fault that even with terrible engineering managers, I managed to never get below the max rating on any performance review. I know what I know, and I'm good at it. The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive. The worst part of this is the more and more levels of management that get put in. People start coming in who have spotty technical understandings, but talk a whole lot that sways people who only need a high level understanding of what is going on. Imo this is due to people who cannot operate efficiently nor in a lean manner. Everything needs to be overly complex for them, to prove they’re something. Again, I'm giving my experience as a competent engineer and I at one point managed 4 people for a few months before I stopped because I was leaving meetings that were a waste of fucking time with other managers. Literally people stroking each other's ego in a passive aggressive way instead of talking business and ensuring their teams succeed. Not to mention the ways they talked about their reports and literal games on how promotions work. I am super passionate about removing the unnecessary complexity bloat and drama that bad management leads to.
- alanfranz 4y ago
  It seems you’re talking about bad managers. My managers are very good. They act somewhat in-between a coach and a secretary, and never muddle in technical details that they don’t understand. They try doing small-chunked tasks that don’t fit a developer’s schedule.
- yibg 4y ago
  Aren't you just replacing the word manager with the word "team lead"? What in your view is the difference between the responsibilities of a manager vs a team lead if the team still reports to the team lead?
  - moomoo11 4y ago
    In my mind the team lead wouldn’t have reports. The whole team is responsible for carrying out the business objective, and the team lead is the best IC on the team to guide the other ICs to the end. the director level (it could be multiple people) receive leadership objectives for the quarter or year. Their only job is to take their resources/battalion and divvy the work up into small atomic fire teams. Obviously there are many players from UX product QA devops etc. There is a directive, and everyone needs to be on board to WORK. The team lead is in charge of ensuring the eng work gets done. There might be product or other folks, they’re specialists on the team like a marksman or medic or automatic weapons specialist. This is a tech company we are taking about, the output is a product backed by technology. They need to be strong technically and take their team to the finish line. They don’t need to waste their time with 1:1 where they can’t remember the last session or making up stupid stories and wasting time in meetings. Just do the work. The team lead is the best engineer on the team and the rest of the team just does their job. Maybe incentive structure could be set up where the entire team is rewarded for completion. If people don’t feel it’s fair they can leave, but when things work out the reward would be 100s of thousands of dollars for everyone. If you just need bodies to throw at some low hanging problem outsource that work. Otherwise focus on execution. Like imagine trying to take a building with many doors and floors from an enemy. You want each team nimble enough to move independently of each other while working together via the team leads talking to each other. They lead their teams towards their objective of taking the building. Engineering managers would just be dead weight. They’re not in the building and don’t have line of sight. They are far away (rarely have I seen eng managers code or get their hands dirty) and because of this cause confusion and disarray. They get information that gets lost in translation or some hero noob on the team wants to try their own plan and the manager gives them time to try it out. Good luck taking that building. Just keep the work lean, and keep focused on work. Like so many managers allow their teams to waste time and effort with “finding the right process” or bullshit meetings. Just focus on taking that building.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  I am so tired of hearing devs complain about managers and anyone else who doesn't think that everything revolves around the dev. There are a lot of poor, mediocre or bad devs as well as bad managers. The solution to these problems is not to arbitrarily get rid of most of the practitioners. There is frequently a lack of humility and self awareness in dev culture I'm afraid to say. It was one of the things that made me leave the profession.
  - eska 4y ago
    IMO the hostility comes from the fact that a bad manager makes all devs in his team, even the good ones, underperform as a whole. A bad dev is simply.. one bad dev. One bad dev causes less damage than an incompetent manager. It’s also immediately clear when a dev is bad, but managers will weasel out of their responsibility and blame the devs, despite constantly changing requirements, asking for the impossible, not providing the necessary information and resources, etc. a dev doesn’t sabotage a manager’s work like that. Most managers also aren’t professionally qualified for their position. An education in accounting doesn’t make somebody a manager, just like computer science doesn’t make a dev a team leader.
- bitL 4y ago
  They will never understand you as they think managers are the most important part with devs being just human CPUs for their "wonderful ideas".
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > Get rid of eng managers. > Put in a team lead and a few people. What's the difference between a team lead and a manager?
  - eska 4y ago
    Domain knowledge, e.g. somebody who doesn’t understand programming is actively harmful as a programming lead. At that point they should just cut their pay and call themselves what they are: a secretary
posharma 4y ago
How credible is this news source?

