7 ms·

"My boss says we don't need any engineering managers"

102 points by tianzhou 2y ago

JoeAltmaier 2y ago
Managers can be friction. If they negotiate with other managers, then you have a game of telephone tag where engineering issues become 'resource' issues and the work gets muddled in the conversation. I worked for a year with no engineering manager, no software director, no VP of Engineering. The most productive year of my group at that job. Brought out two new versions of our OS to support multi-processor configurations and use new memory modes.
- belter 2y ago
  > I worked for a year with no engineering manager, no software director, no VP of Engineering No you did not. You were the engineering manager
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    I'm always surprised when people do not notice this. If you don't have a manager doing the management work for you, YOU are doing the work. At my current job we haven't had a product manager for quite a while, to the point that all engineers have just internalized that we are the product managers, so we frequently show up at meetings to drive product decisions, we talk with partners and everything and every once in a while it dawns on someone _this wasn't supposed to be our job_ but if we don't do it who's gonna do it?
    - bluGill 2y ago
      > this wasn't supposed to be our job I'm not sure if that is bad or not - while it is annoying to attend all those meetings, often you know the problem well enough that you can just build the right thing. You start to feel empowered to add this feature customers want because you know the customer
      - mlinhares 2y ago
        I don't think its bad per se, i do enjoy being closer to customers and all, but there's a lot of managing, calendaring, and meetings where I know someone else could be taking them instead of me (and I could focus on the stuff I do that bring more value to the business).
    - htrp 2y ago
      and you're able to deliver features that customers request, especially if they are low engineering lifts
  - bluGill 2y ago
    If the total team was 5 or less (maybe 10) that is find - there isn't much overhead that a manager is needed for in the first place. It is also likely you won't have the "people" issues that a manager needs to deal with in those couple years. A larger team will have a lot of overhead that a manager can take care of for you. A larger or longer lasting team will have "people" issues that a manager should deal with.
  - ghusto 2y ago
    You're presuming he performed managerial tasks, which presumes further that those tasks are unavoidable. It's difficult to imagine if you've only ever worked in places where this is evidently true, but that is only one way in which a company can work. You can also run a company of _hundreds_ of engineers who are all self-governing. If it can happen at least once (company I worked for), then it's repeatable and therefore a viable alternative.
  - JoeAltmaier 2y ago
    Doublespeak. We did no budget meetings; we did no 'resource allocation' charts or plans. We all worked our butts off, harder than before because nobody needed our status reports so they could concatenate them and pass them up the chain to pretend they were doing something. The fact is, the work of an engineering manager is largely make-work. Something to justify a middle manager's salary.
- evilduck 2y ago
  > The most productive year of my group at that job. Brought out two new versions of our OS to support multi-processor configurations and use new memory modes. But did this significantly impact the business in a positive way? If it was a wild success why did it only last a year? Part of managing software engineers can be to stop them from doing things that merely feel productive.
  - JoeAltmaier 2y ago
    Good questions. The OS releases were the most successful in the company's history. It lasted until we got bought (the price of success) and the old-mill buyer installed drones to crush moral and productivity. They had no idea how an engineering company worked. I quit and moved on.
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  That sounds great, but if your output was to develop new versions of an OS to support multi-processor configurations and memory modes, you were making a product whose customers were engineers like yourself. I am not saying that to take away from the accomplishment, as another said: you were the engineering manager. A manager is often the delivery system for all the messages that engineers aren't interested in: The fickle customer, the imperfect or unattainable vision of the enterprise, fiscal demands.. Often managers are delivering you unpleasant, distracting, or annoying news. But if they are good they are giving you a lot less of that distraction then if the org were flat.
rgavuliak 2y ago
Google tried to remove Engineering Managers and decided they were a net positive (https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...) I am an Engineering Manager/Director and my life is quite hectic and not because of busywork. You work with some very brilliant people, but they often fail in conflict resolution. Even if you don't have EMs, you still have upper management and more often then not they're out of touch, here the EM acts as a translation layer that understands both the business and the tech enough to balance these tensions well to make sure the team works well while delivering value for the company. Sometimes you need to deal with other teams with their own agendas. In essence - if things go well, there's less need for an EM. I had a well running team last year, so much so that my life was quite calm. Then the leadership forced product domain and technology change on us and we lost our tech lead. Even if 90 % of the team stayed the same the dynamics were completely new and I had to help the team navigate an uncertain environment. Things went to normal and suddenly we became responsible for the core of a cross-team project and I am busy pushing against leadership, getting other teams to commit to take the burden off of our core team and other much needed activites. My tech lead couldn't do that while also designing the tech solution so in a way I am helping them do better work.
- wjnc 2y ago
  As part of non-IT management I'm culpable of last-minute changes in business strategy / tactics. Easy to disparage (How can strategy change last-minute? It's like starting with soccer, but ending with rugby.), but market circumstances can change in an instant. A few key customers expecting new and custom specs and possibly an entrant willing to offer those specs, and whoops there goes predictable management based on strategy / tactics / operations. The thing EM adds for me is agility (small a). Our engineers work Agile (quite happy with it), but they are human. They (as a group) have an overarching goal in mind (to reach X now, Y later, to keep Z in check, but replace O around then and then). Management can undermine that medium term feeling of being in control. That leads to losses in confidence and commitment. EM helps bridge that gap. In the end it all comes down to getting the Why across emphatically.
