A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers
firstround.com

There are well-defined scenarios where an MBA has some value. Agree with you that managing developers is typically not one of these scenarios, but I don't believe b-schools typically frame MBA programs as a means to teach management of people but rather management of well-known business problems.

A good proportion of managers get promoted due to necessity rather than merit (as mentioned a the beginning of the OP). This issue is more conspicuous now that employees of fast-growing companies are more open about this issue and have time to blog about it (as growth has become somewhat more efficient).

Would love to see the space of engineering management get "disrupted" by high-quality, community-reviewed, and freely available publications. Might not 'kill MBAs' but will help people decide if they even need an MBA.

When a software company becomes successful, it becomes a magnet for crazies. The crazies are the process-people who use fancy marketing lingo to tell you that you are doing something inadequate and you should be using a different methodology which is more correct for your company.

This takes the conversation away from “ideas” to “sudo-ideas”. The conversation shifts from what made the product amazing and what else we can do about it to a new conversation about how someone should do a certain job and fulfill its role. A new engineer with a good potential to produce software will have to go through a phase of self doubt surviving in this world and asking himself/herself if he/she is meeting the role and understanding what it means to meet the role. Now you need more people who are smarter than the engineer to tell him/her and hold him/her accountable and enforce certain improvements needed to fulfill this role.

This leads to a burdensome overhead which derails the whole organization from focusing on the core or the simplicity in its culture which enabled the business to succeed in the first place. This overhead and drama around it is what the smart helpless people call politics. Instead of a plan to solve a problem you can see people talking about a plan for a plan. Instead of a simple understanding between people, there will be a process to come up with more process. Someone writes a document about how to write documents because somehow that seems to be more rewarded. You got to be good at being the process abiding employee fulfilling the Role to play in this environment. An expert professional sees this system as something that is designed to keep you at the same level of influence no matter how much value you can produce and sees the leadership very un-inspiring.

There comes a point where if you are a productive engineer, it is more easy to build something and let the market forces decide if your invention is worth any merit. The bar in the market is not too high either. You build an app that lets you share your dick pictures, you get a billion dollar investment. Though it takes multiple engineer teams to produce useful software, it is possible to build a very useful feature or system that is missing from an ecosystem of a larger product or service. This micro service/product which generates revenue, Improves on the market feedback, succeed and itself might one day become a magnet for crazies. The feedback the market gives you is far more useful and actionable than the feedback you get in a large organization that is designed to to fit you to the role.