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Is engineering management bullshit?

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Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#221

Post by koonsolo »

I think a lot here miss the main point of the article.

Managers used to be smarter than their subordinates, so they could steer the work.

With knowledge work, as soon as you turn manager, you're away from the knowledge. That means all of a sudden your subordinates are smarter than you.

So where does that leave the manager? Well, as the article also kind of concludes, the manager is now at the service of the team. Big difference!

Instead of coordinating and guiding the work, the manager now has to make sure the path is clear for the team to do their job. The manager deals with all the bullshit so the team doesn't have to.

This also means that it will be hard for you to notice a great manager, but easy to notice a bad one.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#222

Post by johnbellone »

nonethewiser wrote: post #41
gautamdivgi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one? I guess a manager could make the same claim that devs are making his life miserable.

But a manager is something you progress into. How did bad people progress into it?

This is a common misconception and it is exactly how "bad people" progress into a role where they aren't a match. It is an entirely different role. Most engineering managers come from an engineering background and rely on the learned experiences of that job in order to be successful.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#223

Post by linuxftw »

aniforprez wrote: post #203
linuxftw wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In the US, most doctors are independent providers for hospitals, they don't have a traditional 'manager' 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 medicin…

> As I already stated, these are not the kind of managers we see in development where your manager is your "boss".

We're talking about the kind of managers software engineers have. Doctors don't have those kind of managers, that's entirely my point.

> Again, this is very insulting to the people working these roles. They are not "subordinate".

They are definitely subordinate in any patient-care scenario. Anyway, I feel like you're missing the point of the analogy, analogies aren't perfect, and you know well what I meant.

If you want to argue lawyers and doctors have managers, fine, give engineers that kind of a manager. IMO, these are subordinate clerical people.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#224

Post by allendoerfer »

ryandrake wrote: post #158
sulam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 2. Joel Test[1] was 0 out of 12.

Sorry, but then you and your colleges were not senior enough to handle an environment like this. This is not a question of missing management, but also missing (technical) leadership.

While I do not know if it would have solved all your problems, you can make this environment better, without adding a management layer in between.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#225

Post by rco8786 »

johnbellone wrote: post #206
rco8786 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If your manager is only adding a marginal value to your career it is time to have a conversation with them. A manager that isn't advocating for their team isn't a good manager at all. They're something else.

A manager can only add marginal value to your career. ONLY.

You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career.

100% agree that they need to be advocating for you/your team, finding the right projects for you/your team, etc, etc. But at the end of the day your career is your responsibility, and it's only a fraction of your manager's responsibility.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#226

Post by julik »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #19
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…

Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one? I guess a manager could make the same claim that devs are making his life miserable.

Bad devs do not have reports they would have authority over. Bad EMs do.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#227

Post by aniforprez »

royaltheartist wrote: post #193
aniforprez wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as an engineer, I hope FFS no one notices my vacations. It means everything is running smoothly and I actually get to have a little down time and not think about work

Every job I've worked at, when a co-worker goes on vacation, it's up to the other engineers and laborers to compensate. When the manager goes on vacation there's no extra work leftover

Engineers having to compensate for your vacation sounds like a bad engineering org. Ideally, any gap in engineering should not be missed. If there are fires while you're out, there's something worse going on that needs to be addressed, whether it's bad management or bad engineers

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#228

Post by jeltz »

sumtechguy wrote: post #65
drstewart wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

That is a terrible argument. Would you want to be the office elevator boy? I like to be useful so of a role would be useful I would want to do it even less.

As for what I think about managers: unsure, I have been a manager, worked under many managers (most of them bad) but I am still not sure if mangers should exist or be replaced with another role.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#229

Post by mk81 »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#230

Post by rco8786 »

tayo42 wrote: post #211
rco8786 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If most managers are useless Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity. > means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing. > If you can have someone who is a negati…

Idk if its that big of an "if". People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support. Often just attracting bad personalities. Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager. Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job. > By this l…

> People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support.

> Often just attracting bad personalities.

> Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager.

You are saying these things as though they are simple truths that I am just supposed to accept. But I do not.

People who end up as managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support, more often than not.

Often attracting great personalities since the job is about interfacing with people, more often than not.

It's always someone who wants to do management, whether or not they want to continue engineering, more often than not.

> Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job.

Yea, sounds terrible. It's a darn good thing we don't hire engineers or managers like this.

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