Is engineering management bullshit? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#361

Post by noneeeed » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #352

noneeeed wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the question I asked myself that totally changed how I thought about sales and marketing people. I cannot do sales, I do not want to do sales, but if I want a job someone needs to do sales. To me sales looks like an awful job, but some people really get a kick out of it and I'm glad they do because otherwise I would earn a lot less than I do. We love to think that "if we build it they will come" but the real…

> To me sales looks like an awful job You meet new people. They tell you about their problems. You explain to them how your product can alleviate them. You work on finding a common position regarding what you could bring at which price. When it works, you get a big cheque. It’s pretty fun really.

I think the outbound cold calling side of it was the bit that never appealed.

Once that connection has been made I can definitely see the attraction.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#362

Post by bumby » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

warcher wrote: post #360

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…

The MBA is for people who want to skip right to "being in charge" without having to learn how to actually do anything first. The scary part is, if you went to a selective enough school, it kinda works. The Ivy League undergrad -> elite MBA -> management consulting -> C-suite pipeline is especially frightening.

My issue with the converse is that being a good engineer and understanding how to do things doesn't necessarily make you a good manager. I've worked in plenty of orgs where they don't treat leadership as a skill unto itself and assume just because you're a good engineer, you'll be good at managing an engineering team.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#363

Post by Maursault » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #177

Maursault wrote: post #139

> Despite years of effort, and a market value for individual software companies of over trillions of dollars, we’ve yet to formalize a way of measuring how effective a developer is or isn’t. I am not a developer, but I studied CS until my eyes bled, and I've been watching you guys. Seems to me you (royal, developers) have already long figured this out with 2 metrics. The first isn't how many lines of code, but the op…

those two have no demonstrated correlation with business performance, unlike DORA measures

Though it certainly seems counter-intuitive that the efficiency of a developer has absolutely no business value, my only point was that developers have their own metrics for praise of their peers, not that business should adopt them.

I've never heard of coders gushing over how fast someone got a piece of crap to market, no matter how profitable it was. Adobe development, for example, was one of the first to release their pro applications on Apple's PowerPC platform, but no one was impressed because their carbonized code was known not to be as performant as it would have been if ported natively in Cocoa. On the other hand, they also took a lot of grief for taking so long (wasn't it about 5 years?) to finally release Cocoa versions of those applications, just in time for Apple's platform switch to Intel, to be run in Apple's Classic emulator.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#364

Post by olddustytrail » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

rco8786 wrote: post #323

015a wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe these articles are written by people who have never been managers themselves. I'd also posit that most of the defense of the position comes from managers. Do you not recognize the irony in this? I'm sure you're aware of what they say: Its difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it. Do you have the self-awareness to recognize that this, alone, is a huge reason why managers…

> I'd also posit that most of the defense of the position comes from managers. Do you not recognize the irony in this? That’s not irony. That’s someone with no domain expertise saying something and then someone with domain expertise refuting it. If I, a casual baseball fan, made a claim about umpires being useless in baseball and then an umpire came in to explain otherwise, that would not be irony. I’m also not an EM…

Don't know if that is what they're suggesting, but I would suggest:

owner/board -> worker teams (up to 5 individuals) -> team helper (this is the previous manager role)

Edit: I will also add that it's strange, the more experience I have of incompetent managers, the more I'm told I don't understand them!

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#365

Post by spc476 » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

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 been at my current job for 12 years. For my first three years, I had no manager [1]. I then did an internal transfer to development, and had a 'meh' manager [2]. He burned out after a few years. The next manager I had was great. Technically, he shouldn't have been our manager as he was a director at the company, but due to financial politics, the company couldn't hire a manager for us. He just told us what we needed to do and otherwise, let us developers alone to do the voodoo that we do. He was eventually let go and one of the other developers on our team was promoted to manager. He too, was great, just telling us what to do, and trusting us to do the voodoo that we do. He retired. My current manager (from the company that bought us out) is bad. Enterprise development being shoved down our throats, not only telling us what to do, but how to do it.

