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Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

jeffammons.com

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

#11
Guess what, organization problem is a manifestation of a collective world view of the organization. And adding feature is always easier than refactoring/merging responsibility.

It is easy for a company building single page app to form an API, an analytics team, an infra team, QA, slapping incremental solution to solve their incremental problem. After having specialised team, it is far harder to merge things into good old Django with nginx where you can parse the log for analytics and just serve fully rendered html. At this point people will start saying their organization is different, we do it for "scale up" sake. They are probably right and the WhatsApp/instagram path is probably not for everyone.

Organization is the human version of software architecture. Do it too much, too early, too little understanding will all have long term, non-immediate, non-numerically justifiable effect. People love to talk about these.

Re: Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

#12
post #10

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

No need to apologize for removing clickbait.

Re: Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

#15

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?

The title stuff is in the site guidelines

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's also a giant pile of additional title lore in the mod comments.

@dang doesn't do anything but there's emailing which does work.

Re: Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

#17
post #3

Don’t ever take on organizational problems. You are working at a company. The company is a sociopath. You have to act accordingly.

A company is not a single entity. Your experience can be very different depending on your team, manager and department.

The experience only differs because of how much or little you are sheltered from reality of the inter-organization politics.

Re: Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

#19
I have trouble with the premise. Organizational problems are not the hardest problems a company faces, not by a long shot. Rather, organizational problems are a manifestation of leadership dysfunction, and by leadership I mean senior leadership (board of directors, CEO and down). They are easy to fix when the right-minded people are in charge and impossible to fix when they're not.

Unless engineering managers are promoted to the board, it's unlikely they can make any change possible. Since the article doesn't mention that, it's just marketing fluff.

Re: Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

#20
post #19

I have trouble with the premise. Organizational problems are not the hardest problems a company faces, not by a long shot. Rather, organizational problems are a manifestation of leadership dysfunction, and by leadership I mean senior leadership (board of directors, CEO and down). They are easy to fix when the right-minded people are in charge and impossible to fix when they're not. Unless engineering managers are pro…

Tell me you’ve never worked at a large company without telling me you’ve never worked at a large company
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