The answer is yes all management is bullshit
I guess the managers have found this comment. Once anyone notices when a manager takes vacation, then I'll consider it a vital part of any job
Is engineering management bullshit?
111–120 of 425 posts
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#112Management is ruined by hierarchy.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my least favorite things about being on the technical side of things is this overarching smug sense of superiority that every other role is bullshit and doesn't do anything of real value. Or that other roles are malicious and/or incompetent and if engineers got their way the product would be perfect and free of defects of errors. e.g: "Don't blame the developers for X, we only put it in because of product or s…
Good way to bash that down is to ask 'would you want their role?' It makes them stop and think what does that person really do and they usually do not want to do it at all.
I think that often engineers hold the view that the role in question doesn’t need to exist. And some roles are just welfare for MBAs.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#114[flagged]
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#115My experience with managers is they exist to put pressure on engineers for social reasons. They never do anything useful and within a short time I tend to resent their interference in my work, so I start fucking things up and generally slacking to screw their metrics up. If I could find a company that honestly wanted work done, they would just give me tickets and I'd power through them. But nobody cares about work, it's all this weird social game. I don't understand it.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#116This 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…
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…
'more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do'
This is quite hyperbolical. A person can have a life experience of "mostly bad manager", but that does not mean "most managers are bad" or that "most people have experienced bad management".
I've been 16 years as a professional software engineer. I would not describe anyone to whom I was a direct report as "bad manager". Quite contrary, I've been quite happy with most of them. This does not mean a life without conflict or misunderstanding, of course.
Statistically, bad management is of course a non-neglible problem, but the above makes the situation sound hopelessly pathological.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#117An effective manager cares for their team, their work, and its effect beyond the immediate organization.
I agree with this take, but with a whopping great caveat - the 'team' is far bigger than the manager's direct reports. Once you accept that the team includes people like product leads, QA, and the leadership team then you start to understand why engineering management is hard. You're trying to get the best work out of your dev team of course, but you're also wrangling a whole bunch of things that intentionally make the dev team's life more difficult, whether that's discussions about the broad direction for the team to go in relative to the wider scope of the business, or the minute little nitpicky bugs that QA won't let slide.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#118From a technical perspective perhaps... from a fiscal perspective it is self justified.
Consensus planning is often expensive, error prone, and glacially slow.
Seen some groups end up navel-gazing in ivory towers, as their company collapsed. ;)
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#119This 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…
Quoted post unavailable.
> Your ego knows no bounds to assume the entire world aligns to your own experience.
Yet, you also used just five examples, presumably from your own experience, to tar entire professions.
Yes, there exist incompetent PMs, Architects, Team leads, and so on. There are also competent ones. Just like there are incompetent and competent engineers. No profession has a monopoly on bullshit.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#120In my experience Engineering management is essential. But most EM management sucks. Why?
Because in our industry management has no legal accountability. Nobody dies if a feature is half-assed. If the feature sucks they just create a ticket and assign it to a dev.
And because of that tech management has always been crowded with bullshit artists who promote other bullshit artists like them (which they have to, if not they would get exposed). And the story repeats over and over again.