8 ms·

"Good engineering management" is a fad

218 points by jkbyc 10mo ago

elliotto 10mo ago
This is a good article that is critical of narratives around behaviour within organisations. I particularly enjoyed his criticism of the 'morality tale'. The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in organisations more generally, working above these strange social structures largely unique to silicon valley. It wasn't the purpose of the article, but I wish he was a bit more critical of these structures in general.
koliber 10mo ago
One of the most important things about great performers in any discipline is to be adaptive. This also applies to engineering managers. I think the article is correct that it identifies that fads shifted. Great people were able to both adapt to new expectations while all the while adapting their approach to individual situations and people. If you are a one-trick pony sometimes your trick is in line with fads and expectations and you will do well. Sometimes it’s not in line and you will struggle. If you are adaptive you will do well in a changing landscape.
- glouwbug 10mo ago
  Sometimes the real deliverable is a happy team
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    Only to the extent that a happy team delivers something of value. Teams can be happy doing things that will drive the company bankrupt. there is only so much unhappiness they can stand
    - khaled_ismaeel 10mo ago
      If value can only be delivered by making a group of people miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.
      - latency-guy2 10mo ago
        Why misrepresent what someone else said to make your point?
      - mjr00 10mo ago
        Even outside the context of capitalism, society only functions when people perform unpleasant tasks which provide value. Nobody has fun collecting garbage, but it has to be done. Nobody finds happiness in digging graves, but it has to be done. Nobody is overjoyed at the prospect of telling a person they have a terminal illness, but it has to be done. So no, I don't really buy the idea that a team which is "forced" to work on boring, but profitable tasks for a business instead of getting to rewrite core infrastructure in Rust as a fun and interesting intellectual exercise is equivalent to slavery.
        BigGreenJorts 10mo ago
        > Nobody has fun collecting garbage, but it has to be done. Nobody finds happiness in digging graves, but it has to be done. Nobody is overjoyed at the prospect of telling a person they have a terminal illness, but it has to be done. but we find ways to make the jobs of people who perform these tasks less horrific. We makes trucks that reduce the physical toll and increase the cleanliness of garbage pickup, we combine the digging of graves with the maintenance and beautification once they have been buried, sometimes you have to tell someone they have a terminal illness, but the majority of the time you are helping someone get their condition into remission. I think the critical balance that management has to achieve between "having a happy team" and "having a productive team" is finding ways to keep morale up so that employees don't lose their minds and quit or reduce performance doing the miserable stuff.
      - ratmeadow 10mo ago
        So I'm guessing most people are downvoting this as a knee jerk reaction to the comparison with slavery, but I think the core point is quite valid. At some point, if people are unhappy working towards some goal, you gotta re-evaluate if the goal is worthy. I consistently meet people in other industries who really enjoy their job, whereas in tech, most of the people I know consider their job to be one of the lowlights of their life. And I don't think it's a stretch to say many, many tech jobs are not serving a worthy goal. So it's disappointing to see people who can't look past "but business value bro", as if we got where we are because capitalism is some holy, inevitable universal law.
    - ozim 10mo ago
      Not fun part is when team delivers good valuable stuff but market isn’t there.
      - sokoloff 10mo ago
        What valuable stuff was delivered if the market isn’t there?
        oasisaimlessly 10mo ago
        Whatever the sales department failed to create a market for.
        ozim 10mo ago
        It is always possible that dev team did all the code right, good product and still marketing failed or sales didn’t execute for plethora of reasons.
        sokoloff 10mo ago
        It may have been “good”, but I don’t see how it was “valuable”. (I also think this is fairly common.)
        ozim 10mo ago
        Like OpenAI is losing money on each user - isn’t it valuable or is it? If they close tomorrow because of lack of new funding would you say whatever they created wasn’t valuable?
        sokoloff 10mo ago
        Are you suggesting/implying that OpenAI lacks product-market fit? I think they found a market for their product, making what they did valuable. That can still lose money for a time, and even maybe run out of money, but what they have is valuable to my mind.
    - jjk166 10mo ago
      If the incentives of the team (team happiness) and the company (delivery of something of value) are misaligned, that's a much higher level failure. Either the engineering manager has been handed the wrong team or assigned the wrong task to accomplish. Setting high level goals for the engineering managers and allocating resources for them to achieve those goals is the entire purpose of senior leadership.
Exoristos 10mo ago
> The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad. Institutional rhetoric at high levels is always meant to manipulate labor markets, financial markets, popular opinion. This is basic worldly-wisdom. The question is how does one (who is not at a high level) survive the recurring institutional changes? There seem to be two approaches to an answer: Do one's professional best regardless of change, or try to anticipate changes and adjust with the wind. For the first, gods may bless you, but it is folly to think your bosses will respect you. For the second -- good luck, you're running with bulls. Either way, the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill.
- WalterBright 10mo ago
  > the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill Businesses exist to make money. If you want a commune instead, join one!
  - Buttons840 10mo ago
    For many workers, working towards the goal of making the company profitable would be an improvement. Many workers primarily work towards helping the boss grow their head count, or helping the middle-manager with their emotional state.
    - RealityVoid 10mo ago
      > helping the middle-manager with their emotional state. Hah, this is hilarious. So very "The Office".
    - Nextgrid 10mo ago
