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"Good engineering management" is a fad

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Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#101

Post by DrScientist »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #52
alphazard wrote: post #47

There are components of management culture which are fads, like the idea that one could be an effective manager, while not understanding what one's reports are doing, through some management-foo learned from books and blogs. The success of that fad is no doubt partially due to the economic climate. People want the tech industry money, but don't have the tech industry skills. Leadership is timeless, humans have always…

Yes. All leadership is supposed to be technical leadership. Outside of engineering-management, technical just means significant actual domain expertise. If you want an organization that can do stuff, you have to know stuff, there's just no substitute and everything else is basically fake. The "visionary", the "idea person", the experts at alignment / people / processes / ceremonies were always kind of mythical but to…

> Seems like the shareholders will be effected soon, so then maybe it starts to change.

With companies at least there is direct feedback via company performance - companies led by people who know what they are doing do better than those that aren't.

And well led companies tend to attract and retain more talent.

The feedback in politics is much much slower - in part because often the people you are voting for are not really the people setting policy - that's all done by the party machine ( 20 somethings with no real world experience working as advisors ) - so changing the 'leader' often doesn't make much of a difference.

ie one of the things that is really annoying the electorate is it's really difficult to actually vote in leaders or policies you want because of the way the party system works - leaders change yet everything stays the same.

I mean in the US - who really though Kamala was the best candidate to run against Trump?

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#102

Post by ozim »

sokoloff wrote: post #98
ozim wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always possible that dev team did all the code right, good product and still marketing failed or sales didn’t execute for plethora of reasons.

It may have been “good”, but I don’t see how it was “valuable”. (I also think this is fairly common.)

Like OpenAI is losing money on each user - isn’t it valuable or is it?

If they close tomorrow because of lack of new funding would you say whatever they created wasn’t valuable?

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#103

Post by the_af »

WalterBright wrote: post #87
the_af wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous to expect every single aspect of the employer-employee relationship spelled out in the contract. There are - or should be - certain societal expectations that the employer will not cause undue stress or unhappiness on the worker. This must not be negotiated in a cutthroat manner; that's such an American thing to expect (which was partly stavros point, I believe). There are other ways to conduct busine…

> It's ridiculous to expect every single aspect of the employer-employee relationship spelled out in the contract. It's not necessary to spell out in the contract what the legal requirements are. The words "exploitative" and "treated well" are very fuzzy words, and everyone has a different idea of what they mean. > for all sorts of evil reasons Then the employee can press charges or sue. > regulating down wages How t…

> Nadella does not need to justify his layoffs.

Only if his goal is to make money at all costs, which is the stance you're taking even if you protest you are not.

> It's bad, because it makes businesses highly reluctant to hire people, which makes the economy less prosperous.

(I preempted your reply, because it wasn't the point to debate whether employee protection regulations are right or wrong; the point was to show you there are different ways of conducting a business that are not merely about making maximum money).

Again, this (and pretty much everything else you wrote in your last comment) is a very American way of doing business, precisely stavros' point.

Thankfully there are other, more respectful ways, as others have pointed out repeatedly and you insist in ignoring.

> How horrible that Microsoft minted tens of thousands of multimillionaires out of their employees!

Complete non sequitur, since you're so fond of calling out logical fallacies.

> Dummy me that didn't get hired on by MSFT in the 1980s

Yes, I'm sure you'd be a millionaire and would be spared arguing with random guys on HN. Life's a bitch.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#104

Post by tyleo »

camel_gopher wrote: post #90
tyleo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a lot of leadership positions are like this. I was a Principal Tech Lead at a 300 personal company and I did everything from PMing large tech teams, to collecting info from top users in spreadsheets, to building demos directly for the CEO, to building a key part of our tech used by over 100 other engineers. I always told people I’d plunge the toilets myself if they were preventing the staff from working.…

You have to be careful of the perceived politics around this. Tall poppies get cut down. I still don’t totally understand why but sometimes taking initiative doesn’t sit well with the folks who want their trains to run on time.

I think this varies from person-to-person or maybe organization-to-organization. I've definitely seen variations in the health of organizations but I think you can break up the categories used to judge them, e.g., meritocracy, overtime frequency, planning accuracy, psychological safety, value of work, etc.

I'd say the place I worked felt above average in meritocracy. In other words, it felt like folks sticking out to take initiative were more often rewarded than punished. I don't think we were perfect in every category though.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#105

Post by bluGill »

khaled_ismaeel wrote: post #28
bluGill wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only to the extent that a happy team delivers something of value. Teams can be happy doing things that will drive the company bankrupt. there is only so much unhappiness they can stand

If value can only be delivered by making a group of people miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.

I wasn't referring to slavery. There are a number of cases where people are unhappy with their job, but go down the road to a competitor and everyone is happy. The industry/product are essentially the same, yet the happiness level is very different.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#107

Post by sokoloff »

ozim wrote: post #102
sokoloff wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may have been “good”, but I don’t see how it was “valuable”. (I also think this is fairly common.)

Like OpenAI is losing money on each user - isn’t it valuable or is it? If they close tomorrow because of lack of new funding would you say whatever they created wasn’t valuable?

Are you suggesting/implying that OpenAI lacks product-market fit?

I think they found a market for their product, making what they did valuable. That can still lose money for a time, and even maybe run out of money, but what they have is valuable to my mind.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#108

Post by stavros »

WalterBright wrote: post #82
sfink wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of no business that does not involve making money. I know of many businesses for which making money is not the primary reason to exist. And the majority of businesses do not try to maximize profit at all costs, even when their primary reason for existence is to make money. Random example: I know someone who teaches singing. She no longer employs other people, but has done so in the past. The IRS agrees that it…

> at all costs There's that strawman again. The rest of your argument depends on that, and so is invalid. I know lots of people who started businesses with the intention of making money (including me). None of them were willing to go at it "at all costs". I don't know where you get this strawman.

It's from the post you replied to, from the part you quoted:

> the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill

You can't pretend that this part of the conversation doesn't exist simply because you didn't write those words. You were replying to someone who very specifically said this, you were agreeing with them, and to then basically claim "oh I didn't write it, I merely heavily implied it by agreeing with the parent" is disingenuous.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#109

Post by stavros »

WalterBright wrote: post #77
sfink wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely you can give an actual example of a business not formed to make money? Why? That was never claimed. The claim was that businesses can have other reasons for existing in addition to making money. Furthermore, those other reasons can be a higher priority for a particular business.

You didn't write "in addition" in what I responded to.

> Businesses exist to make money

This implies that this is the primary reason businesses exist. Or did you mean "that's just one reason, it might even be very low on the list of reasons, but it is one"?

Because, if you meant that, I don't know why we're arguing about meaningless pedantry and conversational sleight of hand.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#110

Post by stavros »

chickensong wrote: post #64
stavros wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dammit, Walter, did you not read any of the very extensive comment? It was an entire treatise about why that exact line is misleading and in bad faith, and you reply with it anyway?

FWIW, I enjoyed and agree with your thoughtful comment, and found the response disappointing. Having known privately-owned mom-and-pop businesses, I can confirm not everyone is out for profit at all costs, even in America. For some, it's enough to make ends meet doing something you're passionate about.

> I can confirm not everyone is out for profit at all costs, even in America

Definitely, I didn't mean to imply that every business in the US wants to profit at all costs, I just meant that the culture skews towards that. The US culture towards work tends to have a certain response to cases like one where someone has a popular product/service/business but would rather maximize work/life balance than income.

In other cultures, that's seen as much more of a reasonable choice than in the US, where the response tends to be more on the "I can't believe you're giving up tons of profit for more free time!" or similar.

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