- GianFabien 2y ago
  The greatest value an engineering manager can provide is to run interference with the other managers; to protect their team from outside interruptions, changes and demands. The best engineering managers can push back against changes with specific estimates of how much the changes will increase the budget and delay the deadline. Of course, some changes are inevitable. But core business doesn't change that fast. It is the vanity of other managers that often introduces demands with no underlying benefit to the business.
GianFabien 2y ago
My frame for reference is: https://i.imgur.com/941NX1p.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/941NX1p.jpeg. Ideally startups have a leader. If you have a knowledgeable "boss", then it might work out. Managers are like cockroaches, every time you turn on the lights, there are more of them scurrying around. Yes, we do need project managers, but before you hire them you need a plan and business managers can't come up with sufficiently detailed WBS to drive a project of any significant complexity. Before you have a project plan you need a business case and a marketing plan. As a founder and soon to be CEO you need a rock solid business case. Then a capable technical person comes up with a project plan with sufficient detail (aka WBS) that you can see what needs to be done and a provide a reasonable estimate of time-frames and resources required. Only then do you need a project manager to make it happen. If the project is sufficient large, then groups of technical personnel might need a more experienced person, aka team leader. The bane of so many "projects" is that they have a vague description of a deliverable, a hard deadline and a budget created without any comprehension of what is required to create the deliverables and whether the business plan will even sustain the realistic need for resources.
- dgellow 2y ago
  You can communicate the same without dis-humanizing managers. Middle-managers are as much victims of bad leadership as workers, they aren’t the one calling the shots and often have little freedom to maneuver. Comparing them to cockroaches is really not necessary
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Can't have the cats herd themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE
lvspiff 2y ago
I'm at a company that seems to be struggling with how to dictate a vision but then obtain buy in from the workers. They keep playing this game of throw out an idea, hope the workers will all understand and implement in the same direction, and everyone will have great success. The middle managers (the VPs and Directors) are essentially useless as they are passing forward the leadership 10,000 ft view. The managers are stuck implementing in their area and thus no two teams operate the same way. The workers are then in this area of constant upheaval as nothing seems to get accomplished the way leadership expected. I read these articles as they seem to have come out every year first Google then Zappos then various startups. Leadership communicating to workers never seems to work out well as companies grow. They operate at too high a level and unless there are a solid structure of guidance to go across teams/individuals it makes it difficult to all row in the same direction. It makes sense that a UI team is going to operate at a different cadence to the services team to the data team, but if you don't have managers over each function at least there will be chaos in my experience.
- josephg 2y ago
  I have a really leadership test at every place I work at: Can I, and everyone around me, tell the story of how the random thing they're doing today connects all the way up to the company's big picture goals? When this works well, its obvious to everyone. "Today I'm triaging a bug that comes up for our customers. We want customers to have a delightful experience, keep giving us money and recommend us to their friends." / "I'm writing a technical blog post. I've been asked to blog more because it helps us attract good talent, and good talent will help us make better software." But its heartbreaking how often teams and people fail this test. "Oh, I'm doing this but I don't know why. My boss asked me to do it. But she didn't tell me the reason and I didn't ask." / "Yeah we're all working hard on this product but there's another team doing basically the same thing and in 6 months all our work will probably be scrapped." / "Our scrum meetings are an absolute waste of everyone's time. My boss admitted over drinks that we only do it because it makes our team look good in the meeting with all the big bosses." Sometimes the problem is communication. Sometimes its a lack of initiative on the ground - eg "I learned to stop asking questions like that". Or a lack of mentorship to junior employees. Sometimes its a lack of leadership from the C-suite, or incompetent middle managers or VPs or something. But whenever people can't explain the point of their work, something is going terribly wrong in the company, and I hear a calm voice playing in my head: "Please take a moment to locate the nearest exit. It may be behind you. In the event of an emergency, ..."
jjk166 2y ago
This article hits the nail on the head. Large teams need coordination, and coordination is a job that both takes up significant time and operates in a very different manner from engineering work. Without having a few people specialize to do this work, you are forcing everyone else to compromise their engineering capacity to make up the difference. The real difficulty, which the author only touches on at the end, is optimizing the number of managers. Not only are there diminishing returns to adding excessive managers, more management creates more workload for everyone past a point. But even though the organization would benefit from scaling back the number of managers, there is an obvious individual disincentive to say "it would be better for you all if I was fired." Thus once you get too much management, it tends to stick around[0], and therefore it is critical to avoid excessive management in the first place. The article articulates clearly why you need more than 0 managers, but it should include strategies for determining whether you need an n+1th manager. [0] There is one fix. It's tough to get rid of excess management, but an organization can potentially grow into an appropriate size for the amount of management it has. This may be a challenge for a mature company, but for a startup like the one featured in the article hiring too many managers is just hiring an appropriate number of managers early.
