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Is engineering management bullshit?

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Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#381

Post by wahnfrieden »

Maursault wrote: post #363
wahnfrieden wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I wouldn't want to work with someone on a project who takes such a narrow role-based view of success. If the broader business goals seem gross or alienating or irrelevant to an engineer, perhaps they are, though not by necessity unless it's a typically exploitative class-based structure (even with some limited mobility to pmc)

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#382

Post by strix_varius »

agentultra wrote: post #130

I’ve been on both sides. I spent a few years as an engineering manager. The majority of my career as a software developer. It’s not a bullshit job. It’s sometimes a bullshit management job. Like working for the benefit of engineers on your team who view your role as bullshit. And dealing with negotiating between marketing, sales, founders, and being the voice for engineering. There’s a lot of bullshit there some time…

I've also been on both sides, and I think that it is sometimes a bullshit job. I've spent a few years as a BS EM and a few years as a legit one. Your EM role might be bullshit if...

- You're managing fewer than four reports.

- You were previously a low-performing engineer & you find it easier to hide your lack of technical competency in the management track.

- You spend a lot of your time in broadly-attended meetings about topics on which you are not a direct decision-maker.

It's easier to coast as a bullshit EM than as a bullshit engineer because your impact is one step removed. When an engineer ships a bug-ridden mess, they get pinged by QA/product/whoever. When a manager hires an engineer who ships bug-ridden messes, the manager rarely faces consequences. When a manager lacks the backbone to put folks dragging down a team on a PIP, they're rarely called on it. When a manager lacks the backbone to advocate for their best engineers, those engineers leave and the EM gets to interpret for their boss "why" the engineer left. I doubt many say, "because I failed to advocate for their career" or "because they were sick of me misinterpreting the technical situation my team is in."

So engineering management is an attractive field for engineers who are technically incompetent, and by definition those folks are poorly equipped to manage technical teams.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#383

Post by pyrale »

Swizec wrote: post #140
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…

> they almost always drain resources to aggregate information Here’s an idea: Provide this information before they have to ask, when it’s convenient for you. Like between tasks. Took a 5min break? Move the damn story over to done. Got stuck and seeking clarity but are blocked? Leave a quick comment. If your manager has to ask what’s going on, you’re not communicating enough.

> Here’s an idea: Provide this information before they have to ask, when it’s convenient for you. Like between tasks.

Sometimes that's all the manager wants, and the team lets them down. Sometimes the team takes hours estimating work that no one can reliably estimate, because management wants a burndown chart to feel good about, even though the last n burndown charts were wildly inaccurate.

As with any situation, issues happen at every level. What's unique to managers, though, is that they combine overwhelming power on the team with zero accountability to the team. Obviously when something goes wrong the team is going to be mad about it.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#384

Post by pyrale »

ewuhic wrote: post #333
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…

PM as product or project?

Yes.

(said tongue in cheek, but the confusion is so often carefully maintained that...)

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#385

Post by taneq »

liuliu wrote: post #60
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…

> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. I do understand what OP said somewhat though. Mostly due to Peter's principle, thus, managers are not "about average" but "mostly incompetent". It is easier to promote people managers than ICs in growing organization, hence it is easier to play out Peter's principle in real…

Remember that the Peter principle only applies to people who’ve peaked and who are in roles with some meaningful promotion path remaining. It doesn’t apply to someone who’s working their way up the ranks and is currently an engineering manager. It also doesn’t apply to someone in that role in a small-to-midsized company where there’s nowhere further to be promoted without buying out the owner.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#386

Post by pyrale »

rco8786 wrote: post #225
johnbellone wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

If your manager has little more leverage than you do, that's true. In many orgs, managers have considerably more leverage than their reports, and their help is mandatory to get some things (promotions, pay increase, access to conferences and trainings, changing teams, passing messages up the chain or laterally, support for escalation, etc).

The only trump card the report has is leaving, but they pay for that by losing all the social capital acquired at the current company.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#387

Post by mechanical_bear »

adra wrote: post #171
mechanical_bear wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that often engineers hold the view that the role in question doesn’t need to exist. And some roles are just welfare for MBAs.

I've never personally felt that race-to-the-bottom capitalism would generally allow for such parasitic drains on productivity, but then again, if you're hiring on past contributions only, how would you as a non-expert in sales/marketing/etc know what makes efficiency? I don't think your view is anywhere near as common as you think it is, but maybe in your immediate peer group there's some self-selecting cause for bel…

I didn’t say it was my view, just what I’ve seen in expressed by others.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#388

Post by cdolan23 »

writeinpencil wrote: post #321
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…

I don't agree. There is a good line in the book "Impro" about good and bad teachers. It says that we think of "good teachers" as providing a lot of some substance called "education" while "bad teachers" provide only a little. In fact bad teachers can and often do not only fail to provide education but actively make students less educated by, for instance, teaching wrong ideas, punishing arbitrarily, etc etc. The same…

This is very true. I've seen a single bad manager destroy an entire wing of an engineering organization in a couple of months. This person wasn't even a particularly mean or bad person, and had apparently been a successful middle manager for Pac Bell in their previous role. But they had no feel for the team they had taken over at all, and tried to impose a new structure all at once (basically boiled down to all of the senior devs were now technical project managers and wouldn't be coding). Everyone left within a couple of weeks.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#389

Post by ZephyrBlu »

grumple wrote: post #99
liuliu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. I do understand what OP said somewhat though. Mostly due to Peter's principle, thus, managers are not "about average" but "mostly incompetent". It is easier to promote people managers than ICs in growing organization, hence it is easier to play out Peter's principle in real…

The Peter Principle is just an idea someone had (and intended to be satire) and not an actual factual reflection of the way the world works.

It does seem to be a reflection of how the world works though. Most promotions risk being promoted to your level of incompetence because they are happenstance. They mostly occur either when you're joining a new company or someone leaves/company is growing which makes room.

Being promoted because you are excelling in your position and taking on responsibilities of the one above is the rarest main reason from what I have seen.

Re: Is engineering management bullshit?

#390

Post by ska »

koonsolo wrote: post #355
ska wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're away from the knowledge. That means all of a sudden your subordinates are smarter than you. This is incorrect in a subtle but important way: Being closer to "the knowledge" as you put it, doesn't change how smart you are, it changes how well informed/up to date you are. That being said, it's always better to hire people smarter than you if you can :) Similarly, being closer to "the knowledge" tends to make y…

> Similarly, being closer to "the knowledge" tends to make you poorly informed about other important aspects of your business, almost unavoidably. This information is often critical to actual success, more than IC's/engineers often realize. But the question is here the same: is the manager most informed to take the decisions? I would expect the functional analyst to know most about the domain and what is required, an…

> is the manager most informed to take the decisions?

Often, yes. Or at least knows who is, and how to put it to them.

Put another way, the domain experts are usually the best people to describe the tradeoffs but often don't have a sufficiently broad view to make the decisions. Obviously this isn't universal - one key skill in engineering management is empowering your team to make all the decisions they can most usefully make, and facilitating their input to the ones they can't.

> As for capabilities, a great manager will present what needs to be done to the team, and the team will decide what effort will be required.

I think this really misses the point. With a great manager, a team will fire on all cylinders; rarely is this true without at least a good one (exceptions made for small, experienced teams in certain circumstances). You are describing more of a project manager "hat", which sometimes is worn by an engineering manager, but need not be.

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