201–210 of 289 posts
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Why does managing the team takes so much work? Do you need to hold the hand of all your reports?
I have a team of 13. It's a lot of work. One-on-ones, setting direction, making plans for the coming period, talking and negotiating with stakeholders, scrum ceremonies, quality control, helping people grow, resolving conflicts - it never ends. I enjoy it though.
I see this discussion has gone deep into so called technical managers and their effectiveness, even their necessity. I feel there is no clear answer possible. We are trying to objectively analyse what is not objective in the first place. Before we discuss necessity of some role we need to define it. Who is a good technical manager? What do they bring to the table? Definitions anyone? I can try but it will be subjecti…
Larger amounts of managers means more levels of indirection and more opportunity for miscommunication, conflicts of interest, and other negative patterns. The way to fix a broken software organization is similar to how you would refactor a faulty code base. You start by looking at the most complicated bits and refactor those to be simpler and easier to understand. You might also profile things a bit: where are things getting stuck in the organization. And so on.
Either way, the fixes tend to be similar as well: remove unnecessary levels of indirection (layers of management). Look for places with lots of dependencies. Look for ways to increase cohesiveness and reduce coupling. Etc. How do you improve cohesiveness and reduce coupling? Break teams up. Have less managers. Reduce their interfaces to each other. Shorten the lines of communication. If you know your SOLID principles, that should sound familiar.
Large organizations do the same as bloated code bases: when in doubt, they add people (more code) to fix issues. So, you get a lot of functional duplication because this part of the organization is just in the wrong part of the org tree to be off use to that part. So, they hire their own people to do the same. And some more managers to manage those, which then fractally make things worse. And you get this culture of fracturing responsibilities across large amounts of teams and those teams having to work around each other.
That's how Google ended up with a few dozen different chat clients. Instead of just one good one. They are still figuring that one out.
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I’ve worked with engineering managers and they did none of the stuff you listed lol. I’m still wondering what they were doing.
If that is legimately the case then you are probably working fore a bad company. I would caution you to confirm that your engineering manager isn't working in the background on a bunch of non engineering tasks that kept the engineers more productive. IMO, my modus operandi as an engineering manager is to body all the work that I can handle for a team that lets the team stay focused on the engineering work and be more…
With tens of billions in the bank, who will be dancing on the graves of highly effective startups
Which is why people still work for "bad" companies
I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies
Scrum masters are the real scam. Let some non technical with neither a background in engineering or tech or management run things.
Just like home inspectors...failed contractors
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> India Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? I always assumed, especially first generation immigrants, would be working balls-to-the-wall. Am I wrong? Is there some sort of incentive misalignment in the H1B program? Is it cultural (e.g. like “island time”, which I’ve learned is at least partially attributable…
> Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? Indian here. First generation, naturalized American, et cetera. I'll be honest and say that my initial response was, “Ugh! Your friend is a big old racist”. Moving on from that reflexive thought, I'll attempt to answer your question of: > I’m asking is there a perceptual…
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"the missing 80%" you mean the ones that would go from the salad bar to the yoga class and then go into a DEI meeting and talking about how we must change "the color of our vibes"? Yeah I think Elon is almost picking up that slack. But I doubt anyone could find him at an yoga class
You’ve made up a guy and are mad about it but go off
Keep in mind a lot of the slacker are really good at pretending to do real work and they've had a long time to hone their skills.
I have a long held belief that engineering managers are mostly a scam, and are actually just overpaid scrum masters. This is from working at some top companies
Silicon Valley used to have engineering managers who managed engineering. As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical. This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architectur…
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Silicon Valley used to have engineering managers who managed engineering. As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. First thing they do is rebrand middle management as “leaders” and the other thing they do is make management non technical. This has even bled into making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. “Staff engineers don’t code, they set high level architectur…
> As the money got bigger we got more grifters / professional manager types. That. Same for all the decorative functions with low value added. > make management non technical This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business. > making higher level IC engineering roles being “above” coding. There is little that re…
> This is a big flag to me. I know this is a devisive opinion, but I don't think you can do a good job at managing people without knowing their core business.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I used to have a manager (who later became vp) that was technical, and it’s been the worst. Of my professional life so far. He would dictate the technical solution and shut down every initiative, making people below him mere executioners. No room for dissent, he had the last word on everything.
The problem being, this person worked for like ~5 years as a developer, then became a manager, then got in charge of infrastructure.
And oh boy, infrastructure was not his core competency.
So prod infrastructure was essentially at a hobbyist level (everything in the same subnet, some dev stuff along with prod stuff, no network segmentation, a number of things implicitly relied on virtual machines not being rebooted or getting the same ipv4 if rebooted, dns was a patchwork etc). In all this he avoided solutions that he wouldn’t understand (no matter if people below him would understand them). Oh and he would have the console access to cloud services and the authority to do all the testing he wanted, we did not (hence perpetuating some thoroughly artificial knowledge gap).
So yeah… having a technical manager can be awful.
1 in 6 people in Nokia are/were managers so the ratio sounds about right.
It gets worse if you need something from elsewhere in such organizations. Because now you are communicating up the tree to some busy executive with no attention span who then barks down another path in the tree down to (hopefully) the right person you should be talking to directly. Of course doing the sensible thing here (talk directly) pisses off everybody along that path who justify their existence by gatekeeping their precious resources (i.e. people) and jealously control flows of information.
I've been there and done that and have had to deal with such executives. Not fun to have your boss tell you that his boss got yelled at by their bosses because you had the nerve to send an email to a report of their report's report. This is a thing that happened to me. I was actually encouraged to continue to engage with "the other side" (as it was obviously the right thing to do) but please keep them (all of them) in the loop because it made them look like the bunch of useless muppets they were. In their defense, this was a tense time for them because there was this thing called the iphone that was an existential threat to the entire organization and people were very busy identifying the most dysfunctional bits in the org tree for firing as things were going rather poorly. I got caught up in one of the larger rounds eventually.
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Yes, at least among my colleagues - both in the US and India offices.
> India Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? I always assumed, especially first generation immigrants, would be working balls-to-the-wall. Am I wrong? Is there some sort of incentive misalignment in the H1B program? Is it cultural (e.g. like “island time”, which I’ve learned is at least partially attributable…
There is none. I worked at a big tech company where a big chunk of positions were moved to India, and the teams in India were constantly overworked and under pressure.