Engineering Managers will also begin to code again [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/1628737303479738368 https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/162873730347973836...

moomoo11 4y ago

This whole management heavy culture needs to F off. 9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usually awful at understanding business needs too. Get rid of eng managers. Put in a team lead and a few people. If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over. You don’t need battalions when the leaders aren’t even soldiers. Just have fire teams where everyone is a soldier that reports to their team lead. These teams report to a director who is the battalion commander. Managers should be rare. And they should be actually good at their job. People don’t quit jobs they quit shitty terrible managers.

zactato 4y ago
Who hurt you?
- lytedev 4y ago
  I'm gonna go out on a limb here: an engineering manager.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  I’ve quit jobs before over awful managers. Nobody hurt me because for me at least, I’ve gotten every job I’ve applied to. For example I got bored of my last company and my manager, applied to four companies and got each job, then just picked the one that paid most. I don’t like dealing with incompetent people. It’s that simple. I’m not a bottom feeder lmao.
  - yibg 4y ago
    Congrats, everyone wants you and throw boat loads of money to get you. You're also the only competent person in a sea of incompetence. What would the world do without you?
    - chillwaves 4y ago
      These replies are lazy. HN becoming reddit so you guys can feel smart or something.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
seanhunter 4y ago
> If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over This is one of the most irrational things I’ve ever read on here so congratulations I guess. The people in the team are not the ones to blame if the teams are too big, you are (if you are in charge). Therefore if you actually want to fix the problem, the person you need to fire before starting over is yourself.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  I’m ESL and the context of my comment is management and my opinion on what company should do. Get rid of engineering managers. And yes. Fire all the management who caused shit to get that bad. I 100% stand by that.
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    Fire the management who caused shit to go bad != fire everyone. If you actually are sincere about fixing things, actually finding the causes is very important.
    - moomoo11 4y ago
      How do you fix a broken pipe that’s already had a dozen patches on it? Keep adding more and it stays broken? At some point you have to just rip it out and put a new one in. I’m personally fine just leaving and getting a new job if things get wack. Unless I can get to senior leadership level I can’t do much when the culture is already so ingrained. That’s why you need an Elon or someone like that with guts to just come in and fire people.
mrphoebs 4y ago
There is certainly scope for a more intelligent and nuanced discussion to be had here than what reads like a junior engineer's half baked rant on the uselessness of engineering managers. Yes there are awful engineering managers just as there are great ones who are force multipliers for their teams. I've known great engineering managers who were great engineers who naturally became an interface for their teams and some who weren't very technical but were great people managers that got great outcomes for individuals and teams. Org design, culture, complexity, needs determine the necessity of an engineering management function. Do orgs and engineering management functions become dysfunctional? Yes. Can this be resolved by just eliminating the management layer? Hardly.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  Sure, and I'm a staff+ level engineer who has worked at darling unicorns and big media/tech and made a ton of money. I earned that equity payoff. Now I'm working on my own projects and paying for myself to live in SF, so you're free to have whatever opinion. I know what I'm saying, and out of a dozen plus managers I've worked with over just the last 6 years (re-orgs because they have way too much time on their hands) only 2 have been excellent, and 1 somewhat all right. It isn't my fault that even with terrible engineering managers, I managed to never get below the max rating on any performance review. I know what I know, and I'm good at it. The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive. The worst part of this is the more and more levels of management that get put in. People start coming in who have spotty technical understandings, but talk a whole lot that sways people who only need a high level understanding of what is going on. Imo this is due to people who cannot operate efficiently nor in a lean manner. Everything needs to be overly complex for them, to prove they’re something. Again, I'm giving my experience as a competent engineer and I at one point managed 4 people for a few months before I stopped because I was leaving meetings that were a waste of fucking time with other managers. Literally people stroking each other's ego in a passive aggressive way instead of talking business and ensuring their teams succeed. Not to mention the ways they talked about their reports and literal games on how promotions work. I am super passionate about removing the unnecessary complexity bloat and drama that bad management leads to.
