Management problem is an engineering problem. Management is how you engineer your organization. I don't know how big the organization the author is working at,

Management problem is an engineering problem. Management is how you engineer your organization. I don't know how big the organization the author is working at, too big in my opinion, too big in complexity. What I observe, could be wrong - the team "writing" the service is different from the team "fixing" the service. It is like letting one guy write code, the other guy compile code, but on a team level. Feedback of quality is lost. - "Then I got lucky and intercepted a few of the zanier ideas". It is common in tech companies nowadays, but I think is really not ideal, one party for ideation, one part for implementation. This is not making full use of engineers in my opinion. Give me a recipe, I cook for you. Engineer can be both chef and a cook, but people seem to be happy being a cook. Feedback between ideas and implementation is lost. - "The surprise came later, when the biannual review cycle ". If it is performance review. It is too sparse. Engineers might already be gone and good luck keeping the service up - "They wanted to give this person some bullshit sub-par rating". Lacking objective measurement. Maybe that's why they run the review biannually. Subjective rating is time consuming. I imagine it having to compile "evidence" from various source, and give "justification". You always want the feedback be quick and whole. Code compilation fast, test run fast, CI/CD fast, HTTP return fast, usage gathering fast, the feedback about whether your piece of code is useful fast, the feedback about team's performance fast. In engineering, we take for granted that things can happen almost in real-time. But in management, somehow feedback (reports, performance) need to be "compile" X times per Y period. In engineering, we somehow have the thinking that abstract only when the code is repeated the 3rd time. Hence we avoid abstracting the wrong thing. In management, we often form an abstraction (team) based on some vague notion on how things are compartmentalize. Oh yeah let's have 2 frontend and 2 backend on the completely new recommendation feature. That's the team formation. Engineering and management have a lot in common