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"Good engineering management" is a fad

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Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#41

Post by an0malous »

torben-friis wrote: post #39

>Then think about our current era, that started in late 2022(...) We’ve flattened Engineering organizations where many roles that previously focused on coordination are now expected to be hands-on keyboard, working deep in the details Is this everyone's experience nowadays? Personally I haven't experienced such a big shift at all. Our C-suite is irrationally pushing AI-everything and eng culture is suffering a bit fr…

Yes I’ve noticed this change acutely, working at a couple Series A YC startups. I’ve been surprised there haven’t been more articles on this topic because it’s been a miserable shift from my perspective, and I agree with the author that the root cause is the end of the ZIRP era.

Basically, in addition to the irrational AI-everything initiatives in spite of customers not wanting or using those features, as an engineer I’m being asked to basically run my own business unit doing everything from user interviews to product/design, engineering, QA, support, and reporting. There are no EMs anymore, everyone reports to the founders.

I think the author’s post could be boiled down to: in the ZIRP era the engineers had leverage and were treated well, and in the post-ZIRP era the tech companies have the leverage and are squeezing everything they can out of engineers to the point where you’re basically doing the job of a founder within someone else’s startup.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#42

Post by tibbar »

bornpsy wrote: post #10

Every skill eventually boils down to empathy, alignment is just being empathic

I think you need to pair empathy with its counterpart, "willingness to be disliked." Empathy is great for building relationships but, taken alone, can make you a slave to doing whatever people want. Which stops working as soon as there are conflicting needs.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#43

Post by ozim »

bluGill wrote: post #25
glouwbug wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the real deliverable is a happy team

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

Not fun part is when team delivers good valuable stuff but market isn’t there.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#45

Post by madrox »

Aeolun wrote: post #37
madrox wrote: post #23

I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs beco…

> I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it. I do. It’s often done by people that become tyrants over their little fiefdom.

That's usually a consequence of bad incentives. Either leadership is selecting for that kind of behavior in managers or they don't know how to properly unselect for it.

If a bunch of crap code gets shipped, it isn't always because the engineers are bad. Often it's because they were given a bad deadline. Same with EMs.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#46

Post by jaredklewis »

madrox wrote: post #23

I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs beco…

I like your thinking about this problem.

What if teams were integrated groups of engineers, designers, and product people, managed by polymaths with at least some skill in all of these areas. In this case, do you think it would be easier to evaluate the team’s (and thus the manager’s) performance and then higher levels of management would care less about processes and management philosophy?

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#47

Post by alphazard »

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 organized themselves in groups with leaders, and we instinctively play the part of leader or follower according to the situation. Being a good leader just means allowing the group to accomplish something that would be less likely without one's guidance. Being a good follower is mostly a selection role, where one exercises judgement in choosing a leader to follow.

The mechanism for dealing with bad leaders has also changed relatively little: stop giving them your own resources, and put distance between you and them. In the workplace this is asking to switch to another team. You can dress it up with fake reasons, like you are interested in another project, or you aren't learning enough, whatever. The important thing is that it takes a resource (you) away from a bad leader and gives it to a better one. Iterate this process enough, and the incompetent leaders are outed through their inability to maintain personnel.

People don't do this enough, it's an easy way to signal to upper leadership who in management is bad at their job, without a direct accusation.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#48

Post by madrox »

jaredklewis wrote: post #46
madrox wrote: post #23

I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs beco…

I like your thinking about this problem. What if teams were integrated groups of engineers, designers, and product people, managed by polymaths with at least some skill in all of these areas. In this case, do you think it would be easier to evaluate the team’s (and thus the manager’s) performance and then higher levels of management would care less about processes and management philosophy?

You're describing the GM (general manager) model, sometimes called the single threaded leader. This does work well in large scale organizations...especially ones where teams are built around projects and outcomes but exist for a finite time. Video game development tends to have this model.

I tend to believe in this model because when I've seen it in action, bad GMs are quickly identified and replaced for the betterment of the project.

It can be challenging to implement for a few reasons.

- It is difficult for a GM to performance manage across all disciplines. This model works best when you aren't interested in talent development.

- It's bad for functional consistency. GMs are focused on their own outcomes and can make the "ship your org chart" problem worse. It requires strong functional gatekeepers as a second-order discipline.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#49

Post by sokoloff »

ozim wrote: post #43
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

Not fun part is when team delivers good valuable stuff but market isn’t there.

What valuable stuff was delivered if the market isn’t there?

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#50

Post by brightball »

madrox wrote: post #23

I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs beco…

Process over Outcome is something that I think would be easy for anyone to proscribe to a process that they didn't like.

In my younger years, I was very cavalier about my approach to programming even at a larger company. I didn't particularly want to understand why I had to jump through so many hoops to access a production database to fix a problem or why there were so many steps to deploy to production.

Now that I more experienced, I fully understand all of those guardrails and as a manager my focus is on streamlining those guardrails as much as possible to get maximum benefit with minimum negative impact to the team solving problems.

But this involves a lot of process automation and tooling.

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