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"Good engineering management" is a fad

lethain.com

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Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#91

Post by hapless »

pnathan wrote: post #31

The question of leadership is much larger, more general, and more timeless than the last 15 years. I invite those curious about it to look into the American Army. > Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. taken from - -- https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf

The American army, the origin of the term "fragging." (to wit, making sure your commanding officer has a close, and final, encounter with a piece of ordnance, such as a frag grenade)

if we are to learn anything from the US military, it is twofold

1. You can absolutely create a self-reproducing tradition of absolute conformity while retaining ample capacity for local decisionmaking, if you have enough money and time. (In the case of the US army, approximately 150 years, and more money than any other organization in the history of man)

2. Segregating the staff into "officers" and "enlisted" is still gonna get a lot of "officers" killed dead, and even more "objectives" un-taken, because it spreads their incentives too far apart.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#92

Post by hapless »

WalterBright wrote: post #12
Exoristos wrote: post #4

> The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good le…

> the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill Businesses exist to make money. If you want a commune instead, join one!

Well, that is just the problem, isn't it?

A lot of the bad behavior in corporate America comes from signalling (for above) and posturing (for below), not from finding ways to make money

(Communes often have the same signalling and posturing problems, but they don't have to additionally worry about shareholders and bonus payments)

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#93

Post by ozim »

sokoloff wrote: post #49
ozim wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#94

Post by orionfollett »

jampa wrote: post #54

I've worked as an EM at four different companies, from large enterprises to small startups, and I think "the role of engineering manager" is a myth. Your role varies wildly from one company to another. In every company I've worked at, my job has never been the same: In the end, engineering management basically requires you to counter-balance whichever of the four pillars your team needs most: Product, Process, People…

At least in small companies, my experience is that being adaptive like this applies to ICs as well as managers. Although to be fair the environment I'm thinking of doesn't have any full time managers.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#95

Post by viccis »

simonw wrote: post #29
viccis wrote: post #24

I read more of the author's blog posts and it's actually insane to me that he not only was involved in one of the worst product deliveries in internet history (Digg v4), but he still justifies it somehow??

Presumably you're talking about this - https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity" Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content? Because it's a fantastic insider's war story about one of the most infamous product launches in our industry's history. Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if you like but seems like a very interesting piece of i…

This is like claiming that one of the North Korean nuclear scientists is credible on atomic bombs after theirs immediately fell into the ocean. Presiding over a disaster doesn't give you some magical insight on why you completely failed.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#96

Post by simonw »

viccis wrote: post #95
simonw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you're talking about this - https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity" Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content? Because it's a fantastic insider's war story about one of the most infamous product launches in our industry's history. Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if you like but seems like a very interesting piece of i…

This is like claiming that one of the North Korean nuclear scientists is credible on atomic bombs after theirs immediately fell into the ocean. Presiding over a disaster doesn't give you some magical insight on why you completely failed.

He didn't "preside over a disaster". He was a recent engineering hire who joined two months before the launch.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#97

Post by p_v_doom »

brightball wrote: post #50
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 m…

The problem imo tends to be not that there are guard rails in place. It's that they are often build by people that only care about the guard rail part and completely forget that its supposed to be last barrier and that there are other things you can do before you get people to hit a guardrail

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#98

Post by sokoloff »

ozim wrote: post #93
sokoloff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.)

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#99

Post by roryirvine »

zmmmmm wrote: post #65
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.…

> identifying and executing on whatever is highest value that you have the skills for There's a hidden assumption there though, that you CAN actually do that. At least management skills mostly stick over time but even a year away from hands on technical work is going to leave you likely stranded and unable to execute on the technical aspects. Which is why I continue to push back against suggestions technical managers…

If people think that not being hands-on for a year is unmanageable, then we as an industry are doing something horrifically wrong.

It would mean that no engineer could ever aspire to become a parent, take a sabbatical, further their education, or experiment with alternate career paths.

But I promise you that that is not actually the case. In fact, it is often the engineers who've stifled every other part of their life that are most likely to struggle in their mid-careers and beyond.

Re: "Good engineering management" is a fad

#100

Post by tyleo »

orionfollett wrote: post #94
jampa wrote: post #54

I've worked as an EM at four different companies, from large enterprises to small startups, and I think "the role of engineering manager" is a myth. Your role varies wildly from one company to another. In every company I've worked at, my job has never been the same: In the end, engineering management basically requires you to counter-balance whichever of the four pillars your team needs most: Product, Process, People…

At least in small companies, my experience is that being adaptive like this applies to ICs as well as managers. Although to be fair the environment I'm thinking of doesn't have any full time managers.

Yeah, I think true. The smaller a company is the easier and more important it is to think and act holistically.
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