      It's generally a symbiotic relationship though, as the workers grow their own resume while helping their boss grow theirs (and generally the boss is growing his own while helping his boss grow theirs and so on. Sometimes it goes all the way up where even the founder just wants that lifestyle subsidized by investor money and does not care to actually ever build a profitable product). This kind of perverse incentive comes up when the rank and file has no meaningful way to profit off the company's success, and so it instead becomes more profitable (in future profits from the inflated resume, or kickbacks/favors from vendors, etc) to act against the company. Just like in security bug bounties, companies should reward their employees more than an external malicious actor would, otherwise they will choose the rational option.
Aloha 10mo ago
I think my takeaway from this is there is no objective standard for good engineering management - whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the organization.
- cyanydeez 10mo ago
  Right, implementation od policy is equal to policy itself. If an org draws up a policy of maximized productivity with minimal staff, good is preventing turnover.
- bigiain 10mo ago
  > whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the organization Within and outside the organization. A "good" manager during a time of mass recruiting uses a very different skillset to a good manager during times of mass layoffs. I suspect we won't really know what a good manager in the era of AI tools looks like for another 5 years or more.
zkmon 10mo ago
There is no absolute description of good leadership. But there is a relative one. It's about the degree of alignment with goals at the moment, at team level, and org level and being able to convince people about the achieved alignment. Knowing what these goals are, is just as difficult or even harder, than achieving those goals. Most of these goals are not the ones that are written in big font.
ghaff 10mo ago
And more broadly, goals/interests/skills can align really well with company needs and priorities at a time--and then they don't. You may be able to adapt but when the whole reason you were hired basically goes away, maybe it's not a great fit any longer.
fijiaarone 10mo ago
A manager’s job isn’t to guide the company, it’s to make sure his team does the tasks they are assigned. Likewise, a worker’s job isn’t to “think about the big picture” and come up with a strategy for the organization. So who is supposed to do it? Because executives sure aren’t.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
  The executives are supposed to, even if they aren't doing so.
- Muromec 10mo ago
  You would love working in a bank
- sfink 10mo ago
  Disagree. Software development requires a lot of expert knowledge that executives won't and can't possess. If you're not employing that expert knowledge to benefit the company you're a part of, why are you even in the field? Personally, I find a lot of appeal in having the expertise and influence to be more than a small cog, even when working as a generic staff engineer at the leaf level of my organization. I don't think there are many professions where that is possible, or at least nowhere where that degree of influence is near as feasible (apocryphal stories about janitors coming up with the next breakthrough product notwithstanding).
bornpsy 10mo ago
Every skill eventually boils down to empathy, alignment is just being empathic
- criemen 10mo ago
  I've been thinking lately a lot about this. What is it I do when I want to convince someone of something (i.e. "creating alignment" in corporate speak)? I listen to them, am empathic, ask meaningful questions etc. Afterwards, that opens a space for me to make a proposal that is well-received.
- gishh 10mo ago
  I completely agree with you. I also completely disagree with you. I’ve watched people scream at a room until they got their way. It was awful.
- tibbar 10mo ago
  I think you need to pair empathy with its counterpart, "willingness to be disliked." Empathy is great for building relationships but, taken alone, can make you a slave to doing whatever people want. Which stops working as soon as there are conflicting needs.
simonw 10mo ago
Make sure you get as far as the four core management skills and the four growth management skills, which are very clearly explained and make a ton of sense to me.
nevertoolate 10mo ago
I also hear that middle management is being cut from all companies. Some kind of management is necessary though, no? Otherwise people will get misaligned an all that. I'm not sure what is the point of the article. I guess a good manager doesn't need a bullet list to be able to function so why this person is writing a new one?
- davidw 10mo ago
  The article is giving me PTSD.
constantcrying 10mo ago
This is about software and management for software. But software developers have no engineering culture, they have a craftsmanship culture, favoring things like individualism and "taste". The article pretty clearly demonstrates this, as this is not how any actual engineering organization or any actual engineer thinks about management. Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything. Management exists, for the sole reason of creating anything in such a world. What the corporation wants from an engineering manager, is someone who solves that communication problem, what the engineer wants from his manager is someone who figures out what is happening in the rest of the organization.
- sfink 10mo ago
  > Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything. In other engineering disciplines, a lot of work goes into preventing everything from affecting everything. You overbuild a bridge so that you don't have to consider oscillation magnitudes (other than to conservatively figure out the maximum you need to support, and that maximum will be a worst case specifically so you don't need to consider the interaction of everything else.) Any time you're adding a safety margin, you're removing from consideration all of the things that could go wrong but not wrong enough to exceed the margin.
hunterpayne 10mo ago
It isn't good leadership/management that is a fad. What is a fad is what that looks like to the C-suite and how that is measured. There is no substitute for ability no matter how many management courses or frameworks you know. What is constant is the higher-ups ignoring this and going for the latest management philosophy.
madrox 10mo ago
I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs become political animals over time. My suspicion about why this is the case is rooted in the responsibilities engineering shares with product and design at the management level. In an environment where very little unilateral decision making can be made by an EM, it is difficult to know if an outcome is because the EM is doing well or because of the people around them. I could be wrong, but once you look high enough in the org chart to no longer see trios, this problem recedes. The author really got me thinking about the timeless aspects of the role underlying fads. I have certainly noticed shifts in management practice at companies over my career, but I choose to believe the underlying philosophy is timeless, like the relationship between day to day software engineering and computer science. I worry about the future of the EM discipline. Every decade or so, it seems like there is a push to eliminate the function altogether, and no one can agree on the skillset. And yet like junior engineers, this should be the function that grows future leadership. I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it.
