I'm a manager. This is a low-energy take on management, focused on the part of the job I call "keeping the spice flowing": knocking out tickets, landing key results, and coordinating with other teams. For a manager, this is all low-impact work.
High impact management work isn't mentioned here. These are things like developing your people and networking. It's a lot of work to get somebody promoted, even if that person is a well-known high performer. Networking with other managers, product managers, finance, IT... building influence with other parts of the company, this pays huge dividends for your team.
High-impact managers focus their efforts around the people on their teams.
Note how everything you categorize as 'high-impact' is basically politics.
"Rather than focus on delivering results (which again is difficult(!), might be wrong, and often not easily identified by leadership), these people spend time making alliances and crafting narratives about outcomes instead of delivering. Title acquisition becomes the goal, seeking to maximize the expected organizational rewards, at the expense of direct results, all while working to minimize accountability."
Politics is something you do or something that is done to you is the saying no? Would you rather someone from engineering do your politics for you? Or someone from product or the business? I think the engineering person will look after you better.
Where it becomes fascinating is the 10+ year EM. They used to know what to do, but clearly don't anymore. They either accept that, and lean on their leads for technical decisions and just focus on politics, or dont accept it and thats what it can get bad fast.
I mean, a company is made up of a bunch of people, all with different ideas on how thinks should be done and in the end it’s often influence that decides the path forward.
Of course organizations have politics. It will always be that way unless you get rid of all the humans.
I think the issue is that it's sort of circular, like, "managers provide value when they convince other managers not to be obstacles". I think there's important stuff managers can do, but creating complex hierarchies that they then have to navigate or circumvent is a neutral contribution at best, from a systemic standpoint rather than an individual one. For this high performer who's earned their promotion, having their manager go to bat for them is incredibly valuable. But if the reason they needed a manager to advocate for them was that other managers were either adversarial or ambivalent, that's just adding back value that was previously removed.
To be clear, I'm addressing this narrow aspect of management, I've had managers who helped me resolve disputes, get access to resources and opportunities I couldn't have gotten on my own, et cetera, and I see the value in that without qualification.
But if the reason they needed a manager to advocate for them was that other managers were either adversarial or ambivalent, that's just adding back value that was previously removed.
But "adversarial" management is just a reality in company that has $X to spend and 12 different ways to spend it.
Business decisions often have to made with limited data. A engineers "super cool feature that should obviously be implemented" is not so obvious at the CEO level where there are multiple competing projects.
As such there is a need to "sell" ideas internally -> that's politics.
Just because it is the reality doesn't mean it can't be critiqued though, right? If the CEO doesn't have insight into this situation because their attention is divided - maybe the CEO should provide the people closer to the problem with the information they need to do their jobs, and trust that they've hired good people who will digest this information, prioritize appropriately, and get the job done? If they can't trust that's the case, then isn't that the problem we should be discussing? Maybe the CEO should focus on the strategic direction of the company and securing the investment required to implement it, and not manage projects at the feature level?
Generally I find that managers are awesome at facilitating stuff and making sure information gets where it needs to go but that when they dictate it leads to bad decision making because they don't have the proper insight. This becomes exacerbated as you add levels of indirection are between the manager dictating decisions and the people on the ground implementing them. That isn't per say their fault, it's just the dynamics of hierarchies. As information travels up the hierarchy it becomes more essentialized and nonspecific. It loses fidelity. Statistics can travel up the hierarchy, experience can't. So that engineer who's close to the problem has this rich first hand information about the system, and the CEO has a spreadsheet and third- or forth-hand accounts of the situation on the ground.
There's certainly a lot of global, systemic insights you can make from that position and useful work to be done. But it's probably not whether a individual feature of a broader project should or should not be implemented. Internal salesmanship is a bandaid, but structuring the organization differently is a solution.
Sure, the CEO delegates decisions to his COO. Ok, now the COO has to decide which 5 projects to find out of the 12 the company wants to do.
