Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
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Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#2I tend to agree that managers of engineers should have engineering experience. I think my reasons would differ from those of the author and many other engineers: it's much less charitable toward engineers. One of the best reasons to select managers who have been engineers, in my opinion, is because they know how much bullshit engineers engage in with respect to fad chasing, bikeshedding and other negative practices. It's important to know what the work of an engineer really entails: that includes the aspects of it that negatively impact the business and how as much as it does the aspects that contribute value and how.
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#3My own experience in this department has been managers with engineering experience but no management training or experience. Sometimes it’s orgs that promote bad engineers into middle management to get them out of engineering. Sometimes it’s orgs promoting their best engineers into management roles for which they are a bad fit, or just ill prepared.
A number of the examples in the article are just bad management, and things I’ve heard from managers with years of engineering experience.
YMMV
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#4> It’s better to have no management than unqualified management.
If you’ve ever been on a project with more than 1 or 2 people without a manager—or where the manager doesn’t do their job—you would know how insane this sounds. It does not work. Once you’re coordinating groups of people you need a manager to keep them working together towards a common goal.
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#5> It’s better to have no management than unqualified management. If you’ve ever been on a project with more than 1 or 2 people without a manager—or where the manager doesn’t do their job—you would know how insane this sounds. It does not work. Once you’re coordinating groups of people you need a manager to keep them working together towards a common goal.
That's not true in general, I've been in environments where a team of 10+ very motivated individuals worked together without a manager. It's not common though.
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#6I don't think 'no managers' is a good idea. There are managerial 'things to be done' in every project.
As a thought experiment, if management were 'just a role' and people could switch into for a period of time and then go back to their 'real jobs' with no loss of pay or prestige, that might lead to some interesting effects.
(warning, anecdata:I've worked on teams where the 'manager' role was cycled among engineers/testers/designers etc throughout the project lifetime, and it worked well. I've also seen managers come back to being full time developers, and their perspective from the time of being managers really helped with their effectiveness as developers)
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#7I find a good manager who facilitates the bureaucratic nonsense I don't want to deal with to be worth their weight in gold. They don't have to understand the details of what I do and build, so long as they support my work, are willing to shop it out, and give solid feedback.
I've worked with managers who thought they were somehow superior to the people they manage. This seems to be a common issue. They tend to experience a high attrition rate.
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#8Historically for me, any time I've worked with managers who either managed my team or projects I've worked on, whether they helped or harmed things depended pretty much solely on "does this person have management training/experience, and a desire to be a manager".
I've worked with both engineers-turned-manager and "business" managers, and both have had ups and downs. But the tech industry's love of taking individual contributors and pushing them into management roles without any management training or even interest in managing people seems to be the failed experiment.
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#9Sounds like someone that hasn't ever had a good manager. A leader that can provide good air cover is a serious benefit in a large company. That ability has little to do with whether they have engineering experience or not.
Re: Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
#10It depends.
I've worked along-side and led multiple managers and have experienced various types of managers.
The good ones usually stood out. A good manager is usually the ones that shield their teams from the onslaught of clients' un-managed demands. She is the one that liaises effectively between a looming deadline and the sanity of the team. She is the one making sure the clients are making their timely payments when the work is delivered/deployed or milestones met. She is the one who knows the right way to calm down an angry client when something is not happening the way it should - missed deadline, bug regression. A good manager knows her limitations, and also her power.
A bad manager is usually the one that instigates one against the other. Takes credit and sweet talks with the upper management. She blames the team when things go wrong. A manager, who reports to me, once told me, "why should I be the one to say anything now, the client is pissed and we missed the deliverables. I'm not responsible." (btw, he was fired the following month.)
I believe I'm technically sound, know a thing or two about design and I've led multiple projects with multiple project/product managers. I love the ones that are ready to go with me frontal assault on problems and challenges.
Engineering managers are a good fit for an all-out engineering team. But at the end of the day, I believe managers need to be better human characters, have empathy and have more of people skill than technical or design skills. Design/Engineering — that is what the team is for.
Edit: Plural/Singular Gender normalization.