- Aeolun 10mo ago
  > I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it. I do. It’s often done by people that become tyrants over their little fiefdom.
  - madrox 10mo ago
    That's usually a consequence of bad incentives. Either leadership is selecting for that kind of behavior in managers or they don't know how to properly unselect for it. If a bunch of crap code gets shipped, it isn't always because the engineers are bad. Often it's because they were given a bad deadline. Same with EMs.
- jaredklewis 10mo ago
  I like your thinking about this problem. What if teams were integrated groups of engineers, designers, and product people, managed by polymaths with at least some skill in all of these areas. In this case, do you think it would be easier to evaluate the team’s (and thus the manager’s) performance and then higher levels of management would care less about processes and management philosophy?
viccis 10mo ago
I read more of the author's blog posts and it's actually insane to me that he not only was involved in one of the worst product deliveries in internet history (Digg v4), but he still justifies it somehow??
- kaashif 10mo ago
  This really taints the article for me. Maybe I should evaluate the article on its own merits or whatever, but to justify the Digg fiasco...
- simonw 10mo ago
  Presumably you're talking about this - https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity" Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content? Because it's a fantastic insider's war story about one of the most infamous product launches in our industry's history. Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if you like but seems like a very interesting piece of insight to me: > Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly. > I’m glad we took the last swing; proud we survived the rough launch. > On the other hand, I’m still shocked that we were so reckless in the launch itself. I remember the meeting where we decided to go ahead with the launch, with Mike vigorously protesting. To the best of my recollection, I remained silent. I hope that I grew from the experience, because even now I’m uncertain how such a talented group put on that display of fuckery. I can't imagine how reading that could make you think they were less rather than more credible as a source of information on engineering management!
  - viccis 10mo ago
    This is like claiming that one of the North Korean nuclear scientists is credible on atomic bombs after theirs immediately fell into the ocean. Presiding over a disaster doesn't give you some magical insight on why you completely failed.
pnathan 10mo ago
The question of leadership is much larger, more general, and more timeless than the last 15 years. I invite those curious about it to look into the American Army. > Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. taken from - -- https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf
- hapless 10mo ago
  The American army, the origin of the term "fragging." (to wit, making sure your commanding officer has a close, and final, encounter with a piece of ordnance, such as a frag grenade) if we are to learn anything from the US military, it is twofold 1. You can absolutely create a self-reproducing tradition of absolute conformity while retaining ample capacity for local decisionmaking, if you have enough money and time. (In the case of the US army, approximately 150 years, and more money than any other organization in the history of man) 2. Segregating the staff into "officers" and "enlisted" is still gonna get a lot of "officers" killed dead, and even more "objectives" un-taken, because it spreads their incentives too far apart.
geoffbp 10mo ago
The job of EM is to be accountable for a team (or teams) which deliver(s) software. A software engineer’s job is to develop software.
Zigurd 10mo ago
If you're talking about the relationship of engineering management with senior management, the most important "core skill," though I wouldn't really call it a skill, is alignment. Thing is, you won't get alignment without being closely aligned with product management, and if product management is weak, acting just as a features accountant, you're screwed no matter how good an engineering manager you are. You have no support to disagree with or shape senior management inputs. Everything else is nice and correct but not determinative the way that alignment will be.
armcat 10mo ago
I think there is this troika of "Leadership", "Management" and "Followship". You don't have to be an engineering manager to be a leader, and just because you are a leader doesn't mean you have any "followers". As someone who's been a team lead, a tech lead, an EM, and a C-level, I feel the goal is to hit that balance between those three. You want to embody a leader by actually being technically great, visionary, empathetic, and leading by example; but you also want to manage people and expectations; and ultimately you want people to follow you - to basically say "I love working for/with this person". Finding this triangulation is essentially what makes you timeless and relevant no matter the fad.
torben-friis 10mo ago
>Then think about our current era, that started in late 2022(...) We’ve flattened Engineering organizations where many roles that previously focused on coordination are now expected to be hands-on keyboard, working deep in the details Is this everyone's experience nowadays? Personally I haven't experienced such a big shift at all. Our C-suite is irrationally pushing AI-everything and eng culture is suffering a bit from not fully figuring out how to integrate new tooling safely, but nothing as fundamental as the mentioned changes are taking place so far.
- an0malous 10mo ago
  Yes I’ve noticed this change acutely, working at a couple Series A YC startups. I’ve been surprised there haven’t been more articles on this topic because it’s been a miserable shift from my perspective, and I agree with the author that the root cause is the end of the ZIRP era. Basically, in addition to the irrational AI-everything initiatives in spite of customers not wanting or using those features, as an engineer I’m being asked to basically run my own business unit doing everything from user interviews to product/design, engineering, QA, support, and reporting. There are no EMs anymore, everyone reports to the founders. I think the author’s post could be boiled down to: in the ZIRP era the engineers had leverage and were treated well, and in the post-ZIRP era the tech companies have the leverage and are squeezing everything they can out of engineers to the point where you’re basically doing the job of a founder within someone else’s startup.