So, in my mind, a good manager will tell the team what to do, listen to them, and let them do the how. Next up is no management---in my experience, I knew what needed to be done, and got it done. It was great, but I realize that was a bizarre case that normally doesn't apply everywhere, but because of the nature of the work I did, only a few other people actually knew the work involved. The 'meh' manager didn't hurt, but really didn't help. And bad management, well ... let's just say a bad manager can really damage a company.

Until bad management showed up, our team always delivered on time, had smooth deployments, very few bugs in production, and otherwise, was not a source of issues for anyone. Now, we've missed multiple deadlines, horrible deployments, bugs in production and our customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, is very pissed. And it's not the sole fault of my current manager, but of upper management in general.

[1] I was initially hired in QA to test the call processing side of our product (the bit that happens when a call is placed). The existing QA manager only knew how to QA the cell phone handsets, not the call processing server side. I knew next to nothing about the cell phone handsets. It was clear the QA manager was not a good fit for me.

[2] He wasn't great. I don't think he was as bad as some other employees said he was. He was a developer who was forced into a management role.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#366

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:08 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #285

deepGem wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these comments come mostly from engineers who have just started their software engineering journey or somewhere in their early stages. When you are at that stage, your odds of coming across an inspiring figure in other areas are very low, unless you have a natural proclivity to other areas in your life. As you grow, you do realize that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and you mellow down…

When I was just starting out as an engineer, I was very interested in what management was doing. I went to every town-hall type meeting I could, every business planning meeting, every financial meeting. I really wanted to be steeped in it to understand the role. Year after year after year I learned again and again that there's something truly toxic about middle-management and up. It's like the higher you go, the wors…

[deleted]

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#367

Post by afarrell » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:12 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #309

afarrell wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However if the satyrical speaker did not believe that they had a duty of care to the truth, then it is bullshit[1]. [1] Prof. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...

Not really, that does not follow. It is possible to speak the truth by accident.

It is also possible to arrive safely at your destination via reckless driving.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#368

Post by hbrn » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:22 PM UTC

One litmus test for a good manager that I found: do they ever make decisions that are optically bad?

If the answer is no, what do you think are the chances that optics are the main factor in their decision making process?

An example from personal experience: one of the downtime post-mortem action items that manager was pushing for was a complex alerting system (we already had a good amount of monitoring in place, but it didn't catch all issues).

The right action item should've been: we got extremely unlucky, but despite downtime we're not going to change anything, because likelihood of that happening again is extremely low.

It takes balls saying "this is a risk I'm willing to accept".

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#369

Post by clhodapp » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

felizuno wrote: post #157

mrits wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indu…

or the values provided by ORMs

I'll point out that the world is pretty diverse and there are actually lots of people who think that ORMs were a mistake and lots of people who think that using them is always a no-brainer. There's an interesting phenomenon that it seems like a lot of folks manage to build up reasonably long careers while only running into one side of this divide or the other and not even realize that the verdict on ORMs isn't a settled fact where one choice is always right.

Perhaps it's similar with engineering management and we should be having a more nuanced conversation.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#370

Post by hbrn » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

Draiken wrote: post #345

ethanbond wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it seems nearly every organization of meaningful scale has a large amount of this “cruft.” Why don’t we see companies that “simply don’t” add this cruft, and accordingly sail off into orbit under propulsion of their own excellence?

Most importantly because most organizations just copy what everyone else does. They're afraid of trying anything different than the status quo and don't want to risk it. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", right? Same stuff, different context. Nobody ever got fired for copying Google, Spotify, Twitter, . This is the unfortunate truth IMO. Organizations rather get the known "cruft" instead of taking a chance to in…

> Nobody ever got fired for copying Google, Spotify, Twitter

This. I see it over and over. People are thinking that copying management practices of successful companies is going to make them successful too. But it only works if those practices are what made the likes of Google successful. And it's not: Google is famous for it's search engine, not for it's managers. It's also famous for it's graveyard of failed projects. Somehow smartest people in the world created the most hated frontend framework.

Having infinite power doesn't typically create good leaders, it creates dictatorships.

Do you think having infinite money naturally leads to good management practices?