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Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

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Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#11

Post by atmartins »

sidlls wrote: post #2

I tend to agree that managers of engineers should have engineering experience. I think my reasons would differ from those of the author and many other engineers: it's much less charitable toward engineers. One of the best reasons to select managers who have been engineers, in my opinion, is because they know how much bullshit engineers engage in with respect to fad chasing, bikeshedding and other negative practices.…

This is a valid point. In my mind, ideally, at least one or two trusted members on the team can help with this since they're even closer to the actual engineering taking place. It's helpful for management to understand the tradeoffs that are discussed, so I agree that some experience is very helpful, but hopefully the team has a few mature members as well.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#12

Post by sheepmullet »

mcphage wrote: post #4

> It’s better to have no management than unqualified management. If you’ve ever been on a project with more than 1 or 2 people without a manager—or where the manager doesn’t do their job—you would know how insane this sounds. It does not work. Once you’re coordinating groups of people you need a manager to keep them working together towards a common goal.

> Once you’re coordinating groups of people you need a manager to keep them working together towards a common goal.

What is a manager?

I've worked on many successful teams (including projects with 100+ devs) without formal managers in the typical hierarchy sense.

You just need a combination of program managers, project managers, product managers, and architects.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#13

Post by saas_co_de »

My experience is the opposite: I find that managers who are not from a software engineering background are generally better.

In my experience managers from a software engineering background are usually lower skilled engineers who tend to overrate their own skill level and make bad technical decisions where a non-engineer manager would defer to the expert opinion of the people they manage.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#14

Post by derrekl »

I often institute a “just” $1 jar. Anytime “why don’t we just” or “it’s just” is uttered you have to put a dollar into the jar. This applies to engineers, managers, myself, everyone. The idea is breaking the habit of trivializing work that isn’t. Something like a dollar jar is fairly effective as a notifier but doesn’t necessarily replace the habit with a better one. Nevertheless the game itself seems to help even if dollars aren’t transferred into the jar.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#15

Post by hliyan »

Sometimes we engineers do a poor job of communicating complexity: we have un-communicated assumptions that we think the listening party shares. Which sometimes lead to this:

"You could prepend the words “it’s just” to anything, it’s not going to change the fact that you sound completely ignorant and will ignore any challenges that your team communicates to you."

I have often found it effective to counter "just-justifications" with the right representation of complexity. E.g.

"Yes, it's just an API change, but it requires 50 new test cases and impacts 120 existing test cases",

OR

"Yes, it's just a library change, but there are 450 sites in our code that use the library and out of those, 50 involve financial calculations"

Almost always, the manager appreciates this because you would have brought to his attention a problem that would otherwise gone under his radar.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#16

Post by b4lancesh33t »

It's just management, after all.

I don't mean to be too flippant, but isn't this whole article an instance of exactly what the author is complaining about? Let's have good managers rather than bad ones. Good managers trust their reports to tell them the constraints of the work and factor that into the team's strategy. Being conversant in the underlying task helps a lot with that, but there are plenty of managers who come from an engineering background who make the same mistakes the author laments.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#17

Post by mcs_ »

In my experience management was either good an bad. I think that culture was the most important thing at the end of the day. Engineering is not everything when productivity is important as well as environment.

In some cases/team there is the need of an extra effort in order to balance resources AND people.

If I could pick a manager from a pool I will probably take someone with experience in people first and docker later...

At the end manager that are open to listen to the team and the customers will probably take the right choice in term of technology.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#18

Post by Arwill »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #10

It depends. I've worked along-side and led multiple managers and have experienced various types of managers. The good ones usually stood out. A good manager is usually the ones that shield their teams from the onslaught of clients' un-managed demands. She is the one that liaises effectively between a looming deadline and the sanity of the team. She is the one making sure the clients are making their timely payments w…

>have empathy and have more of people skill than technical or design skills

The problematic ones i've seen had some people skills, or they were thinking they had. The problem was when they did not understand engineering problems, and were thinking that everything was a people problem/issue. So they either assume that the developers are lazy, or they simply can't accept that the engineer can have some real objective concerns. So its either they don't understand however hard you try to explain or they try to understand it is a people/personal problem, when it is not.

Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

#19

Post by humanrebar »

tyingq wrote: post #9

Sounds like someone that hasn't ever had a good manager. A leader that can provide good air cover is a serious benefit in a large company. That ability has little to do with whether they have engineering experience or not.

There is value in keeping negative attention away. There is also value in attracting attention to technical needs. If you need someone in another part of the org to do something technical to make your life easier (or even unblock the project), it's difficult to get the job done without a technical manager. You can usually get the job done with a non-technical manager who can listen and delegate well to a good technical leader, though. The problem is that a non-technical manager won't necessarily know who is a good technical leader and who is just a loud engineer.
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