  - the_af 10mo ago
    But is it universal for companies that aren't startups (or FAANG, where I hear they are also pushing for EMs to get their hands dirty or be fired -- or was that just Facebook)? Like the comment you're replying to, I've also have NOT experienced this shift in EM skills. In my experience, they are still about making the team happy and productive, and definitely NOT coding or designing software (though I'll concede most seem technically minded and understand the details well enough to ask relevant questions and push back against bad takes). But coding? Nope. EMs are still about the team, careers, hiring, alignment, etc. C-levels forcing AI on everything, whether it makes sense or not, is definitely a symptom of the times.
alphazard 10mo ago
There are components of management culture which are fads, like the idea that one could be an effective manager, while not understanding what one's reports are doing, through some management-foo learned from books and blogs. The success of that fad is no doubt partially due to the economic climate. People want the tech industry money, but don't have the tech industry skills. Leadership is timeless, humans have always organized themselves in groups with leaders, and we instinctively play the part of leader or follower according to the situation. Being a good leader just means allowing the group to accomplish something that would be less likely without one's guidance. Being a good follower is mostly a selection role, where one exercises judgement in choosing a leader to follow. The mechanism for dealing with bad leaders has also changed relatively little: stop giving them your own resources, and put distance between you and them. In the workplace this is asking to switch to another team. You can dress it up with fake reasons, like you are interested in another project, or you aren't learning enough, whatever. The important thing is that it takes a resource (you) away from a bad leader and gives it to a better one. Iterate this process enough, and the incompetent leaders are outed through their inability to maintain personnel. People don't do this enough, it's an easy way to signal to upper leadership who in management is bad at their job, without a direct accusation.
- robot-wrangler 10mo ago
  Yes. All leadership is supposed to be technical leadership. Outside of engineering-management, technical just means significant actual domain expertise. If you want an organization that can do stuff, you have to know stuff, there's just no substitute and everything else is basically fake. The "visionary", the "idea person", the experts at alignment / people / processes / ceremonies were always kind of mythical but to the extent they were ever real.. that kind of expertise tends to be removed in large orgs anyway because they are viewed as threatening by fakers who are better at maneuvering. The fad is non-technical management, and the result is a general crisis in leadership that you can see everywhere across tech, politics, entertainment, whatever. Top leadership is out of ideas and just looking around for others to copy, or cruising on extraction/exploitation of value-creation that came before. It's a slow-motion disaster that's been picking up speed, which is why consumers, workers, and constituents are all pissed off. Seems like the shareholders will be effected soon, so then maybe it starts to change.
jampa 10mo ago
I've worked as an EM at four different companies, from large enterprises to small startups, and I think "the role of engineering manager" is a myth. Your role varies wildly from one company to another. In every company I've worked at, my job has never been the same: In the end, engineering management basically requires you to counter-balance whichever of the four pillars your team needs most: Product, Process, People, and Programming. - Too few people? You'll work on scope to make the deliverables meet reality. Since there's not much communication overhead, you'll be able to program. - No PM? You now own the product pillar entirely. This takes a lot of your time: You'll need to validate features, prioritize the roadmap, and even talk directly with clients. None of the rest matters if your team is shipping features with no user value. - Too many people in the team/company? Say goodbye to programming. You'll be responsible for careers, making everyone work cohesively, and navigating the org to get the right resources and support for your team. - Reporting close to the CEO? You'll handle the bridge between sales, operations, client communications, and other functions. The common thread is that your focus constantly shifts based on where your team's bottlenecks are. The key is identifying which pillar needs attention and adapting accordingly.
- tyleo 10mo ago
  I feel like a lot of leadership positions are like this. I was a Principal Tech Lead at a 300 personal company and I did everything from PMing large tech teams, to collecting info from top users in spreadsheets, to building demos directly for the CEO, to building a key part of our tech used by over 100 other engineers. I always told people I’d plunge the toilets myself if they were preventing the staff from working. I feel like the closer you get to top leadership the more your job becomes identifying and executing on whatever is highest value that you have the skills for.
  - saghm 10mo ago
    > I always told people I’d plunge the toilets myself if they were preventing the staff from working. This is a lot closer to a literal interpretation of "shit rolls downhill, so a good manager will be a shit umbrella to protect their team" than I thought I'd ever see.
  - 10mo ago
hapless 10mo ago
fads come and go but idiocy is forever this guy didn't write a blog post, he wrote the preface material for a training module to be sold to the least-competent HR execs he can find it is generally a bad sign when you set out to taxonomize all possible productive behaviors. in this case, possibly a worse sign is that this guy has two "clusters" making up eight "foundational skills." for perspective, when Immanuel Kant set out to taxonomize all possible human experiences, he came back with four "clusters" of four "skills" apparently engineering management encompasses the same complexity as half of all possible human experiences, from tabula rasa. good to know, i guess (perhaps obviously, i did not read the essay any further than the introduction of "eight foundational skills" in "two clusters." at that point clearly I am being sold nonsense, and I feel free to stop reading and just poke fun at the author instead.)
enjoyitasus 10mo ago
Brilliant and true. Finally exposing the tech middle management for what it is!