Business decisions are rarely black and white which is why if you can’t articulate why you should get resources, you won’t - someone who can articulate their value better will get resources. And if they can convince someone else their idea is best, now you’ve got two people advocating (i.e. politics).
The larger orgs get the more politics because there is simply to much going on for any one person to have all the information needed to make a decision - they can only rely on others to argue for their own priorities.
Degrading "developing your people and networking" as "politics" just shows the lack of overall business and people acumen that engineers tend to suffer from. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are aware of this, but these type of statements usually lead to engineers drifting away more and more from the purpose of the company.
It's not degrading or a value judgment (at this point).
But OPs post / self described high impact activities pretty much fit the definition of (company) politics perfectly.
The many pertinent questions I am asking are:
Is it useful or necessary, to have people doing company politics full time, what are the incentives?
What does this say about an organisation? Is such (internal) politics healthy for an org, how much is it predicated on, and much does it foster internal tribalism?
> It's a lot of work to get somebody promoted, even if that person is a well-known high performer
Is it? Why? Sounds like a problem created by managers to me.
> Networking with other managers, product managers, finance, IT... building influence with other parts of the company, this pays huge dividends for your team.
I sincerely hope no engineering manager acts or thinks this way, or they will soon be just another MBA manager who doesn't know anything, other than how to navigate among other MBAs who also, don't know anything.
Do you not get the problem with people who don't know anything besides politics being in charge of delivering real world products and services?
Most of the "engineering managers" I've had to work under have been utter bullshit. Didn't learn anything from them (technically or in regards to leadership) and were there merely to check a box, play babysitter and/or sit in meetings all day that had zero impact on our work streams.
The few who did have impact (1) were skilled engineers in their own right and were able to translate that into more management, (2) understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively. Those are very few and far in-between imo.
Your last paragraph is basically the gist of it. Managers who make an impact are recognized as such by their team. They manage the team to do their best work possible.
The model of manager as a babysitter is, I think, what happens when an organization gets to a certain size. Once the organization gets big enough, management becomes a vehicle for bureaucratic surveillance. At that size, an organization uses managers to give a human face to bureaucratic machinations.
> 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
it's more like protecting the team from being shut because some asshole somewhere managed to convince an exec that there was overlap with their team, or raising warnings when some product idiot has a new idea that's obviously going to end up having a last-minute dependency on the team, hustling to get licences to use Circle instead of Jenkins or whatever, etc
So middle managers are important because upper managers are fucking awful? That's the idea? We need the middle-management tier because of the upper-management tier? And why is the upper-management tier there? To protect middle-management from the C-tier? I think you're kinda making our point here.
100%. And all of the above are necessary because customers and investors are the fucking worst.
Ok, that’s how the world works, do we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend we can ignore it? Or do we embrace it and accept the rules of the game?
> Ok, that’s how the world works, do we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend we can ignore it? Or do we embrace it and accept the rules of the game?
Imagine having this attitude about literally any other widespread problem.
"Ok, everyone is spewing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Do we close our eyes and ignore it, or do we join them and roll coal? LET'S BURN SOME FUEL BOYS"
"Ok, everyone is dumping toxic waste into the river. Do we just ignore it and keep drinking, or do we embrace it and just chuck our own toxic waste in there?"
"Ok, everyone is eating each other in Satanic canniablistic rituals. Do we just pretend it's not happening and go about our day, waiting to be eaten? Or do we fire up the grill and go on a hunt!?"
Um, how about a third option: we be vocal about how the problem is an actual problem and work together toward fixing it?
>> 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 anything. Turns out he spent most of his time in higher level meetings finding out what projects were coming and ensuring we were properly staffed and projects got scheduled reasonably. He'd go into a meeting uninvited because "this project doesn't involve software" only to discover that there would be a software component to the project and make sure that was covered. Turns out once I knew what he was actually doing I'd say he was one of the more effective managers I've worked for. Things usually ran smoothly and random shit never dropped from other parts of the company unexpectedly. He did zero engineering (but he had previously), and most of what he did was unseen to us. Life was good because we lived behind an invisible shield.
