Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

A lot of organizations have this problem, not covered in the article:

> Anxiety, low abilities

I was once a software engineering manager at a company in the financial services realm. This was a low margin business that had suffered a decade of layoffs when I joined. It was a morass of low effort, punch the clock, do just enough to get by teams and leaders. Making any sort of forward progress was nearly impossible. I gave it my best shot though, and managed to find like minded people throughout the organization. We had a good couple of years and made some real progress. Then the next round of layoffs saw some of these key people let go.

It was very disappointing, but I too left after a time. After the layoffs, 75% of my remaining team quit for better pay. My boss, a director, gave me some support people who could spell "java" and told me to train them up, because we weren't hiring (no one would work for the company anyway, horrible reputation). Yep, that was it for me, I resigned.

All that to say, at some point it's a business problem. I hope others in similar situations don't stress as much as I did.

Edit: words

I hope your stake in ownership was commensurate to your emotional stake!

"The company" is nothing, except what leadership makes it. As a manager, that includes you. If everybody chooses not to care about org problems? Guess what, that's a manifestation of sociopathic behavior.

So, act accordingly.

It looks like the actual title here is “Growing Leaders to Solve the Hardest Problems”, but the submission is different.

I believe HN policy is to post actual titles if possible, is that right @dang?

Sorry if I messed that up when posting it