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Is engineering management bullshit?

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Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#251

Post by __alexs »

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.

Can you design an organisation in which has managers, which would fall apart entirely if you took them away? Yes absolutely.

I'm not sure this really demonstrates that they added value so much as they just prevented value from getting subtracted by other dysfunctional parts of the organisation.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#252

Post by gopuck16 »

disintegore wrote: post #167

Did anyone here actually read the article? The author is not putting the usefulness of good engineering management into question. He is criticizing the culture around the organization of knowledge work. If the hat doesn't fit, don't wear it.

Clearly, 90% of the people commenting haven't read through the article and putting out their feelings by taking it personally instead of adding anything constructive.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#253

Post by MontyCarloHall »

Engineering management is only bullshit if the managers are not potential target users of the product, since a manager needs to deeply understand how the product gets experienced by its end users. Note that this does not mean that non-technical people cannot be engineering managers; it just means that they cannot manage technical products.

Thus, you cannot have effective nontechnical managers for products intended for technical people (e.g. IDEs, sysadmin tools, etc.), but technical managers for products intended for general audiences (e.g. email, office applications, etc.) are perfectly fine (and perhaps even better, since they provide a much needed nontechnical perspective to highly technical developers).

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#254

Post by soperj »

nicoburns wrote: post #159
soperj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Vacations are booked through a booking system, pay raises are negotiated by a union, so not an issue.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#255

Post by gopuck16 »

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…

Instead of actually reading the article and critiquing what the author wrote, you've taken it personally and really just haven't provided any valid points.

The last 2 paragraphs of your comment can be applied to your behavior actually.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#256

Post by soperj »

bratbag wrote: post #176
soperj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Conversely, I had to attend more meetings when I didn't have a manager, because they were no longer there to act as a filter/shield for the chaff around the corn of what I needed to know.

What do you need to know from your manager exactly? Majority of my assigned work is coming from my project lead.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#257

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Management is a generic role with many of the same tasks no matter what jobs the people they manage are doing. Engineering manager means you have the software engineering domain of problems which are highly technical in nature but coaching, reviewing people's work, planning work, hiring/firing/perf reviews, etc. are all things that have to get done.

Maybe a better corollary is managing surgeons? Highly technical work, highly paid, sometimes the manager won't be better than the people they manage or even be able to perform their role.

The way humans organize work is hierarchical. I view my role as manager is more servant leader, doing busy work dev stuff when I have time like patches, bugs, etc. and leaving "fun" feature/product work to the team. Make sure they have what they need to do their work (planning, filtering out nonsense, attending planning meetings, etc.) and get out of their way.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#258

Post by jsmith45 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #192

It's a simple test for me: does my manager protect me from bullshit so that I can get high caliber work done, or do I have to deal with bullshit myself because he can't? The former are worth their salt. The latter can get back to coding or go pound sand for all I care.

Fair, but on the flip side, the easy thing to notice is the amount of BS that slips though. It is often much harder to quantify the amount of bullshit that the manager blocked, without more visibility of the dumb requests or whatever that the manager in receiving.

Even if a manager let nearly zero bullshit make it to you, from your perspective you can't always tell if that was your manager being good at that, or if your manager just received very little bullshit to deal with in the first place because their manager was good, (unless they happen to mention some of the non-sense they are blocking for you at some point or other).

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#259

Post by stackbutterflow »

edmundsauto wrote: post #53
nine_zeros wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has switched between management and IC work, I’ve found management to be much, much more difficult to do well. Management should be managing people, which is much harder than managing code. Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.

But in fuzzy disciplines like management you're allowed not to do well. Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code. Thus when bad managers demand that you do x by end of the day/week/month they put an insane amount of pressure on you because there's only one way out. You have to crack the code, you must figure the problem out.

Therefore technical people develop a special sort of humility, reminded everyday of their errors by the law of physics, that bad managers who fail forward never do.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#260

Post by giantg2 »

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…

When it comes to managers, it's hard not to say their role is BS for many of us. I've never had a truly good manager (19 in 10 years). Many of their perceptions don't match with mine or the other team members.
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