- jghn 2y ago
  There are two separate tasks that need to be filled as a company starts go get beyond a small size. One is the coordination that you mention. The other is the day to day people management: making sure people are happy, understanding their hopes & desires, steering them towards growth, that sort of thing. What I've found over time is the implementation of this is often very inefficient. The coordination aspect is often a blend of the product organization and the engineering leadership, and in both cases I find there's too much authority pushed all the way down into individual scrum teams. There needs to be a cohesive product vision across all of the teams, and some set of people need to make sure they're all working on roughly the same things at roughly the same time. But that's about it. And you don't need a Product Manager, an Engineering Manager, and a Scrum Master for every set of 8-10 developers in order to make that happen. The people management portion is trickier. You *do* want to cap that at a ratio of about 1:8-10. But this role is traditionally associated with authority over things like on what their reports are working. Which exacerbates the point above.
politelemon 2y ago
The article doesn't seem to go into what an engineering manager is or does, but that they're vital. It might be self evident to the author what they do but not true for some of us perhaps. Yes, I could just do a search but imo is also worth mention and listing the key points that the author wants to highlight about them. Otherwise everyone is taking away a different interpretation.
givemeethekeys 2y ago
If the number of IC’s to managers is less than 4, then your company is too top heavy. You will know this because the managers keep creating specs without consulting the IC’s and the amount of useless busy work and fake deadlines go up.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Oh my God, did you just explain grad school
tech4goodgeek 2y ago
Hey, Your boss here. Come meet me at my desk immediately. Sincerely, Boss :D
yareal 2y ago
I'm an engineering manager who was formerly an engineer. I have always held that an engineering manager is not above the team, but within the team with a different role. Like, I do the following things: Prevent other teams from reaching in and randomizing our priorities, work on promotion plans for anyone seeking promotion, manage customer/partner team relationships, ensure everyone has balanced feedback regularly, mediate disputes, collect information to manage upwards so we can still be funded, advise on team process but never mandate it, facilitate accommodations, manage poor performance so the team isn't dragged down, try to consolidate and clear meetings from calendars across the team. If I'm not around, then all those things either don't get done or fall to the engineers themselves. I personally think it's useful to have someone on the team specialize in those activities for the benefit of the team. But I'll admit my bias.
- ghusto 2y ago
  I'm going to rip into your examples not because I want to, but because this is the only comment with concrete examples I can use to show the fallacy of needing managers. Apologies. > Prevent other teams from reaching in and randomizing our priorities, work on promotion plans for anyone seeking promotion, manage customer/partner team relationships, ensure everyone has balanced feedback regularly, mediate disputes, collect information to manage upwards so we can still be funded, advise on team process but never mandate it, facilitate accommodations, manage poor performance so the team isn't dragged down, try to consolidate and clear meetings from calendars across the team. Now I won't pretend that these are not real problems that companies have, but I would argue (from my own experience) that they are not problems that all companies _must_ have. A company I worked at did not have these problems — _without_ a manager sorting them — and we had literally hundreds of engineers. Granted, this was a single company, and I've not seen it happen since, but if it can happen even once, then it proves the point.
  - yareal 2y ago
    It's a function of scale. Hundreds of engineers is very, very small scale. In an environment like that I totally agree that you can delegate these responsibilities to individual engineers and it's probably fine. When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working together, those responsibilities become large enough that centralizing them makes sense. Engineering management is just specialization of a role, based on the need to have a specialist fill that role. Just like a games studio with 5 people doesn't need a dedicated build engineer, but a game studio with 1000 people probably does.
donatj 2y ago
I debate the idea that at a mere 40 person team you would want or justify 3 levels of engineering managers? That seems excessive. I worked on a team half that size with a single manager, our "lead developer" and it was remarkably smooth. I ask what is keeping the VP of engineering so busy that they can't handle that work themselves?
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > I worked on a team half that size with a single manager, our "lead developer" and it was remarkably smooth. In a 20 person team the lead developer also played the role of EM?
  - donatj 2y ago
    Only person above the lead was the owner of the company, who was a total business man with no tech skills whatsoever.
    - andsoitis 2y ago
      I’m going to infer then no other engineers in the company and probably relative low complexity in terms of product and partnerships etc. Limited transferability in all likelihood.
- bluGill 2y ago
  3 levels is excessive for 40 engineers. You need the CIO, and below that 2-4 managers (there is some debate over how many people a manager can handle - 30 is too much, 5 is too little). You need that 3rd layer when the team is so large the CIO cannot manage all the managers reporting to him.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  At the top of the org there is often an inward-managing VP focused on execution reporting up to an outward-facing CTO who focuses on tech direction and relations with external parties. I'm not saying that has to happen. I'm just saying I've seen that more often than not. Maybe it's a side-effect of having tech founders who don't really want to manage.
tomohawk 2y ago
You don't need engineering managers who used to be engineers and are no longer technically relevant, but who think they are still technical and try to make technical decisions. Those are the worst.
smrtinsert 2y ago
For startups yes. Engineering managers at small companies literally spend most of their time in save my ass work, building freedoms and attempting to show value. Any manager with less than 12 people shouldn't be a manager.