218 points by jkbyc 10mo ago

This is a good article that is critical of narratives around behaviour within organisations. I particularly enjoyed his criticism of the 'morality tale'. The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in organisations more generally, working above these strange social structures largely unique to silicon valley. It wasn't the purpose of the article, but I wish he was a bit more critical of these structures in general.

koliber 10mo ago

One of the most important things about great performers in any discipline is to be adaptive. This also applies to engineering managers. I think the article is correct that it identifies that fads shifted. Great people were able to both adapt to new expectations while all the while adapting their approach to individual situations and people. If you are a one-trick pony sometimes your trick is in line with fads and expectations and you will do well. Sometimes it’s not in line and you will struggle. If you are adaptive you will do well in a changing landscape.

glouwbug 10mo ago
Sometimes the real deliverable is a happy team
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Only to the extent that a happy team delivers something of value. Teams can be happy doing things that will drive the company bankrupt. there is only so much unhappiness they can stand
  - khaled_ismaeel 10mo ago
    If value can only be delivered by making a group of people miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.
    - latency-guy2 10mo ago
      Why misrepresent what someone else said to make your point?
    - mjr00 10mo ago
      Even outside the context of capitalism, society only functions when people perform unpleasant tasks which provide value. Nobody has fun collecting garbage, but it has to be done. Nobody finds happiness in digging graves, but it has to be done. Nobody is overjoyed at the prospect of telling a person they have a terminal illness, but it has to be done. So no, I don't really buy the idea that a team which is "forced" to work on boring, but profitable tasks for a business instead of getting to rewrite core infrastructure in Rust as a fun and interesting intellectual exercise is equivalent to slavery.
      - BigGreenJorts 10mo ago
        > Nobody has fun collecting garbage, but it has to be done. Nobody finds happiness in digging graves, but it has to be done. Nobody is overjoyed at the prospect of telling a person they have a terminal illness, but it has to be done. but we find ways to make the jobs of people who perform these tasks less horrific. We makes trucks that reduce the physical toll and increase the cleanliness of garbage pickup, we combine the digging of graves with the maintenance and beautification once they have been buried, sometimes you have to tell someone they have a terminal illness, but the majority of the time you are helping someone get their condition into remission. I think the critical balance that management has to achieve between "having a happy team" and "having a productive team" is finding ways to keep morale up so that employees don't lose their minds and quit or reduce performance doing the miserable stuff.
    - ratmeadow 10mo ago
      So I'm guessing most people are downvoting this as a knee jerk reaction to the comparison with slavery, but I think the core point is quite valid. At some point, if people are unhappy working towards some goal, you gotta re-evaluate if the goal is worthy. I consistently meet people in other industries who really enjoy their job, whereas in tech, most of the people I know consider their job to be one of the lowlights of their life. And I don't think it's a stretch to say many, many tech jobs are not serving a worthy goal. So it's disappointing to see people who can't look past "but business value bro", as if we got where we are because capitalism is some holy, inevitable universal law.
  - ozim 10mo ago
    Not fun part is when team delivers good valuable stuff but market isn’t there.
    - sokoloff 10mo ago
      What valuable stuff was delivered if the market isn’t there?
      - oasisaimlessly 10mo ago
        Whatever the sales department failed to create a market for.
      - ozim 10mo ago
        It is always possible that dev team did all the code right, good product and still marketing failed or sales didn’t execute for plethora of reasons.
        sokoloff 10mo ago
        It may have been “good”, but I don’t see how it was “valuable”. (I also think this is fairly common.)
        ozim 10mo ago
        Like OpenAI is losing money on each user - isn’t it valuable or is it? If they close tomorrow because of lack of new funding would you say whatever they created wasn’t valuable?
        sokoloff 10mo ago
        Are you suggesting/implying that OpenAI lacks product-market fit? I think they found a market for their product, making what they did valuable. That can still lose money for a time, and even maybe run out of money, but what they have is valuable to my mind.
  - jjk166 10mo ago
    If the incentives of the team (team happiness) and the company (delivery of something of value) are misaligned, that's a much higher level failure. Either the engineering manager has been handed the wrong team or assigned the wrong task to accomplish. Setting high level goals for the engineering managers and allocating resources for them to achieve those goals is the entire purpose of senior leadership.

Exoristos 10mo ago

> The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad. Institutional rhetoric at high levels is always meant to manipulate labor markets, financial markets, popular opinion. This is basic worldly-wisdom. The question is how does one (who is not at a high level) survive the recurring institutional changes? There seem to be two approaches to an answer: Do one's professional best regardless of change, or try to anticipate changes and adjust with the wind. For the first, gods may bless you, but it is folly to think your bosses will respect you. For the second -- good luck, you're running with bulls. Either way, the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill.