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."
It's like good infrastructure, if you don't notice it and you can proceed through your life with minimum distractions, that means it's working as intended.
This is an excellent comment that really does distill down what an EM is supposed to be.
As someone who's been on all sides of this (currently an EM, been a tech lead and an individual contributor in the past), I really think there is a lack of understanding among large parts of the tech community about what engineering managers do. A good manager's first and primary responsibility is to reduce chaos for their team. In an ideal world you won't even know I'm here, because I am shielding you from all the stuff that is going on further up in the company and clearing out obstacles so that you can work without interference.
Good managers reduce chaos, bad managers create chaos. In my experience, engineering managers are a lot like all other employees: you have a few outstanding performers, a significant number of average/acceptable/mediocre managers, and some number of pretty bad ones. The difficulty comes in knowing which type you have, and often that only becomes clear when a manager leaves. Either a new EM makes things better, or things get dramatically worse because a good EM is no longer helping the team.
It's like that Futurama episode where Bender meets God: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
IME, The managers who believe this tend to hide too much information from their team. The team doesn't have enough context as a result, and is in the dark re. what's really expected of them by higher-ups.
If you have to have people sitting in meetings all day just to avoid corporate crap to clutter you devs' work than you have a bit problem in the upper layer of the organization. Best solution is to leave.
I think you're right, but I think you're stopping short of recognizing that maybe this is a reason why so many ICs have issues with the EM role. If the role of an EM is to be a Shield Against Complexity for the team, then two things are induced to happen more frequently:
1) The EM looks up far more often than down.
2) The ICs miss out on collaboration which could be critically valuable to their projects, careers, and broader understanding of the business.
But that's the average! Some EMs pat themselves on the back and say "look at all these meetings y'all didn't have to attend, so you could focus and get the good work done all day" when in reality they didn't do anything remotely near the title of their role: Engineering Management. Managing the Engineers; not managing project dependencies, not managing leadership, not managing politics, but leading the people who report to them.
Great engineers swim in that complexity; and great EMs expose their team to (the relevant parts of) it.
The big secret is most engineers would be better off moving into management ASAP. It pays better, less intellectually demanding, and is far easier than claimed. Management failures are often pinned to their direct reports.
> understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively.
Wait, saying "no" to upper management _is_ managing upwards. If you have a high performing team you can damned near ignore them as long as you're paying attention to what matters to them so that you can manage up effectively and keep bullshit off their place. If you have a team that needs a lot of help then yes, you have to focus on managing "down" -- but that's the less common scenario in my experience.
I suspect you're defining "managing up" as "brown-nosing" -- which is just managing up ineffectively. Being good at managing up and out is honestly the bulk of the job at most organizations; engineers can usually just do their thing.
I didn't say that there is no managing up, only that managers should be focused on managing down while simultaneously pushing back against top-down bullshit. I've usually seen managers just focusing on the later (whether it's ass kissing, career gunning or from bullshit) while neglecting their team.
This 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 unwillingness to understand, the complexity and nuance that goes into running a business, and to recognize that actual smart people can make real contributions in non-engineering roles.
It's just personal and professional immaturity. Every time I ready these comments and articles, I really hope that the folks writing them are able to grow out of this mindset. They'd be a lot happier and more productive.
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 functions of these roles aren't necessary, they're saying that the people who live in these roles are overall bad, don't know how to effectively execute these tasks and present an aura of superiority over the technical roles when they're providing very little value at all.
Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one? I guess a manager could make the same claim that devs are making his life miserable.
The power dynamic is completely different. Managers have the ability to hire/fire, guide technical decisions (usually for the worse) and set the tone for the team since its "their" team. The team itself has very little recourse over a bad manager.