alphazard 2y ago
If you are running a startup, you should not go to a recruiter and ask for an engineering manager as an outside hire. You are likely to get someone totally incompetent, and if this is your first manager hire, it's almost guaranteed, given what's out there. You also run the risk of triggering an exodus of talent, since engineers will recognize this as the part where the bozos come in, and now the workplace isn't run by smart people who they can learn from. Instead you should notice the natural hierarchy that forms based on everyone's desire to build things. Some of your engineers are already deferring decisions to other engineers, and you just have to pick up on that as you develop a leveling system. That's where a hierarchy should come from if you insist on it. It sounds like this is already what's going on given that you have clumps of 3-4 engineers around leads. And the author even says "hierarchy is a property of self organizing systems". So clearly this system is self organizing and working. But the author has no skill for designing organizations, and doesn't know what to do if he can't hire managers and make it look like what he's used to. It sounds like a bad culture fit. The CEO needs a VP who isn't stamping out the same organization job after job, and can embrace and extend what is already working at this company.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > Some of your engineers are already deferring decisions to other engineers But do those other engineers want to be managers? I've certainly picked up some of that work from time to time in my career, and yet if my boss told me, "congratulations, you're being promoted to manager!" I'd have to respond with, "congratulations, I quit."
  - alphazard 2y ago
    Maybe they don't, but this is a good test for "qualified to be a decision maker". If other people want someone to help make decisions for them it's because they want the benefit of their prowess. You could either embrace this as the start of the hierarchy everyone is apparently so desperate to create. Or you could ignore this signal in favor of handshakes, smiles, buzzwords, or however else you intend to pick a manager from your outside funnel. Part of this reluctance is an aversion to the busy work that often comes with a manager title. Work that managers create for themselves and other managers to legitimize their roles, but which actually impedes progress, and annoys or alienates talent.
csours 2y ago
How long is a coastline? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dcDuVyzb8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dcDuVyzb8Y https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox Problems are fractal-like. Each section of a problem needs attention and management. Engineers are largely self-managing - we pay attention to the problem in front of us. There is still a need for coordination.
cromulent 2y ago
IME the tech industry attracts rather a lot of net-negative managers who fail their way upwards through lucrative careers. Hiring the net-positive managers is the hard part.
ricardobeat 2y ago
A team of fourty is just starting to touch the limits for self-organization. The tech leads already fill the role of providing alignment and guiding collaboration. The VP will be stretched to run performance cycles but again, leads can do a lot of the legwork. Once this becomes _really_ painful then you create an extra layer, not before. At a minimum, I’d limit it to two or three managers (12-13 reports). Adding EMs for each 3-4 person team is overkill, and a huge morale hit especially if they are outside hires. All I can see is a massive 25% headcount increase that will result in ten people trying to implement [latest-job-I-had] structures and “show impact”. Seems like a recipe for disaster at a startup.
neilv 2y ago
> When you're an engineer, you are responsible for the software you develop, deploy, and maintain. When you’re a manager, you are responsible for your team and the organization as a whole. Maybe, in the article's startup with 40 engineers, if they want to structure it as compartmentalized worker drone resources, who mostly only do what they're tasked to do, and someone else has their eye on the bigger picture and what all the teams need. Depending on the nature of the project, 40 engineers could be a lot, and might have big coordination overhead and risk. Then maybe managers and/or cross-team technical roles can help with that. Or maybe the bulk of it is something easily parallelizable and straightforward, like systems integrations for many customers around a shared core that they don't much change. Or they're building something that they're sure fits a routine pattern, with little cross-team thinking to do (e.g., "simple CRUD, with Web backend, Web frontend, and iOS and Android apps"). If the work is that simple, but still voluminous, you don't need many people who aren't either typing code or determining&selling product.
neilv 2y ago
Why is someone, hired to manage a pretty flat structure of 40 engineers, reaching out to a blogger? And publicly airing conflict with their CEO in a way that could come back to them? The article's topic is of common interest, and the quoted question's little details sound plausible/familiar. But I'm wondering whether the quote was contrived by the article author, to set up the article in a more engaging way?
itsanaccount 2y ago
ctrl+f "power" on this page With nothing coming up, I'm getting my biases confirmed that orange site remains unable to discuss the conditions of our jobs. Until we can discuss power and control instead of just how we build things you're gonna have managers same way a prison has guards.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
atoav 2y ago
My boss says I should disregard physics when solving a problem produced by... physics. Yeah.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Oh lord. It's a newbie anti-pattern because it's rarely possible nor effective to make some people both managers-in-all-but-name and tech leads. Managers make the lives of ICs better by doing tasks ICs hate, accommodating human needs, overseeing performance, and lubricating the organizational culture by unblocking work ICs don't need to be distracted and time wasted figuring out. You don't need more managers than ICs, but you need just enough, perhaps per 6 ICs in some situations to per 20+ for high-performance managers with low-maintenance ICs.
OutOfHere 2y ago
Managers will go to any length to justify their job. As an engineer at a corporation, I would rather have or be a competent team lead engineer or principal engineer who also writes code.
danjl 2y ago
The magic answer, as the author points out at the end, is to stay small. Growth, and its need for communication, begets managers. Stay small enough and you'll never need them.
Marietta040 2y ago
[dead]