WalterBright 10mo ago
> the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill Businesses exist to make money. If you want a commune instead, join one!
- Buttons840 10mo ago
  For many workers, working towards the goal of making the company profitable would be an improvement. Many workers primarily work towards helping the boss grow their head count, or helping the middle-manager with their emotional state.
  - RealityVoid 10mo ago
    > helping the middle-manager with their emotional state. Hah, this is hilarious. So very "The Office".
  - Nextgrid 10mo ago
    It's generally a symbiotic relationship though, as the workers grow their own resume while helping their boss grow theirs (and generally the boss is growing his own while helping his boss grow theirs and so on. Sometimes it goes all the way up where even the founder just wants that lifestyle subsidized by investor money and does not care to actually ever build a profitable product). This kind of perverse incentive comes up when the rank and file has no meaningful way to profit off the company's success, and so it instead becomes more profitable (in future profits from the inflated resume, or kickbacks/favors from vendors, etc) to act against the company. Just like in security bug bounties, companies should reward their employees more than an external malicious actor would, otherwise they will choose the rational option.

Aloha 10mo ago

I think my takeaway from this is there is no objective standard for good engineering management - whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the organization.

cyanydeez 10mo ago
Right, implementation od policy is equal to policy itself. If an org draws up a policy of maximized productivity with minimal staff, good is preventing turnover.
bigiain 10mo ago
> whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the organization Within and outside the organization. A "good" manager during a time of mass recruiting uses a very different skillset to a good manager during times of mass layoffs. I suspect we won't really know what a good manager in the era of AI tools looks like for another 5 years or more.

zkmon 10mo ago

There is no absolute description of good leadership. But there is a relative one. It's about the degree of alignment with goals at the moment, at team level, and org level and being able to convince people about the achieved alignment. Knowing what these goals are, is just as difficult or even harder, than achieving those goals. Most of these goals are not the ones that are written in big font.

ghaff 10mo ago

And more broadly, goals/interests/skills can align really well with company needs and priorities at a time--and then they don't. You may be able to adapt but when the whole reason you were hired basically goes away, maybe it's not a great fit any longer.

fijiaarone 10mo ago

A manager’s job isn’t to guide the company, it’s to make sure his team does the tasks they are assigned. Likewise, a worker’s job isn’t to “think about the big picture” and come up with a strategy for the organization. So who is supposed to do it? Because executives sure aren’t.

AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
The executives are supposed to, even if they aren't doing so.
Muromec 10mo ago
You would love working in a bank
sfink 10mo ago
Disagree. Software development requires a lot of expert knowledge that executives won't and can't possess. If you're not employing that expert knowledge to benefit the company you're a part of, why are you even in the field? Personally, I find a lot of appeal in having the expertise and influence to be more than a small cog, even when working as a generic staff engineer at the leaf level of my organization. I don't think there are many professions where that is possible, or at least nowhere where that degree of influence is near as feasible (apocryphal stories about janitors coming up with the next breakthrough product notwithstanding).

bornpsy 10mo ago

Every skill eventually boils down to empathy, alignment is just being empathic

criemen 10mo ago
I've been thinking lately a lot about this. What is it I do when I want to convince someone of something (i.e. "creating alignment" in corporate speak)? I listen to them, am empathic, ask meaningful questions etc. Afterwards, that opens a space for me to make a proposal that is well-received.
gishh 10mo ago
I completely agree with you. I also completely disagree with you. I’ve watched people scream at a room until they got their way. It was awful.
tibbar 10mo ago
I think you need to pair empathy with its counterpart, "willingness to be disliked." Empathy is great for building relationships but, taken alone, can make you a slave to doing whatever people want. Which stops working as soon as there are conflicting needs.

simonw 10mo ago

Make sure you get as far as the four core management skills and the four growth management skills, which are very clearly explained and make a ton of sense to me.

nevertoolate 10mo ago

I also hear that middle management is being cut from all companies. Some kind of management is necessary though, no? Otherwise people will get misaligned an all that. I'm not sure what is the point of the article. I guess a good manager doesn't need a bullet list to be able to function so why this person is writing a new one?

davidw 10mo ago
The article is giving me PTSD.

constantcrying 10mo ago

This is about software and management for software. But software developers have no engineering culture, they have a craftsmanship culture, favoring things like individualism and "taste". The article pretty clearly demonstrates this, as this is not how any actual engineering organization or any actual engineer thinks about management. Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything. Management exists, for the sole reason of creating anything in such a world. What the corporation wants from an engineering manager, is someone who solves that communication problem, what the engineer wants from his manager is someone who figures out what is happening in the rest of the organization.

sfink 10mo ago
> Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything. In other engineering disciplines, a lot of work goes into preventing everything from affecting everything. You overbuild a bridge so that you don't have to consider oscillation magnitudes (other than to conservatively figure out the maximum you need to support, and that maximum will be a worst case specifically so you don't need to consider the interaction of everything else.) Any time you're adding a safety margin, you're removing from consideration all of the things that could go wrong but not wrong enough to exceed the margin.

hunterpayne 10mo ago

It isn't good leadership/management that is a fad. What is a fad is what that looks like to the C-suite and how that is measured. There is no substitute for ability no matter how many management courses or frameworks you know. What is constant is the higher-ups ignoring this and going for the latest management philosophy.

madrox 10mo ago

I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs become political animals over time. My suspicion about why this is the case is rooted in the responsibilities engineering shares with product and design at the management level. In an environment where very little unilateral decision making can be made by an EM, it is difficult to know if an outcome is because the EM is doing well or because of the people around them. I could be wrong, but once you look high enough in the org chart to no longer see trios, this problem recedes. The author really got me thinking about the timeless aspects of the role underlying fads. I have certainly noticed shifts in management practice at companies over my career, but I choose to believe the underlying philosophy is timeless, like the relationship between day to day software engineering and computer science. I worry about the future of the EM discipline. Every decade or so, it seems like there is a push to eliminate the function altogether, and no one can agree on the skillset. And yet like junior engineers, this should be the function that grows future leadership. I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it.