They can quit. I promise you as a manager I spend at least half my time trying to keep developers happy and engaged because losing even one of them will cost the team way, way more in productivity than indulging somebody who wants to implement a perhaps-overengineered solution.
I don't know how it is everywhere, but in my neck of the woods good developers are hard to recruit and expensive to lose - they have a lot of leverage and they know it.
I've met devs who don't have the self-confidence to leave their current job under a terrible manager because they don't want to go through the equally terrible interview loops. They're stuck in some kind of purgatory.
Actually I've developed the wisdom to realize that 90% of people are not good at what they do for a living. They don't have that job because they're talented at it, they have it because they needed a job.
But the worst thing ever is when a bad dev gets promoted to the position of a dev manager or a tech lead. Armed with “knowledge” and “experience,” and now with a degree of authority, they would put their weight on everything they touch. The damage will be immense (but no one would care).
So now we’re including actual engineers in this perpetual rant against management, now? Is it only engineers whose sole job is to write code given a spec who are valuable? At what level of seniority is a job “useless” or worse?
Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one?
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a large number of users in this community have actually worked in a bubble of tech outside the norm where most devs were actually pretty solid overall. A developer who is truly incompetent (not just mediocre) would have a very hard time even getting hired at a FAANG or similar, let alone stick around very long.
Yeah, it goes both ways. Worse is when someone thinks that they're this magical unicorn that is always right when they're in fact more often wrong and correspondingly makes trouble for everyone else. They make you out to be the enemy when you're not. It's horrible when that person is a manager. But it's also horrible when that person is a developer. Or any other role. I've managed people that you just have to let go, after trying every method known to man, you can't fix their fundamental psychology and neuroticism. Some people are just broken and organizations unfortunately are not equipped to deal with that (would be nice if every organization could have an in-house psychiatrist, but that's not the reality we have).
I will concede this though. When that bad person is a manager, EVERYONE on the team can suffer, the entire culture can suffer. When that person is just a team member, others on the team can usually figure out how to just avoid that person so that the problem can be compartmentalized. Better still, a good manager will not tolerate the bullshit because they know that it can poison the team if not handled properly. When that person is a manager, there's no avoiding the problem and team policies and culture will be poisoned accordingly so that the best people leave and nothing good is left.
This is actually pretty consistent across companies: being the most senior person around when the last manager leaves. Sometimes it's a senior dev, sometimes a PM, heck I've seen it be somebody from the UX org. The path of least resistance is a quick promotion from within. As many of us have experienced this leaves us with a non-zero amount of managers who are both unqualified and uninterested in their role, but accept it for status (you're supposed to get promotions after X years right?) and pay reasons.
what people don't undertand (and that included me, when I did the change) is that being a manager is a totally different job than being a developer. you can be an extremely good developer, but be a lousy manager. there are different skills needed for those roles and not all of them are transferable. when you transition from a senior developer, you don't transition into a senior manager, you start from zero. it helps to be a good dev, but it's not a guarantee for success.
This is a common misconception and it is exactly how "bad people" progress into a role where they aren't a match. It is an entirely different role. Most engineering managers come from an engineering background and rely on the learned experiences of that job in order to be successful.
Its true, but I think the impact is what matters. Even a below average dev produces output; it may be substantially less than a great dev, it may not be of the highest quality, they may require more hands-on reviews and mentorship from other devs on the team, but its still producing output. In comparison, a bad manager can invert the productive output of a team or individuals on that team; high attrition rates, high quiet-quitting rates, prioritizing the wrong things, interrupting work such that little gets done, not playing defense, etc etc etc.
The "old" saying (well, I've heard it said a few times) is: bad software (probably) won't kill your business. There's a litany of examples to this effect. However, bad management will, with increasingly leveraged effects the further that bad management is from the line worker.