102 points by tianzhou 2y ago

Managers can be friction. If they negotiate with other managers, then you have a game of telephone tag where engineering issues become 'resource' issues and the work gets muddled in the conversation. I worked for a year with no engineering manager, no software director, no VP of Engineering. The most productive year of my group at that job. Brought out two new versions of our OS to support multi-processor configurations and use new memory modes.

belter 2y ago
> I worked for a year with no engineering manager, no software director, no VP of Engineering No you did not. You were the engineering manager
- mlinhares 2y ago
  I'm always surprised when people do not notice this. If you don't have a manager doing the management work for you, YOU are doing the work. At my current job we haven't had a product manager for quite a while, to the point that all engineers have just internalized that we are the product managers, so we frequently show up at meetings to drive product decisions, we talk with partners and everything and every once in a while it dawns on someone _this wasn't supposed to be our job_ but if we don't do it who's gonna do it?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > this wasn't supposed to be our job I'm not sure if that is bad or not - while it is annoying to attend all those meetings, often you know the problem well enough that you can just build the right thing. You start to feel empowered to add this feature customers want because you know the customer
    - mlinhares 2y ago
      I don't think its bad per se, i do enjoy being closer to customers and all, but there's a lot of managing, calendaring, and meetings where I know someone else could be taking them instead of me (and I could focus on the stuff I do that bring more value to the business).
  - htrp 2y ago
    and you're able to deliver features that customers request, especially if they are low engineering lifts
- bluGill 2y ago
  If the total team was 5 or less (maybe 10) that is find - there isn't much overhead that a manager is needed for in the first place. It is also likely you won't have the "people" issues that a manager needs to deal with in those couple years. A larger team will have a lot of overhead that a manager can take care of for you. A larger or longer lasting team will have "people" issues that a manager should deal with.
- ghusto 2y ago
  You're presuming he performed managerial tasks, which presumes further that those tasks are unavoidable. It's difficult to imagine if you've only ever worked in places where this is evidently true, but that is only one way in which a company can work. You can also run a company of _hundreds_ of engineers who are all self-governing. If it can happen at least once (company I worked for), then it's repeatable and therefore a viable alternative.
- JoeAltmaier 2y ago
  Doublespeak. We did no budget meetings; we did no 'resource allocation' charts or plans. We all worked our butts off, harder than before because nobody needed our status reports so they could concatenate them and pass them up the chain to pretend they were doing something. The fact is, the work of an engineering manager is largely make-work. Something to justify a middle manager's salary.
evilduck 2y ago
> The most productive year of my group at that job. Brought out two new versions of our OS to support multi-processor configurations and use new memory modes. But did this significantly impact the business in a positive way? If it was a wild success why did it only last a year? Part of managing software engineers can be to stop them from doing things that merely feel productive.
- JoeAltmaier 2y ago
  Good questions. The OS releases were the most successful in the company's history. It lasted until we got bought (the price of success) and the old-mill buyer installed drones to crush moral and productivity. They had no idea how an engineering company worked. I quit and moved on.
georgeecollins 2y ago
That sounds great, but if your output was to develop new versions of an OS to support multi-processor configurations and memory modes, you were making a product whose customers were engineers like yourself. I am not saying that to take away from the accomplishment, as another said: you were the engineering manager. A manager is often the delivery system for all the messages that engineers aren't interested in: The fickle customer, the imperfect or unattainable vision of the enterprise, fiscal demands.. Often managers are delivering you unpleasant, distracting, or annoying news. But if they are good they are giving you a lot less of that distraction then if the org were flat.

rgavuliak 2y ago

Google tried to remove Engineering Managers and decided they were a net positive (https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...) I am an Engineering Manager/Director and my life is quite hectic and not because of busywork. You work with some very brilliant people, but they often fail in conflict resolution. Even if you don't have EMs, you still have upper management and more often then not they're out of touch, here the EM acts as a translation layer that understands both the business and the tech enough to balance these tensions well to make sure the team works well while delivering value for the company. Sometimes you need to deal with other teams with their own agendas. In essence - if things go well, there's less need for an EM. I had a well running team last year, so much so that my life was quite calm. Then the leadership forced product domain and technology change on us and we lost our tech lead. Even if 90 % of the team stayed the same the dynamics were completely new and I had to help the team navigate an uncertain environment. Things went to normal and suddenly we became responsible for the core of a cross-team project and I am busy pushing against leadership, getting other teams to commit to take the burden off of our core team and other much needed activites. My tech lead couldn't do that while also designing the tech solution so in a way I am helping them do better work.

wjnc 2y ago
As part of non-IT management I'm culpable of last-minute changes in business strategy / tactics. Easy to disparage (How can strategy change last-minute? It's like starting with soccer, but ending with rugby.), but market circumstances can change in an instant. A few key customers expecting new and custom specs and possibly an entrant willing to offer those specs, and whoops there goes predictable management based on strategy / tactics / operations. The thing EM adds for me is agility (small a). Our engineers work Agile (quite happy with it), but they are human. They (as a group) have an overarching goal in mind (to reach X now, Y later, to keep Z in check, but replace O around then and then). Management can undermine that medium term feeling of being in control. That leads to losses in confidence and commitment. EM helps bridge that gap. In the end it all comes down to getting the Why across emphatically.
GianFabien 2y ago
The greatest value an engineering manager can provide is to run interference with the other managers; to protect their team from outside interruptions, changes and demands. The best engineering managers can push back against changes with specific estimates of how much the changes will increase the budget and delay the deadline. Of course, some changes are inevitable. But core business doesn't change that fast. It is the vanity of other managers that often introduces demands with no underlying benefit to the business.

