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Is engineering management bullshit?

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Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#81

Post by maxbond »

refurb wrote: post #9
fisf wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note how everything you categorize as 'high-impact' is basically politics. "Rather than focus on delivering results (which again is difficult(!), might be wrong, and often not easily identified by leadership), these people spend time making alliances and crafting narratives about outcomes instead of delivering. Title acquisition becomes the goal, seeking to maximize the expected organizational rewards, at the expense…

I mean, a company is made up of a bunch of people, all with different ideas on how thinks should be done and in the end it’s often influence that decides the path forward. Of course organizations have politics. It will always be that way unless you get rid of all the humans.

I think the issue is that it's sort of circular, like, "managers provide value when they convince other managers not to be obstacles". I think there's important stuff managers can do, but creating complex hierarchies that they then have to navigate or circumvent is a neutral contribution at best, from a systemic standpoint rather than an individual one. For this high performer who's earned their promotion, having their manager go to bat for them is incredibly valuable. But if the reason they needed a manager to advocate for them was that other managers were either adversarial or ambivalent, that's just adding back value that was previously removed.

To be clear, I'm addressing this narrow aspect of management, I've had managers who helped me resolve disputes, get access to resources and opportunities I couldn't have gotten on my own, et cetera, and I see the value in that without qualification.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#82

Post by brightball »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #6

This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an…

There’s a lot of roles needed to build a product. As the engineering load grows, the engineers have less time to handle those other duties themselves as much as we might like to.

When that happens, other people have to be involved to take over.

There are real requirements to communicate with other parts of the business, customers, coordinate who is doing what and triage what is needed when.

So generally, I agree with you that the mindset isn’t a great one.

At the same time, there are methodologies that aim to alleviate exactly this problem by ensuring engineers directly control more than they often do.

Scaled Agile (SAFe) is my favorite because of two core tenets.

1. There are 2 backlogs, one managed by product/business and one managed by dev/ops/arch. Going into planning, capacity allocations are given to each (usually 70-30 product dev). Priority among those backlogs is entirely handled by the group managing it.

2. PI Planning where backlog items are presented from each group and dev is responsible for planning out those priorities over the next 8-12 weeks in the manner that they believe is best. Everybody who could potentially answer questions that devs have is present with their schedules cleared to streamline the decision making process. Plans are discussed with management, risks assessed and finally agreed on.

I love this process. It gets everybody on the same page as far as who is doing what, when and why. It reduces friction and lets devs focus for 2-3 months at a time without a directional shift.

Planning from product is focused on the next PI instead of the constant “we have to drop everything and work on X now!” situations that so often happen.

I wish more orgs would adopt it. I hear so often about devs stuck in orgs claiming to do so that aren’t actually doing any of the things that make it great and it’s frustrating.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#83

Post by 0xedd »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #6

This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an…

No post body was provided.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#84

Post by vlovich123 »

rco8786 wrote: post #42
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do. I would posit a guess that most, if not all, engineers on HN have had to live through at least one terrible manager that has soured/tainted the position. Speaking for myself, I've lived through many and it's a miserable experience to be under these people. Nobody is saying that the fu…

That’s silly. Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. These articles are undoubtedly written by people who have never been managers themselves, and frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for. Which is fine - everyone starts that way. But to then assume the job is useless is classic sign of imaturity. > No…

> Most are about average

Surely you meant to communicate something different here and not a mathematical impossibility.

Do you mean most fall within 1 standard deviation of the average? That still means half the managers you encounter would be below the average quality assuming a normal distribution (which it’s clearly not - skills tend to follow the power law).

Most engineers are actually decidedly quite bad at software development itself for what it’s worth. The equivalent of a first level line manager is typically a first level engineer (not always but usually). Good managers get promoted to manage managers / multiple teams which dilutes their qualities (they now have to train other managers to be good). So think about whether you’d put a very junior engineer in charge of a project and what kind of results that might have, especially since if the manager is actually good they’ll be promoted away whereas an IC who’s hood is simply given more responsibility on the project but the role doesn’t change too much.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#85

Post by consp »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #6

This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an…

My pet problem is not with those roles, they are needed, it is with the overpaying of those roles and downplaying of the requirement of actual engineers and thus lowering their standing an payment. An engineering manager should in my view never earn more than the rest of the team and where I live they do earn more by default.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#86

Post by KaiP »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #6

This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an…

RTFA before commenting please

Your comment added nothing because it was responding to a straw man rather than the article itself.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#87

Post by disintegore »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #6

This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an…

It looks like you've read the headline and decided to get angry.
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