Bad developers write code that has a negative impact on team prouctivity. e.g. by insisting on a wildly overcomplicated implementation or writing poor tests and being aggressive to anyone that questions them, or being highly negative about some decision or other to the point where the team are not sure if that person is in charge or their manager is.
They can also pester everyone with mountains of trivia in PRs and refuse to change anything in their own and so on and on.
My own boss says "the main thing is to hire nice people - everything else can be improved" and that changed my perspective a lot. I think he's right.
That’s silly. Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves.
These articles are undoubtedly written by people who have never been managers themselves, and frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for. Which is fine - everyone starts that way. But to then assume the job is useless is classic sign of imaturity.
> Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary
That’s literally the premise of the article posted.
The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
I think this is the sign of inexperience/immaturity.
What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
And we're honing in on the pain point of that aspect of life. I'm not having a revelation here, I'm lamenting the fact with my peers on a site dedicated to technology/engineering.
I do think that this is fair and it is a reason why bad managers stand out so much in people's minds. I think that making it feasible for a team to fire its own manager would be generally a good thing.
But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.
Why? If most managers are useless that means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything yet the world seems to go on. Why have that role then? If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity.
> means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything
You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing.
> If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
Idk if its that big of an "if". People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support. Often just attracting bad personalities. Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager. Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job.
> By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
Its not really the same because there's only one manager. If i had redundant managers maybe then a couple bad ones could get by. bad engineers have a tons of checks to prevent them being a real drain. theres no code review for a manager.
im saying things based on my experience, but if yours is different and you see high quality and effective managers being created from engineers thats cool. can i send a resume over?
> managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support
This support im questioning. Its all on the job training. I went to business school, i actually have a business degree. I didn't leave that school feeling like i should manage or lead. The "training" is on the job, the people who teach are your small peer of manager peers and maybe some corporate style training. Corporate training has never been effective from what I have seen.
I don't agree. There is a good line in the book "Impro" about good and bad teachers. It says that we think of "good teachers" as providing a lot of some substance called "education" while "bad teachers" provide only a little. In fact bad teachers can and often do not only fail to provide education but actively make students less educated by, for instance, teaching wrong ideas, punishing arbitrarily, etc etc. The same is true of managers. They can easily drop below zero and start to have a negative impact on productivity and their employees.
This is very true. I've seen a single bad manager destroy an entire wing of an engineering organization in a couple of months. This person wasn't even a particularly mean or bad person, and had apparently been a successful middle manager for Pac Bell in their previous role. But they had no feel for the team they had taken over at all, and tried to impose a new structure all at once (basically boiled down to all of the senior devs were now technical project managers and wouldn't be coding). Everyone left within a couple of weeks.
> Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work.
If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YOU have on your career. If you find yourself on a team with a truly bad manager who is having a negative affect on your career, get out...but this is truly a rare occurrence in my experience.
If your manager is only adding a marginal value to your career it is time to have a conversation with them. A manager that isn't advocating for their team isn't a good manager at all. They're something else.
A manager can only add marginal value to your career. ONLY.
You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career.
100% agree that they need to be advocating for you/your team, finding the right projects for you/your team, etc, etc. But at the end of the day your career is your responsibility, and it's only a fraction of your manager's responsibility.
I'm not sure I agree here, because the manager has the ability to impact all those other hours.
A good manager helps remove the hurdles that will make those 40+ hours immensely more productive. A bad manager adds to those hurdles, potentially whittling productive hours to nothing.
> You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career.
If your manager has little more leverage than you do, that's true. In many orgs, managers have considerably more leverage than their reports, and their help is mandatory to get some things (promotions, pay increase, access to conferences and trainings, changing teams, passing messages up the chain or laterally, support for escalation, etc).
The only trump card the report has is leaving, but they pay for that by losing all the social capital acquired at the current company.
To answer your nitpick with a nitpick, averages can work that way. Do you know the distribution of engineering managers well enough to say that most aren't "about average"? GP was making a claim about engineering managers.. not about all averages.