GianFabien 2y ago

My frame for reference is: https://i.imgur.com/941NX1p.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/941NX1p.jpeg. Ideally startups have a leader. If you have a knowledgeable "boss", then it might work out. Managers are like cockroaches, every time you turn on the lights, there are more of them scurrying around. Yes, we do need project managers, but before you hire them you need a plan and business managers can't come up with sufficiently detailed WBS to drive a project of any significant complexity. Before you have a project plan you need a business case and a marketing plan. As a founder and soon to be CEO you need a rock solid business case. Then a capable technical person comes up with a project plan with sufficient detail (aka WBS) that you can see what needs to be done and a provide a reasonable estimate of time-frames and resources required. Only then do you need a project manager to make it happen. If the project is sufficient large, then groups of technical personnel might need a more experienced person, aka team leader. The bane of so many "projects" is that they have a vague description of a deliverable, a hard deadline and a budget created without any comprehension of what is required to create the deliverables and whether the business plan will even sustain the realistic need for resources.

dgellow 2y ago
You can communicate the same without dis-humanizing managers. Middle-managers are as much victims of bad leadership as workers, they aren’t the one calling the shots and often have little freedom to maneuver. Comparing them to cockroaches is really not necessary

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Can't have the cats herd themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE

lvspiff 2y ago

I'm at a company that seems to be struggling with how to dictate a vision but then obtain buy in from the workers. They keep playing this game of throw out an idea, hope the workers will all understand and implement in the same direction, and everyone will have great success. The middle managers (the VPs and Directors) are essentially useless as they are passing forward the leadership 10,000 ft view. The managers are stuck implementing in their area and thus no two teams operate the same way. The workers are then in this area of constant upheaval as nothing seems to get accomplished the way leadership expected. I read these articles as they seem to have come out every year first Google then Zappos then various startups. Leadership communicating to workers never seems to work out well as companies grow. They operate at too high a level and unless there are a solid structure of guidance to go across teams/individuals it makes it difficult to all row in the same direction. It makes sense that a UI team is going to operate at a different cadence to the services team to the data team, but if you don't have managers over each function at least there will be chaos in my experience.

josephg 2y ago
I have a really leadership test at every place I work at: Can I, and everyone around me, tell the story of how the random thing they're doing today connects all the way up to the company's big picture goals? When this works well, its obvious to everyone. "Today I'm triaging a bug that comes up for our customers. We want customers to have a delightful experience, keep giving us money and recommend us to their friends." / "I'm writing a technical blog post. I've been asked to blog more because it helps us attract good talent, and good talent will help us make better software." But its heartbreaking how often teams and people fail this test. "Oh, I'm doing this but I don't know why. My boss asked me to do it. But she didn't tell me the reason and I didn't ask." / "Yeah we're all working hard on this product but there's another team doing basically the same thing and in 6 months all our work will probably be scrapped." / "Our scrum meetings are an absolute waste of everyone's time. My boss admitted over drinks that we only do it because it makes our team look good in the meeting with all the big bosses." Sometimes the problem is communication. Sometimes its a lack of initiative on the ground - eg "I learned to stop asking questions like that". Or a lack of mentorship to junior employees. Sometimes its a lack of leadership from the C-suite, or incompetent middle managers or VPs or something. But whenever people can't explain the point of their work, something is going terribly wrong in the company, and I hear a calm voice playing in my head: "Please take a moment to locate the nearest exit. It may be behind you. In the event of an emergency, ..."

jjk166 2y ago

This article hits the nail on the head. Large teams need coordination, and coordination is a job that both takes up significant time and operates in a very different manner from engineering work. Without having a few people specialize to do this work, you are forcing everyone else to compromise their engineering capacity to make up the difference. The real difficulty, which the author only touches on at the end, is optimizing the number of managers. Not only are there diminishing returns to adding excessive managers, more management creates more workload for everyone past a point. But even though the organization would benefit from scaling back the number of managers, there is an obvious individual disincentive to say "it would be better for you all if I was fired." Thus once you get too much management, it tends to stick around[0], and therefore it is critical to avoid excessive management in the first place. The article articulates clearly why you need more than 0 managers, but it should include strategies for determining whether you need an n+1th manager. [0] There is one fix. It's tough to get rid of excess management, but an organization can potentially grow into an appropriate size for the amount of management it has. This may be a challenge for a mature company, but for a startup like the one featured in the article hiring too many managers is just hiring an appropriate number of managers early.

