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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

#131

Post by evilduck »

tayo42 wrote: post #130
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we used to say "employees don't quit jobs, they quit managers." i was very happy at Amazon until they moved me under a sub-optimal manager. i quit less than a month later. that manager got promoted. this will tell you everything you need to know about working at Amazon. maybe they were trying to get me to quit. maybe that area's director was incompetent. maybe both.

Do managers ever get fired or fail? All of my worst managers seem to keep moving up the ladder from what I see on LinkedIn. I don't understand it.

As a manager, yeah I’ve seen several of my peers wash out of the role for one reason or another. It happens. Usually it’s self selected though, disliking the inherent drama, having difficult to work with employees, moving up from engineering and realizing that was actually what they loved, etc.

But a bad people manager who still manages resources and timelines and expectations isn’t necessarily bad for business. Promoting them up into a more strategic role that deals less with managing a larger group of individuals directly isn’t necessarily a bad move either.

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

#132

Post by nonethewiser »

bob001 wrote: post #43
Herring wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s better to look at what didn’t happen: unionization. Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you just don’t like them.

Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.

Still do

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

#133

Post by Terretta »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #22

This is all a bit messy to read, but seems TFA recommends against 1:1s and any kind of ticket management or any eng. management all when you have 5-6 engineers and this ... insane. People need to get on the same page. You don't need to be (shouldn't be) process insane or go SCRUM or whatever to do that. But having regular organized interactions and task definitions is absolutely imperative even early on when you don'…

Even works just doing it for yourself, Personal Kanban style:

https://www.personalkanban.com/pk/personal-kanban-101/

I recommend Sunsama:

https://www.sunsama.com

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

#134

Post by marcus_holmes »

Love this, and agree with almost all of it.

The only quibble I'd have is with "1:1's happen organically and infrequently" - I think this is based on a misunderstanding about what 1:1's are for.

Regular, formal, 1:1's are the opportunity to get above the work and talk about meta stuff - career direction, morale, interpersonal issues, etc. It's the founder/manager's chance to check if the employee is happy and thriving, or if there's something that needs to change.

These sorts of conversations can happen organically, but often don't, and can be awkward if they do happen organically. Getting the awkward out of the way with a formal agenda can really help to get into the guts of it. Rather than having to manipulate the conversation to get to an emotional item, the manager can just flat-out ask the question because it's on the agenda.

Obviously, you can overdo this, and it can turn into a nightmare for folks so I can see why TFA proposes eliminating them. But properly done, formal 1:1's are really valuable even in small teams.

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

#135

Post by Onavo »

Herring wrote: post #35
pyrale wrote: post #27

> I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned. A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it [1]. And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the issue with working on saturdays is…

It’s better to look at what didn’t happen: unionization. Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you just don’t like them.

Steve Jobs was also an expert at suppressing software engineering wages. Karma has a funny way of coming around.

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

#136

Post by mji »

bob001 wrote: post #43
Herring wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s better to look at what didn’t happen: unionization. Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you just don’t like them.

Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.

Until recently?

Now it's 20x at the AI labs instead of 5x at FAANG.

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

#137

Post by marcus_holmes »

jayd16 wrote: post #15

I think its clearly false that motivation is an inherent trait. That would imply that demotivation is also inherent, which I think is even more obviously wrong.

I think demotivating people is incredibly easy, see any Dilbert cartoon featuring the PHB ever.

That doesn't mean that motivating people is also easy. They're not equivalent.

Motivating people requires understanding their psychology, their values, what they want from their life, etc, and then applying that knowledge to create a workplace culture that feeds all of that. Demotivating them just requires not understanding any of that, or ignoring it in favour of feeding your own ego or psychology. It's a lot easier to demotivate.

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

#138

Post by mcny »

reactordev wrote: post #128
bob001 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having talked to Occupy Wall Street people at the time I don't think many on the ground differentiated as much as you think they did. I used a generic word because from my experience that is how they saw the world. I got told I deserved to have everything I own set on fire for saying I spent $100 on a nice dinner once. That was on the more extreme side but the sentiment seemed to not differentiate.

They basically hated on anyone making more than a livable wage at the time ($60k).

It is possible they were mistaken. The extreme voices get magnified at these things, I'd guess.

Maybe it is an attempt to slow the shift in the Overton window?

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

#139

Post by nebula8804 »

bob001 wrote: post #122
nebula8804 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are closer but they are not part of the class so does it really matter how close they are? Engineer still has to trade their time for wealth in the form of work. Capital class has assets that work for them.

To me the only question is if there's a hypothetical revolution who will end up swinging in the wind by their neck and I have no doubt many engineers working for big tech would have been in that group. There's always nice rhetoric and focused rhetoric to not make too many enemies but the people on the ground differentiate a lot less and have in every revolution.

By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.

Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being.

This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them.

Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class.

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

#140

Post by cdavid »

Swizec wrote: post #21

> at 15 engineers, it is very doable for a single person to keep track of everyone's work and ensure alignment. All my past experience disagrees. Sure you have 15 engineers, but you're supporting a business of 150 people. This is a pretty common ratio. The noise gets very loud at that scale and it becomes almost impossible for self-managed engineers to make forward progress. At the very least you need super clearly d…

My rule of thumb is that management complexity is given by #direct reports x #project, where project is defined as a set of stakeholders (be it PM, etc. depending on business).

Concretely, managing 12 ICs on a well defined platform team w/ a single PM is much easier than managing 6 people working across 6 businesses, as is more common when managing a team of data scientists.

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