But regardless, that's missing the point. The point is that the distribution of engineering manager quality is likely pretty similar to that of any other role. So claiming that "there are way more bad engineering managers than good ones" seems likely to be untrue unless you also believe that about nearly any other engineering/management/product position.
> To answer your nitpick with a nitpick,
> averages can work that way. Do you know
> the distribution of engineering managers
> well enough to say that most aren't
> "about average"?
Sorry it hit a sore spot; especially in a community such as this we should at least try to speak accurately regards statistics.
That's not what I'm saying. The OP is stating that it holds for averages. It doesn't. It might in this case but we don't have the stats.
The statement just doesn't make sense - you can say exactly the same about a random value. It will hold in some cases. Average too. However it will not hold in all cases.
> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves.
I do understand what OP said somewhat though. Mostly due to Peter's principle, thus, managers are not "about average" but "mostly incompetent". It is easier to promote people managers than ICs in growing organization, hence it is easier to play out Peter's principle in real life for people managers.
It is equally incorrect to assume that someone who speaks "without a duty of care to the truth" is saying something true or false, if given no other information.
It does seem to be a reflection of how the world works though. Most promotions risk being promoted to your level of incompetence because they are happenstance. They mostly occur either when you're joining a new company or someone leaves/company is growing which makes room.
Being promoted because you are excelling in your position and taking on responsibilities of the one above is the rarest main reason from what I have seen.
The key that I think makes all the difference is to treat moving to management as not a promotion, but just a change to a different career track. Same as if the person went into design or any other non-engineering role.
Remember that the Peter principle only applies to people who’ve peaked and who are in roles with some meaningful promotion path remaining. It doesn’t apply to someone who’s working their way up the ranks and is currently an engineering manager. It also doesn’t apply to someone in that role in a small-to-midsized company where there’s nowhere further to be promoted without buying out the owner.
I have been a manager and a manager of managers and I think we really do not have good data on whether not "management" as a profession in software engineering really adds value. We're bad at quantifying the value of engineers, and we're worse at quantifying the value of managers.
There are definitely a wide range of non-engineering skills required to produce good software but that doesn't automatically justify the existence of a dedicated engineering manager role in most or even any teams.
Mind if I ask where you’re from? Even in highly unionized Scandinavia I’ve never seen software devs (specifically) join unions to any larger extent, let alone negotiate salary through them.
Conversely, I had to attend more meetings when I didn't have a manager, because they were no longer there to act as a filter/shield for the chaff around the corn of what I needed to know.
What happens is that an otherwise productive engineer has to step up and perform the role, but without any recognition of the extra responsibilities or any reduction in expectations of their individual contributions.
So then they find a job somewhere else and another otherwise productive engineer has to step up.....
Meanwhile the other engineers continue on blissfully unaware, patting themselves on their backs for how they don't need to be managed.
I've seen this happen in smaller teams; it can work well! Productive teams and skilled engineers can manage their own workload. Not all of them want to do that, so that needs to be taken into account, but it can work spectacularly.
I've also seen it work poorly. We've already established that there are good and bad EMs; there's good and bad in everything. That doesn't justify the role of the EM!
I've also seen PMs do this. This is the far more common situation, and it works! Workload planning ends up being a collaborative effort on the team, with the senior engineers holding domain knowledge over operations, maintenance, architecture, implementation, while PMs/Designers/etc hold domain knowledge over the business, customers, etc. Work once in an environment like this; well, at least a good one; and it will make anyone and everyone question why EMs exist at all. There's no room for them. They wouldn't contribute anything even if they were added to the mix.
And no extra agency and no extra authority. I've been in that spot, had the best 4 months of my life (lack of authority was painful). Then 2 clueless managers were hired above me.