alanfranz 4y ago
It seems you’re talking about bad managers. My managers are very good. They act somewhat in-between a coach and a secretary, and never muddle in technical details that they don’t understand. They try doing small-chunked tasks that don’t fit a developer’s schedule.
yibg 4y ago
Aren't you just replacing the word manager with the word "team lead"? What in your view is the difference between the responsibilities of a manager vs a team lead if the team still reports to the team lead?
- moomoo11 4y ago
  In my mind the team lead wouldn’t have reports. The whole team is responsible for carrying out the business objective, and the team lead is the best IC on the team to guide the other ICs to the end. the director level (it could be multiple people) receive leadership objectives for the quarter or year. Their only job is to take their resources/battalion and divvy the work up into small atomic fire teams. Obviously there are many players from UX product QA devops etc. There is a directive, and everyone needs to be on board to WORK. The team lead is in charge of ensuring the eng work gets done. There might be product or other folks, they’re specialists on the team like a marksman or medic or automatic weapons specialist. This is a tech company we are taking about, the output is a product backed by technology. They need to be strong technically and take their team to the finish line. They don’t need to waste their time with 1:1 where they can’t remember the last session or making up stupid stories and wasting time in meetings. Just do the work. The team lead is the best engineer on the team and the rest of the team just does their job. Maybe incentive structure could be set up where the entire team is rewarded for completion. If people don’t feel it’s fair they can leave, but when things work out the reward would be 100s of thousands of dollars for everyone. If you just need bodies to throw at some low hanging problem outsource that work. Otherwise focus on execution. Like imagine trying to take a building with many doors and floors from an enemy. You want each team nimble enough to move independently of each other while working together via the team leads talking to each other. They lead their teams towards their objective of taking the building. Engineering managers would just be dead weight. They’re not in the building and don’t have line of sight. They are far away (rarely have I seen eng managers code or get their hands dirty) and because of this cause confusion and disarray. They get information that gets lost in translation or some hero noob on the team wants to try their own plan and the manager gives them time to try it out. Good luck taking that building. Just keep the work lean, and keep focused on work. Like so many managers allow their teams to waste time and effort with “finding the right process” or bullshit meetings. Just focus on taking that building.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
I am so tired of hearing devs complain about managers and anyone else who doesn't think that everything revolves around the dev. There are a lot of poor, mediocre or bad devs as well as bad managers. The solution to these problems is not to arbitrarily get rid of most of the practitioners. There is frequently a lack of humility and self awareness in dev culture I'm afraid to say. It was one of the things that made me leave the profession.
- eska 4y ago
  IMO the hostility comes from the fact that a bad manager makes all devs in his team, even the good ones, underperform as a whole. A bad dev is simply.. one bad dev. One bad dev causes less damage than an incompetent manager. It’s also immediately clear when a dev is bad, but managers will weasel out of their responsibility and blame the devs, despite constantly changing requirements, asking for the impossible, not providing the necessary information and resources, etc. a dev doesn’t sabotage a manager’s work like that. Most managers also aren’t professionally qualified for their position. An education in accounting doesn’t make somebody a manager, just like computer science doesn’t make a dev a team leader.
bitL 4y ago
They will never understand you as they think managers are the most important part with devs being just human CPUs for their "wonderful ideas".
yodsanklai 4y ago
> Get rid of eng managers. > Put in a team lead and a few people. What's the difference between a team lead and a manager?
- eska 4y ago
  Domain knowledge, e.g. somebody who doesn’t understand programming is actively harmful as a programming lead. At that point they should just cut their pay and call themselves what they are: a secretary

posharma 4y ago

How credible is this news source?