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Is engineering management bullshit?

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Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#151

Post by adra »

linuxftw wrote: post #123
rco8786 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 'average' manager may indeed be a net-negative, much like the average car crash. > frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for We know what the job is for, but maybe there's no actual value there. Do doctors have managers? Do lawyers have managers? No, they might report to some administrative body, but they mostly work on contract or in teams. The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to low…

Doctors have professional bodies that they can be removed from, same with lawyers, and accountants, and any number of professional associations. But the big differentiator is that largely these professionals do their work solo. They may need to consult with peers from time to time, but their day-to-day bread and butter is their own. Software development is not solo for the vast majority of devs. They need order and the ability to be directed to create a piece of the larger pie.

This is from a 20 year dev who's spent a few of those in management, but enjoys development more.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#152

Post by dasil003 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #33
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…

You are right. Running a business is nuanced and smart people are required for it. Imo, the real problem is that engineering work is disproportionately difficult compared to management and yet, management gets recognition, visibility and power to control engineer lives. This happens in every step. Engineering interviews are insanely harder than management, engineering promos are opaque and need grinding for years as…

As someone who's spent 25 years straddling the IC/EM line in companies of all sizes, I can tell you unequivocally that management—especially engineering management—is not easier.

I think it's fair so say that gross incompetence is easier to recognize in a programmer than a manager, especially to the untrained eye. It's also true that a well-functioning team may be easy to run and the manager shouldn't have to do much except not fuck it up.

But at any kind of scale, all problems are people problems, and there are never ending systematic dysfunctions and organizational problems. Everyone can be making a valid claim to doing their job, yet the output is nowhere near what it could be. These types of problems can be difficult to diagnose and extremely difficult to unsolvable at the high end. One must be technical enough to understand the details, able to zoom out and understand how costs of various paths interact with UX, operations, security and other concerns, and then say the right things in the right venues to nudge people in the right direction while also maintaining the morale and agency of all the ICs who do the actual work.

It is brutally difficult, and the reason most EMs are bad is not out of malice or sociopathic tendencies (though I will say the emotional toll is high for non-sociopaths which is probably one reason they are disproportionately represented in management and executive leadership).

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#153

Post by [deleted] »

vlovich123 wrote: post #84
rco8786 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soft…

[deleted]

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#154

Post by robjan »

switch007 wrote: post #10

My manager joins our stand up and basically just says “had some meetings yesterday, have some more today”. No wonder why we think the job is BS

In the scrum guide, the scrum master is considered to have a management role. Although it's a management role, I don't believe it's a people management role. That's what the Engineering Manager does and ideally they wouldn't be attending the scrum.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#155

Post by tayo42 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #72
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.

I do think that this is fair and it is a reason why bad managers stand out so much in people's minds. I think that making it feasible for a team to fire its own manager would be generally a good thing. But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.

Why? If most managers are useless that means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything yet the world seems to go on. Why have that role then? If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#156

Post by malcolmgreaves »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #13
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…

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…

I’ve had to work with a lot more terrible engineers than terrible manages.

A lot of the time, what makes someone good or terrible in their role is maturity and professionalism.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#157

Post by felizuno »

mrits wrote: post #122
felizuno wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with a lot of technical founders who struggle to accept the inevitable truth that taking the time to specify, coordinate, and resource what they want to do leaves no time to be the one doing any of those things. They eventually solve this problem by hiring other engineers to focus on the implementation step while they keep everything on the straight and narrow. When the company grows and they run out of time t…

Over the first 10 years of a an engineers career they might only be exposed to a few different management roles. It's possible that the manager isn't fulfilling the actual role so what you have left with is just the distraction. Regardless if the manager is helping the team they almost always drain resources to aggregate information that they can synthesize upstream. It's a system that is so fragile it's not hard to…

I think you'r point is that people with 10 or fewer years of experience (which I think is many people in this thread based on the comments) might have a sample bias issue that stems from working around fewer total managers and fewer companies, where those companies also may be worse than average at selecting managers? I would agree that there are probably plenty of people who fit that mold given the state of our industry recently.

As for "draining resources" to do whatever reporting they need to do I don't think I understand what is fragile about it or why it would be anything other than necessary. It's like log aggregation/introspection, you do it because you want to see what's going on at a lower level without dealing with the minutia of every point of data.

To this end as engineers we design code that fills management roles all the time in our systems, and we understand perfectly why their role is needed but sometimes fail to realize that human systems are analogous. Nobody is arguing why a load balancer can be an important part of a system, or the values provided by ORMs, but here we are arguing about what managers do in a complex human system.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#158

Post by ryandrake »

sulam wrote: post #105
__alexs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a manager and a manager of managers and I think we really do not have good data on whether not "management" as a profession in software engineering really adds value. We're bad at quantifying the value of engineers, and we're worse at quantifying the value of managers. There are definitely a wide range of non-engineering skills required to produce good software but that doesn't automatically justify the e…

I can justify it quite easily. Take it away and see what happens.

I've worked in a place without eng managers, product managers, scrum masters, various MBA people, you know... all those employees that a certain segment of HN thinks are useless. It was just Sales and Software Engineering, and the CEO, to whom everyone reported. It was the worst job I've ever had.

Developers just developing, without interference from evil managers and clueless PMs! Amazing! The ideal work environment for the genius bootstrappy engineer! Sounds like heaven, right? It was not. It was total chaos.

1. Nobody knew what they should be doing and what were priorities. Someone from sales would run downstairs and say "I just sold Foo to a giant customer! You need to build Foo now!!" and everyone would go off and start building Foo. Then the CEO would fly in and ask "Why are you not building Bar? I'm personally interested in Bar, please show some results! Oh, and any product changes need to be personally approved by me now. Byeeeeee (gets on his plane again)". So developers kept developing but had no idea what to develop.

2. Joel Test[1] was 0 out of 12. Since it was just developers developing, nobody had time to write a spec, or set up source control, or design a build/release process. Those were icky tasks that stupid PMs and managers did. Developers want to develop. So the software engineering process was a clown show. Releases to customers were always late, and when they happened they were built directly from an engineer's workstation (they would just find a tree that actually built without errors, and that was the release).

3. If the software failed in the field for a customer, and this happened constantly, there were no useless support staff to talk with that customer, do basic tier 1 and 2 support, diagnose, and so on. Customers simply got angry, and since it was just developers developing, they had nobody to call and rage at, so they'd call the CEO. Then CEO mad. CEO would make a developer fly out to the customer's site with a laptop and debugger to pacify the customer. Now, that particular developer wasn't developing and was sad.

4. Things like career growth, mentorship, training, learning new best practices, none of that existed. It was just developers developing, so there really was no knowledge transfer or any distinction between junior, senior, staff, and so on. Nobody's job was to set these things up, so it never happened. There were no levels so no concept of promotion. If you wanted a raise, you'd go to the CEO who would just say no. That was basically your career development.

So yea, go find a place without managers and MBAs and let me know how it goes.

1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#159

Post by nicoburns »

soperj wrote: post #147
sulam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can justify it quite easily. Take it away and see what happens.

I've worked for months while they hired a new manager, and we just had less meetings.

Presumably someone was still managing you (e.g. there was someone for you to go to if you wanted to book time off, ask for a pay rise, etc)?
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