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No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

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Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#101

Post by Animats »

If you need motivation, maybe the organization is designed badly.

It was once said of the Roman legions "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills." Field Marshall the Viscount Slim, who commanded in the China-Burma-India theater in WWII, once wrote "Wars are won by the average performance of the line units." He wrote negatively on various special forces type units, preferring to use regular infantry and training them up to a good, but not superhuman, standard. Arthur Imperatore, who had a unionized trucking company in New Jersey, is profiled in "Perfecting a Piece of the World" (1993) for how he made his trucking company successful despite a very ordinary workforce.

There's an argument for winning by steady competently managed plodding. The competently managed part is hard. Steve Bechtel, head of the big construction company that bears his name, once said that the limit on how many projects they could take on was finding bosses able to go out to a job site and make it happen. Failure is a management problem, not a worker problem.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#102

Post by OhMeadhbh »

amarant wrote: post #48
dcastm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why fewer and fewer companies are hiring in Europe.

Are they? Do you have a source for that? My impression is that it's easier to find engineering work in Stockholm than in silicon valley atm, but I haven't measured objectively.

is that for startups or for the big guys like Ericsson?

i have to admit i was surprised by how much startup activity was going on in Stockholm in the last 20 years. but disappointed by how few startups don't get B or C rounds or get bought after their A or B rounds run out.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#103

Post by tyre »

al_borland wrote: post #95
tyre wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go further: a bad manager can turn a great engineer into a very bad one. People look up to great people, and when the strongest performers are demotivated, that spreads. Commonly in the cultures that end up this way, leadership blames / gaslights the ICs. It's toxic and honestly kind of heartbreaking.

If they are very bad, the company can let them go. If they are simple good or fine, the company lost their great engineer, and now has a seat filler that they can’t justify firing.

For sure. At that point they have to fire them, even though it's the company / leadership's fault and hard to watch. Ultimately better for that engineer, as well, to move on.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#104

Post by OhMeadhbh »

Nextgrid wrote: post #62
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation. it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that…

Maybe 15 years ago I would've agreed because there was genuine innovation in tech where you could actually be passionate and proud of building it. "I want to work here because I want this product to exist" could've been a legitimate thing to say back in the day. Nowadays with every market being saturated and tech being a race to the bottom quality-wise, what's there to be passionate about and/or proud of? Do you thin…

i think it's still out there, but yeah, you have to wade through an amazing amount of poop to find it. insert here the joke about someone digging through the muck in a horse stable and the punch line is "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere."

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#105

Post by ebiester »

Animats wrote: post #101

If you need motivation, maybe the organization is designed badly. It was once said of the Roman legions "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills." Field Marshall the Viscount Slim, who commanded in the China-Burma-India theater in WWII, once wrote "Wars are won by the average performance of the line units." He wrote negatively on various special forces type units, preferring to use regu…

This post is talking about very small companies. At that 20+ person department, it's true. Once you have a team where the founder doesn't know everyone, the average matters a lot more.

If you have 15 people, you can hire 15 people and they will be able to organically organize if you hire well. If they have a question, they know what everyone is working on. The code base is small enough that everyone can just figure it out even if the documentation is bad.

The larger that group is, the more effort it takes to make sure everyone has the context they need to get their job done. That's where management matters.

And honestly, when I was the first manager (team of 17) brought in, I was writing code and on my own project in addition to starting to build up the "what do we need to do to scale?" You bring someone like me in at 17 people because you're going to need to scale soon and someone needs to build the first set of processes that solve the problems of the next stage, and figure out the onramp because done wrong, they make everything worse.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#106

Post by youngtaff »

dcastm wrote: post #74
amarant wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? Do you have a source for that? My impression is that it's easier to find engineering work in Stockholm than in silicon valley atm, but I haven't measured objectively.

I live in Spain. I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years. I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days. This was unthinkable not long ago.

UK companies have been moving IT or other operation functions to India for decades

It's the typical Western management behaviour of knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#107

Post by youngtaff »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
alephnerd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well. > So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week. And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a…

As usual, the problem is not 996 itself but comp. You can get 996, you just have to pay for it. The reason Europeans don't want to do 996 is because the extra effort isn't fairly compensated.

I wouldn't work 996 because I like having weekends off and a life outside work

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#108

Post by OhMeadhbh »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #94
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah. i think you can get away with no 1-on-1's for small teams (like 4 people) but by the time you're at 6 or 8, it's probably a good idea. i suspect the OP has reason for believing this, so rather than say "they're wrong," i would say "i'm not sure they explained their environment sufficiently to explain their conclusion." as for ticket management. JIRA is not your friend. i would rather go with a stack of post-its…

Agree about JIRA. It trends towards TPS Reports and form filling, substituting a workflow in the issue tracker for actual human processes and communication. We just rolled out Linear, and I'm gauging how I feel about it. GitHub / GitLab issues I don't find useful. Linear seems like a middle ground. And it's nice and fast. It also doesn't seem to let PMs go apeshit with custom fields and workflows, so that's good. I a…

thx for the info. i'm not familiar with Linear, i'll have to check it out.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#109

Post by givemeethekeys »

zaphirplane wrote: post #9
givemeethekeys wrote: post #2

I'd like to add to this, only because it is an early stage item but maybe a little unrelated: If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.

Why

Scarcity mindset.

Re: No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

#110

Post by OhMeadhbh »

yfw wrote: post #24

I used to be very motivated to do the right thing but the culture at my company doesnt reward it and actually actively seems to be promoting bad practices e.g. not documenting. Now I also dgaf. You dont necessarily need managers but you do need someone to set expectations and keep the team accountable. Otherwise its a race to the bottom. There's no way for me as a single engineer to undo slop faster than its generate…

"lift up your hearts. all will come right. out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind."
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