Aeolun 10mo ago
> I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it. I do. It’s often done by people that become tyrants over their little fiefdom.
- madrox 10mo ago
  That's usually a consequence of bad incentives. Either leadership is selecting for that kind of behavior in managers or they don't know how to properly unselect for it. If a bunch of crap code gets shipped, it isn't always because the engineers are bad. Often it's because they were given a bad deadline. Same with EMs.
jaredklewis 10mo ago
I like your thinking about this problem. What if teams were integrated groups of engineers, designers, and product people, managed by polymaths with at least some skill in all of these areas. In this case, do you think it would be easier to evaluate the team’s (and thus the manager’s) performance and then higher levels of management would care less about processes and management philosophy?

viccis 10mo ago

I read more of the author's blog posts and it's actually insane to me that he not only was involved in one of the worst product deliveries in internet history (Digg v4), but he still justifies it somehow??

kaashif 10mo ago
This really taints the article for me. Maybe I should evaluate the article on its own merits or whatever, but to justify the Digg fiasco...
simonw 10mo ago
Presumably you're talking about this - https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity" Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content? Because it's a fantastic insider's war story about one of the most infamous product launches in our industry's history. Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if you like but seems like a very interesting piece of insight to me: > Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly. > I’m glad we took the last swing; proud we survived the rough launch. > On the other hand, I’m still shocked that we were so reckless in the launch itself. I remember the meeting where we decided to go ahead with the launch, with Mike vigorously protesting. To the best of my recollection, I remained silent. I hope that I grew from the experience, because even now I’m uncertain how such a talented group put on that display of fuckery. I can't imagine how reading that could make you think they were less rather than more credible as a source of information on engineering management!
- viccis 10mo ago
  This is like claiming that one of the North Korean nuclear scientists is credible on atomic bombs after theirs immediately fell into the ocean. Presiding over a disaster doesn't give you some magical insight on why you completely failed.

pnathan 10mo ago

The question of leadership is much larger, more general, and more timeless than the last 15 years. I invite those curious about it to look into the American Army. > Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. taken from - -- https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf

hapless 10mo ago
The American army, the origin of the term "fragging." (to wit, making sure your commanding officer has a close, and final, encounter with a piece of ordnance, such as a frag grenade) if we are to learn anything from the US military, it is twofold 1. You can absolutely create a self-reproducing tradition of absolute conformity while retaining ample capacity for local decisionmaking, if you have enough money and time. (In the case of the US army, approximately 150 years, and more money than any other organization in the history of man) 2. Segregating the staff into "officers" and "enlisted" is still gonna get a lot of "officers" killed dead, and even more "objectives" un-taken, because it spreads their incentives too far apart.

geoffbp 10mo ago

The job of EM is to be accountable for a team (or teams) which deliver(s) software. A software engineer’s job is to develop software.

Zigurd 10mo ago

If you're talking about the relationship of engineering management with senior management, the most important "core skill," though I wouldn't really call it a skill, is alignment. Thing is, you won't get alignment without being closely aligned with product management, and if product management is weak, acting just as a features accountant, you're screwed no matter how good an engineering manager you are. You have no support to disagree with or shape senior management inputs. Everything else is nice and correct but not determinative the way that alignment will be.

armcat 10mo ago

I think there is this troika of "Leadership", "Management" and "Followship". You don't have to be an engineering manager to be a leader, and just because you are a leader doesn't mean you have any "followers". As someone who's been a team lead, a tech lead, an EM, and a C-level, I feel the goal is to hit that balance between those three. You want to embody a leader by actually being technically great, visionary, empathetic, and leading by example; but you also want to manage people and expectations; and ultimately you want people to follow you - to basically say "I love working for/with this person". Finding this triangulation is essentially what makes you timeless and relevant no matter the fad.

torben-friis 10mo ago

>Then think about our current era, that started in late 2022(...) We’ve flattened Engineering organizations where many roles that previously focused on coordination are now expected to be hands-on keyboard, working deep in the details Is this everyone's experience nowadays? Personally I haven't experienced such a big shift at all. Our C-suite is irrationally pushing AI-everything and eng culture is suffering a bit from not fully figuring out how to integrate new tooling safely, but nothing as fundamental as the mentioned changes are taking place so far.

