201–210 of 425 posts
Engineers that have to do management and paperwork stuff cry that they're so busy with paperwork that they can't engineer. So management hires a guy for them and they cry about how that guy doesn't do anything.
Basically I've got skin in the game over the entire product, not just my silo.
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The power dynamic is completely different. Managers have the ability to hire/fire, guide technical decisions (usually for the worse) and set the tone for the team since its "their" team. The team itself has very little recourse over a bad manager.
They can quit. I promise you as a manager I spend at least half my time trying to keep developers happy and engaged because losing even one of them will cost the team way, way more in productivity than indulging somebody who wants to implement a perhaps-overengineered solution. I don't know how it is everywhere, but in my neck of the woods good developers are hard to recruit and expensive to lose - they have a lot of…
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> Do doctors have managers? Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers. Obviously not "technical" managers in that they're doctors themselves or the doctor's "boss" but in that there are managers who are co-ordinating workforce, priorities, staffing, supplies etc etc. This is very much a thing and is more broad than engineering managers but is an incredibly important task so the dail…
> Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers. Maybe some places. In the US, most doctors are independent providers for hospitals, they don't have a traditional 'manager'. Outside of a hospital setting, this is also true. > This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff It may be, but it's lower skill work delegated to people that are subordinate to doctors, not…
You are putting a round peg in a square hole. As I already stated, these are not the kind of managers we see in development where your manager is your "boss". Even as independent providers, doctors will have someone they are interfacing with who will see to the admin and other work so they are focused on medicine. Less than half of all practicing doctors in hospitals in the US are independent. Most of them are employed by the hospital. You are grievously misunderstanding the role of the "manager" here. There are certainly far fewer managers in independently practicing medical facilities like clinics but that's because the volume is far lower and the doctors themselves wear many hats
> but it's lower skill work delegated to people that are subordinate to doctors
Again, this is very insulting to the people working these roles. They are not "subordinate" and the work in not "low skill". These are parallel roles to doctors. Leaving this kind of work to doctors would result in a failure of the medical profession in its entirety because of the sheer volume and sensitivity of it
And if you look at how engineering management happens, at really any org big enough to have even one manager of engineers, I think you'll see this stuff really is a problem. But it's a problem because, well, organizations need to find some way to scale accountability over all of their members, which, when it faces the really tricky vulnerable and weird work of engineering, runs into these problems because of how incommensurate that work is with the tools it has to understand how it's going at scale.
When EMing is a bullshit job, it's because the engineering manager is so constrained by the bureaucratic needs of the organization that she cannot actually do the work that matters between the lines. Like when you've gotta manage up so much that you cannot find the room to support an engineer grappling with a novel and uncertain task? Well, the engineer suffers, rightfully blaming engineering management -- we were responsible for supporting them, and failed to do so.
As EMs, we have to ask ourselves what we wanna do. Do we wanna fit with what the org asks of us, or do we wanna do what we're responsible for: delivering results by supporting engineers as they do the scary, vulnerable work they do? When those things diverge, I think good managers discover ways to keep the people above them happy, while delivering on their responsibilities to their team. But they often do it despite, not because of, the organization they're serving.
I'd like to say it's as easy as just always focusing on results, as when they are delivered, the rest of the org will see that you know what's up! But no. If you just do that as an EM, you'll be fired, or passed over for promotions, or have your team cut from underneath you, or be told you're a better engineer than manager and demoted. Ultimately, your job is to do both: to deliver what the people above you say they need, and to help those who report to you.
The coda to this is that the people above you are also human, and also probably realize what they're asking of you is bullshit (if you're lucky). So if you're capable of dealing as humanely and vulnerably with those above you as much as your direct reports, you'll also win them over, and you'll win the cover from them to be able to do what matters with your team.
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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…
There are two critical differentiators in the role of an EM: power over those managed, and the bias toward management over productive output. The people who predominately fill those roles are those who are good at management, not those who are good at production (and, by the way, the "good EMs" which DO exist are generally people with a history as an IC, and treat the role more as a PM).
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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.
> Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement. It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work. If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YO…
I think part of problem here is that there's a notion of a generic right answer to these questions and that typically the "right answers" are those that get passed down from the enterprise world. I've worked at companies with no managers and it's worked fine. At one place I worked we basically just had a sales teams, an engineering team and a CEO. There were no managers. The sales people raised tickets for bugs and r…
A thing I teach to younger folks: no one likes making decisions, but that's where money comes from.
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My best experiences with managers were ones that did that. Just let me work and help me if I need it. I'll reach out if I do.
That's not a manager, that's a secretary, which is my point. Engineering groups don't need managers, they need lead engineers and clerical staff, similar to a group of lawyers or doctors.
The reason most engineers don't have secretaries is because we usually prefer doing the same thing with automation and scripts.
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…
Here's the thing. At the end of the day all of the "complexity and nuance" of running a business doesn't matter. The only way you even get to execute on that is if you're flanked by good engineers. All roads lead to the engineer. Bad managers can be worked around. Mindless PMs can be worked around. But if every engineer at apple suddenly stopped working there would be real economic consequences. If managers and PMs s…
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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…
Many lawyers do work on separate projects: Alice drafts my will, Bob handles your divorce, etc. Since these can usually proceed independently, there's not much to manage. However, bigger cases/projects usually do have a structure: someone, perhaps a partner, interacts with the client, develops a strategy, and delegates its implementation to associates.
Likewise, the doctor who manages your blood pressure in a private practice is fairly independent. On the other hand, hospitals, especially teaching ones, often incredibly hierarchical, with med students at the bottom and layers of interns, residents, chief residents, fellows, and attending, with a department chair on top. Attendings can treat patients individually, but they also oversee the work of the more junior staff; they're even called "supervising physicians" in some places.
If any project has more than a few people, I'm not sure how a "team" can proceed without at least a de facto organize/leader, and if that leader spends most of their time leading....well, that's a manager.