[deleted]
Is engineering management bullshit?
341–350 of 425 posts
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core problem sounds like the bullshit paperwork you allude to which is unnecessary and adds time to projects but provides leadership a fake status used to drive other decisions.
And yet it seems nearly every organization of meaningful scale has a large amount of this “cruft.” Why don’t we see companies that “simply don’t” add this cruft, and accordingly sail off into orbit under propulsion of their own excellence?
In my opinion this is because big companies do not want change. They are already big companies. They already won. They care more about understanding how they won / are winning so that they can perpetuate it and extract small percentage increases each quarter. Big things move slow. If you try and move part of them too fast they might break away and potentially endanger the remaining whole.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sit in meetings all day that had zero impact on our work streams maybe the manager was busy in meetings all day in order to ensure you had zero impact on your work streams :) the role of an EM in a large organisation is in large part to be an "enterprise abstraction layer", ensuring the people in the team(s) can work in a way that is as close as possible to what they could do in a startup/solo project
>> the role of an EM in a large organisation is in large part to be an "enterprise abstraction layer", ensuring the people in the team(s) can work in a way that is as close as possible to what they could do in a startup/solo project I worked for a guy like that. Sometimes technical decisions would bubble up and I'd get mad that he wouldn't resolve them but push them back down. I started to think he didn't do much of…
Appreciate you sharing this anecdote. There's multiple archetypes of "successful" managers (i.e. meaning different ways of being useful, not success in terms of kudos or promotions or whatever), and the one you highlight is what I think of as the base/foundational value that a manager should provide (i.e. that one is able to create the quality of "smoothness"). Then, a truly exceptional manager, may also be a technical leader, may also contribute architecture or code, may also be a star recruiter/attractor/retainer of talent, etc. But IMO those are add-on's, and a base manager should first keep the ship on course first.
The quiet enterprise professional, preventing fires and course-correcting to avoid "random shit" or missed requirements, just very non-sexy/non-glorious work, and a pretty literal example of, "if you do your job right, then no one will notice you did anything at all."
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#344I'll go on a whim here and say that all roles in the software industry are bullshit in their own ways.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core problem sounds like the bullshit paperwork you allude to which is unnecessary and adds time to projects but provides leadership a fake status used to drive other decisions.
And yet it seems nearly every organization of meaningful scale has a large amount of this “cruft.” Why don’t we see companies that “simply don’t” add this cruft, and accordingly sail off into orbit under propulsion of their own excellence?
Most importantly because most organizations just copy what everyone else does.
They're afraid of trying anything different than the status quo and don't want to risk it. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", right? Same stuff, different context. Nobody ever got fired for copying Google, Spotify, Twitter, .
This is the unfortunate truth IMO. Organizations rather get the known "cruft" instead of taking a chance to innovate.
Companies, especially early on, can't afford to innovate on many areas and this is a bet they simply don't want to make.
Now, ask developers if they were less or more efficient when their managers left for a month or more. Every single one I've ever asked was way more productive, happy and surprisingly even upper management was happier because status updates had one less layer of telephone.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#346Very long time Engineering Manager here. Engineering Management is not bullshit, though there are many bad Engineering Managers out there, even at companies (like Google, where I've been an EM for over 6 years) that strive to build and support Engineering Managers. Google itself did research into the question of, "Do Engineering Managers matter?" The answer was Yes: Google set out to determine what makes a manager gr…
How did Google change its promotion policies based on the data? From my time working with Google it felt like there were a lot of bullshit artists in management. To be clear, there were also a lot of bullshit artists among the engineers too. Very few people were engaged in using their time productively.
It's very fortunate for shareholders that Google has a cash-cow business, but to the article's point, once bullshit starts to expand within an organization the only true long term control on it is outside the organization ... competition and forced reform, or competition followed by death.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#347I've become convinced recently that the role of an engineering manager is to act as a nanny for the engineers. Managers act as an intermediary between engineers and upper management and soften any blows that come from above. If something upsets an engineer, it's the manager's job to calm them down and tell them they're doing a good job and offer solutions to the engineer's problems. A happy engineer is a productive engineer.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#348This is such a tired take. It's part of a steady stream of commentary that reads something like "non-engineering-role X is bullshit." Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer, CEO, etc., as fungible or run by the biggest boogeyman of all, the dreaded MBA. These arguments most typically result from not an inability, but an…
Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do. I would posit a guess that most, if not all, engineers on HN have had to live through at least one terrible manager that has soured/tainted the position. Speaking for myself, I've lived through many and it's a miserable experience to be under these people. Nobody is saying that the fu…
I don’t know. I think what some people complain about here when they talk about bad management has nothing to do with management. Most seems to complain they have to do reporting which is not fun. While that’s generally true I wouldn’t call that bad management.
I had a relatively bad (inexperienced and overwhelmed would be truer) manager once when I was still doing engineering years ago. I know he was bad because I had to do a significant part of his job for him notably regarding smoothing interpersonal issues in the team and cross-team communication in the org. I don’t see most people here complaining they have to do too much management.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'average' manager may indeed be a net-negative, much like the average car crash. > frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for We know what the job is for, but maybe there's no actual value there. Do doctors have managers? Do lawyers have managers? No, they might report to some administrative body, but they mostly work on contract or in teams. The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to low…
I'm not sure that's true. Many lawyers do work on separate projects: Alice drafts my will, Bob handles your divorce, etc. Since these can usually proceed independently, there's not much to manage. However, bigger cases/projects usually do have a structure: someone, perhaps a partner, interacts with the client , develops a strategy, and delegates its implementation to associates. Likewise, the doctor who manages your…
The important distinction is:
A partner in a law firm, who oversees a large case, is a lawyer. A doctor overseeing med students, etc. is .. a doctor.
These are competence and seniority hierarchies. That is very often not the case for eng. managers (and so inherently more dubious and less useful).
Try telling a surgeon, that his new supervisor is basically a glorified clerk, who will tell him what to do and in what timeframe. Having worked with doctors, I can vividly imagine a hilarious scene.
Re: Is engineering management bullshit?
#350My take is like this: Engineering management works if EMs are good at their job. According to this tweet: - Startups with managers 33% more likely to develop product innovations - Firing a bad manager and replacing them with a top manager drops costs 5%, since you reduce turnover. - In a car factory, replacing a bad manager with a top manager diminishes the hours needed to build a car by 30%. - In the game industry -…
> Startups with managers 33% more likely to develop product innovations If the upside of managers is only 33%, they're probably not worth the added complexity/friction/expense !
30% improvement is a goldmine in any industry.