jghn 2y ago
There are two separate tasks that need to be filled as a company starts go get beyond a small size. One is the coordination that you mention. The other is the day to day people management: making sure people are happy, understanding their hopes & desires, steering them towards growth, that sort of thing. What I've found over time is the implementation of this is often very inefficient. The coordination aspect is often a blend of the product organization and the engineering leadership, and in both cases I find there's too much authority pushed all the way down into individual scrum teams. There needs to be a cohesive product vision across all of the teams, and some set of people need to make sure they're all working on roughly the same things at roughly the same time. But that's about it. And you don't need a Product Manager, an Engineering Manager, and a Scrum Master for every set of 8-10 developers in order to make that happen. The people management portion is trickier. You *do* want to cap that at a ratio of about 1:8-10. But this role is traditionally associated with authority over things like on what their reports are working. Which exacerbates the point above.

politelemon 2y ago

The article doesn't seem to go into what an engineering manager is or does, but that they're vital. It might be self evident to the author what they do but not true for some of us perhaps. Yes, I could just do a search but imo is also worth mention and listing the key points that the author wants to highlight about them. Otherwise everyone is taking away a different interpretation.

givemeethekeys 2y ago

If the number of IC’s to managers is less than 4, then your company is too top heavy. You will know this because the managers keep creating specs without consulting the IC’s and the amount of useless busy work and fake deadlines go up.

selimthegrim 2y ago
Oh my God, did you just explain grad school

tech4goodgeek 2y ago

Hey, Your boss here. Come meet me at my desk immediately. Sincerely, Boss :D

yareal 2y ago

I'm an engineering manager who was formerly an engineer. I have always held that an engineering manager is not above the team, but within the team with a different role. Like, I do the following things: Prevent other teams from reaching in and randomizing our priorities, work on promotion plans for anyone seeking promotion, manage customer/partner team relationships, ensure everyone has balanced feedback regularly, mediate disputes, collect information to manage upwards so we can still be funded, advise on team process but never mandate it, facilitate accommodations, manage poor performance so the team isn't dragged down, try to consolidate and clear meetings from calendars across the team. If I'm not around, then all those things either don't get done or fall to the engineers themselves. I personally think it's useful to have someone on the team specialize in those activities for the benefit of the team. But I'll admit my bias.

ghusto 2y ago
I'm going to rip into your examples not because I want to, but because this is the only comment with concrete examples I can use to show the fallacy of needing managers. Apologies. > Prevent other teams from reaching in and randomizing our priorities, work on promotion plans for anyone seeking promotion, manage customer/partner team relationships, ensure everyone has balanced feedback regularly, mediate disputes, collect information to manage upwards so we can still be funded, advise on team process but never mandate it, facilitate accommodations, manage poor performance so the team isn't dragged down, try to consolidate and clear meetings from calendars across the team. Now I won't pretend that these are not real problems that companies have, but I would argue (from my own experience) that they are not problems that all companies _must_ have. A company I worked at did not have these problems — _without_ a manager sorting them — and we had literally hundreds of engineers. Granted, this was a single company, and I've not seen it happen since, but if it can happen even once, then it proves the point.
- yareal 2y ago
  It's a function of scale. Hundreds of engineers is very, very small scale. In an environment like that I totally agree that you can delegate these responsibilities to individual engineers and it's probably fine. When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working together, those responsibilities become large enough that centralizing them makes sense. Engineering management is just specialization of a role, based on the need to have a specialist fill that role. Just like a games studio with 5 people doesn't need a dedicated build engineer, but a game studio with 1000 people probably does.

donatj 2y ago

I debate the idea that at a mere 40 person team you would want or justify 3 levels of engineering managers? That seems excessive. I worked on a team half that size with a single manager, our "lead developer" and it was remarkably smooth. I ask what is keeping the VP of engineering so busy that they can't handle that work themselves?

andsoitis 2y ago
> I worked on a team half that size with a single manager, our "lead developer" and it was remarkably smooth. In a 20 person team the lead developer also played the role of EM?
- donatj 2y ago
  Only person above the lead was the owner of the company, who was a total business man with no tech skills whatsoever.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    I’m going to infer then no other engineers in the company and probably relative low complexity in terms of product and partnerships etc. Limited transferability in all likelihood.
bluGill 2y ago
3 levels is excessive for 40 engineers. You need the CIO, and below that 2-4 managers (there is some debate over how many people a manager can handle - 30 is too much, 5 is too little). You need that 3rd layer when the team is so large the CIO cannot manage all the managers reporting to him.
drewcoo 2y ago
At the top of the org there is often an inward-managing VP focused on execution reporting up to an outward-facing CTO who focuses on tech direction and relations with external parties. I'm not saying that has to happen. I'm just saying I've seen that more often than not. Maybe it's a side-effect of having tech founders who don't really want to manage.

tomohawk 2y ago

You don't need engineering managers who used to be engineers and are no longer technically relevant, but who think they are still technical and try to make technical decisions. Those are the worst.

smrtinsert 2y ago

For startups yes. Engineering managers at small companies literally spend most of their time in save my ass work, building freedoms and attempting to show value. Any manager with less than 12 people shouldn't be a manager.