an0malous 10mo ago
Yes I’ve noticed this change acutely, working at a couple Series A YC startups. I’ve been surprised there haven’t been more articles on this topic because it’s been a miserable shift from my perspective, and I agree with the author that the root cause is the end of the ZIRP era. Basically, in addition to the irrational AI-everything initiatives in spite of customers not wanting or using those features, as an engineer I’m being asked to basically run my own business unit doing everything from user interviews to product/design, engineering, QA, support, and reporting. There are no EMs anymore, everyone reports to the founders. I think the author’s post could be boiled down to: in the ZIRP era the engineers had leverage and were treated well, and in the post-ZIRP era the tech companies have the leverage and are squeezing everything they can out of engineers to the point where you’re basically doing the job of a founder within someone else’s startup.
- the_af 10mo ago
  But is it universal for companies that aren't startups (or FAANG, where I hear they are also pushing for EMs to get their hands dirty or be fired -- or was that just Facebook)? Like the comment you're replying to, I've also have NOT experienced this shift in EM skills. In my experience, they are still about making the team happy and productive, and definitely NOT coding or designing software (though I'll concede most seem technically minded and understand the details well enough to ask relevant questions and push back against bad takes). But coding? Nope. EMs are still about the team, careers, hiring, alignment, etc. C-levels forcing AI on everything, whether it makes sense or not, is definitely a symptom of the times.

alphazard 10mo ago

There are components of management culture which are fads, like the idea that one could be an effective manager, while not understanding what one's reports are doing, through some management-foo learned from books and blogs. The success of that fad is no doubt partially due to the economic climate. People want the tech industry money, but don't have the tech industry skills. Leadership is timeless, humans have always organized themselves in groups with leaders, and we instinctively play the part of leader or follower according to the situation. Being a good leader just means allowing the group to accomplish something that would be less likely without one's guidance. Being a good follower is mostly a selection role, where one exercises judgement in choosing a leader to follow. The mechanism for dealing with bad leaders has also changed relatively little: stop giving them your own resources, and put distance between you and them. In the workplace this is asking to switch to another team. You can dress it up with fake reasons, like you are interested in another project, or you aren't learning enough, whatever. The important thing is that it takes a resource (you) away from a bad leader and gives it to a better one. Iterate this process enough, and the incompetent leaders are outed through their inability to maintain personnel. People don't do this enough, it's an easy way to signal to upper leadership who in management is bad at their job, without a direct accusation.

robot-wrangler 10mo ago
Yes. All leadership is supposed to be technical leadership. Outside of engineering-management, technical just means significant actual domain expertise. If you want an organization that can do stuff, you have to know stuff, there's just no substitute and everything else is basically fake. The "visionary", the "idea person", the experts at alignment / people / processes / ceremonies were always kind of mythical but to the extent they were ever real.. that kind of expertise tends to be removed in large orgs anyway because they are viewed as threatening by fakers who are better at maneuvering. The fad is non-technical management, and the result is a general crisis in leadership that you can see everywhere across tech, politics, entertainment, whatever. Top leadership is out of ideas and just looking around for others to copy, or cruising on extraction/exploitation of value-creation that came before. It's a slow-motion disaster that's been picking up speed, which is why consumers, workers, and constituents are all pissed off. Seems like the shareholders will be effected soon, so then maybe it starts to change.

jampa 10mo ago

I've worked as an EM at four different companies, from large enterprises to small startups, and I think "the role of engineering manager" is a myth. Your role varies wildly from one company to another. In every company I've worked at, my job has never been the same: In the end, engineering management basically requires you to counter-balance whichever of the four pillars your team needs most: Product, Process, People, and Programming. - Too few people? You'll work on scope to make the deliverables meet reality. Since there's not much communication overhead, you'll be able to program. - No PM? You now own the product pillar entirely. This takes a lot of your time: You'll need to validate features, prioritize the roadmap, and even talk directly with clients. None of the rest matters if your team is shipping features with no user value. - Too many people in the team/company? Say goodbye to programming. You'll be responsible for careers, making everyone work cohesively, and navigating the org to get the right resources and support for your team. - Reporting close to the CEO? You'll handle the bridge between sales, operations, client communications, and other functions. The common thread is that your focus constantly shifts based on where your team's bottlenecks are. The key is identifying which pillar needs attention and adapting accordingly.

tyleo 10mo ago
I feel like a lot of leadership positions are like this. I was a Principal Tech Lead at a 300 personal company and I did everything from PMing large tech teams, to collecting info from top users in spreadsheets, to building demos directly for the CEO, to building a key part of our tech used by over 100 other engineers. I always told people I’d plunge the toilets myself if they were preventing the staff from working. I feel like the closer you get to top leadership the more your job becomes identifying and executing on whatever is highest value that you have the skills for.
- saghm 10mo ago
  > I always told people I’d plunge the toilets myself if they were preventing the staff from working. This is a lot closer to a literal interpretation of "shit rolls downhill, so a good manager will be a shit umbrella to protect their team" than I thought I'd ever see.
- 10mo ago

hapless 10mo ago

fads come and go but idiocy is forever this guy didn't write a blog post, he wrote the preface material for a training module to be sold to the least-competent HR execs he can find it is generally a bad sign when you set out to taxonomize all possible productive behaviors. in this case, possibly a worse sign is that this guy has two "clusters" making up eight "foundational skills." for perspective, when Immanuel Kant set out to taxonomize all possible human experiences, he came back with four "clusters" of four "skills" apparently engineering management encompasses the same complexity as half of all possible human experiences, from tabula rasa. good to know, i guess (perhaps obviously, i did not read the essay any further than the introduction of "eight foundational skills" in "two clusters." at that point clearly I am being sold nonsense, and I feel free to stop reading and just poke fun at the author instead.)

enjoyitasus 10mo ago

Brilliant and true. Finally exposing the tech middle management for what it is!