alphazard 2y ago

If you are running a startup, you should not go to a recruiter and ask for an engineering manager as an outside hire. You are likely to get someone totally incompetent, and if this is your first manager hire, it's almost guaranteed, given what's out there. You also run the risk of triggering an exodus of talent, since engineers will recognize this as the part where the bozos come in, and now the workplace isn't run by smart people who they can learn from. Instead you should notice the natural hierarchy that forms based on everyone's desire to build things. Some of your engineers are already deferring decisions to other engineers, and you just have to pick up on that as you develop a leveling system. That's where a hierarchy should come from if you insist on it. It sounds like this is already what's going on given that you have clumps of 3-4 engineers around leads. And the author even says "hierarchy is a property of self organizing systems". So clearly this system is self organizing and working. But the author has no skill for designing organizations, and doesn't know what to do if he can't hire managers and make it look like what he's used to. It sounds like a bad culture fit. The CEO needs a VP who isn't stamping out the same organization job after job, and can embrace and extend what is already working at this company.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
> Some of your engineers are already deferring decisions to other engineers But do those other engineers want to be managers? I've certainly picked up some of that work from time to time in my career, and yet if my boss told me, "congratulations, you're being promoted to manager!" I'd have to respond with, "congratulations, I quit."
- alphazard 2y ago
  Maybe they don't, but this is a good test for "qualified to be a decision maker". If other people want someone to help make decisions for them it's because they want the benefit of their prowess. You could either embrace this as the start of the hierarchy everyone is apparently so desperate to create. Or you could ignore this signal in favor of handshakes, smiles, buzzwords, or however else you intend to pick a manager from your outside funnel. Part of this reluctance is an aversion to the busy work that often comes with a manager title. Work that managers create for themselves and other managers to legitimize their roles, but which actually impedes progress, and annoys or alienates talent.

csours 2y ago

How long is a coastline? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dcDuVyzb8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dcDuVyzb8Y https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox Problems are fractal-like. Each section of a problem needs attention and management. Engineers are largely self-managing - we pay attention to the problem in front of us. There is still a need for coordination.

cromulent 2y ago

IME the tech industry attracts rather a lot of net-negative managers who fail their way upwards through lucrative careers. Hiring the net-positive managers is the hard part.

ricardobeat 2y ago

A team of fourty is just starting to touch the limits for self-organization. The tech leads already fill the role of providing alignment and guiding collaboration. The VP will be stretched to run performance cycles but again, leads can do a lot of the legwork. Once this becomes _really_ painful then you create an extra layer, not before. At a minimum, I’d limit it to two or three managers (12-13 reports). Adding EMs for each 3-4 person team is overkill, and a huge morale hit especially if they are outside hires. All I can see is a massive 25% headcount increase that will result in ten people trying to implement [latest-job-I-had] structures and “show impact”. Seems like a recipe for disaster at a startup.

neilv 2y ago

> When you're an engineer, you are responsible for the software you develop, deploy, and maintain. When you’re a manager, you are responsible for your team and the organization as a whole. Maybe, in the article's startup with 40 engineers, if they want to structure it as compartmentalized worker drone resources, who mostly only do what they're tasked to do, and someone else has their eye on the bigger picture and what all the teams need. Depending on the nature of the project, 40 engineers could be a lot, and might have big coordination overhead and risk. Then maybe managers and/or cross-team technical roles can help with that. Or maybe the bulk of it is something easily parallelizable and straightforward, like systems integrations for many customers around a shared core that they don't much change. Or they're building something that they're sure fits a routine pattern, with little cross-team thinking to do (e.g., "simple CRUD, with Web backend, Web frontend, and iOS and Android apps"). If the work is that simple, but still voluminous, you don't need many people who aren't either typing code or determining&selling product.

neilv 2y ago

Why is someone, hired to manage a pretty flat structure of 40 engineers, reaching out to a blogger? And publicly airing conflict with their CEO in a way that could come back to them? The article's topic is of common interest, and the quoted question's little details sound plausible/familiar. But I'm wondering whether the quote was contrived by the article author, to set up the article in a more engaging way?

itsanaccount 2y ago

ctrl+f "power" on this page With nothing coming up, I'm getting my biases confirmed that orange site remains unable to discuss the conditions of our jobs. Until we can discuss power and control instead of just how we build things you're gonna have managers same way a prison has guards.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

atoav 2y ago

My boss says I should disregard physics when solving a problem produced by... physics. Yeah.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Oh lord. It's a newbie anti-pattern because it's rarely possible nor effective to make some people both managers-in-all-but-name and tech leads. Managers make the lives of ICs better by doing tasks ICs hate, accommodating human needs, overseeing performance, and lubricating the organizational culture by unblocking work ICs don't need to be distracted and time wasted figuring out. You don't need more managers than ICs, but you need just enough, perhaps per 6 ICs in some situations to per 20+ for high-performance managers with low-maintenance ICs.

OutOfHere 2y ago

Managers will go to any length to justify their job. As an engineer at a corporation, I would rather have or be a competent team lead engineer or principal engineer who also writes code.

danjl 2y ago

The magic answer, as the author points out at the end, is to stay small. Growth, and its need for communication, begets managers. Stay small enough and you'll never need them.

Marietta040 2y ago

[dead]