I've worked in a place without eng managers, product managers, scrum masters, various MBA people, you know... all those employees that a certain segment of HN thinks are useless. It was just Sales and Software Engineering, and the CEO, to whom everyone reported. It was the worst job I've ever had.
Developers just developing, without interference from evil managers and clueless PMs! Amazing! The ideal work environment for the genius bootstrappy engineer! Sounds like heaven, right? It was not. It was total chaos.
1. Nobody knew what they should be doing and what were priorities. Someone from sales would run downstairs and say "I just sold Foo to a giant customer! You need to build Foo now!!" and everyone would go off and start building Foo. Then the CEO would fly in and ask "Why are you not building Bar? I'm personally interested in Bar, please show some results! Oh, and any product changes need to be personally approved by me now. Byeeeeee (gets on his plane again)". So developers kept developing but had no idea what to develop.
2. Joel Test[1] was 0 out of 12. Since it was just developers developing, nobody had time to write a spec, or set up source control, or design a build/release process. Those were icky tasks that stupid PMs and managers did. Developers want to develop. So the software engineering process was a clown show. Releases to customers were always late, and when they happened they were built directly from an engineer's workstation (they would just find a tree that actually built without errors, and that was the release).
3. If the software failed in the field for a customer, and this happened constantly, there were no useless support staff to talk with that customer, do basic tier 1 and 2 support, diagnose, and so on. Customers simply got angry, and since it was just developers developing, they had nobody to call and rage at, so they'd call the CEO. Then CEO mad. CEO would make a developer fly out to the customer's site with a laptop and debugger to pacify the customer. Now, that particular developer wasn't developing and was sad.
4. Things like career growth, mentorship, training, learning new best practices, none of that existed. It was just developers developing, so there really was no knowledge transfer or any distinction between junior, senior, staff, and so on. Nobody's job was to set these things up, so it never happened. There were no levels so no concept of promotion. If you wanted a raise, you'd go to the CEO who would just say no. That was basically your career development.
So yea, go find a place without managers and MBAs and let me know how it goes.
I can't speak for everyone, but I would not argue against PMs or Senior Leadership.
There are two critical differentiators in the role of an EM: power over those managed, and the bias toward management over productive output. The people who predominately fill those roles are those who are good at management, not those who are good at production (and, by the way, the "good EMs" which DO exist are generally people with a history as an IC, and treat the role more as a PM).
Sorry, but then you and your colleges were not senior enough to handle an environment like this. This is not a question of missing management, but also missing (technical) leadership.
While I do not know if it would have solved all your problems, you can make this environment better, without adding a management layer in between.
Now wait, how do developers develop without source control?
As an individual contributor, I consider a number of things in that paragraph good practice. Specs, say. But source control? That's just so fundamentally basic that I lack vocabulary to express how essentially important I consider it to be. How does a team get anything done without one?
I don't think its possible to just take it away and see what happens, because organizations build the concept of EMs into their entire culture.
As an example: I worked in a Big Tech org where the only way to get anything from another team was an org hierarchy jump. ICs could reach out directly; ignored. Some teams didn't even have a way to reach out to them. You had to go EM, then maybe a Director, then it filters down, and maybe a day, maybe a week later, you'd get an email introduction. It doesn't have to be like this, no one even decided it should be like this, but because they had the hierarchy that's how the culture evolved.
The better comparison is to look at companies who don't have that role, or define that role significantly differently from the traditional Big Tech definition. There are many; of course, not as many as the latter. And just like companies who do have the role traditionally defined, there are success stories and there are failure stories. To me, the more I've read up on those stories, the more I've realized how pointless the role is.
Or, maybe more accurately; how much of the role's responsibility is really to be a crutch for bad culture, bad upper management, bad hiring practices, bad interviewing, etc. That ain't totally pointless, but if you're also flipping a coin on the quality of each EM you hire, and moreover the coin is rigged because we don't even have an industry standard definition for what defines success in the EM role in the best cases; there are better ways of reaching the same destination.
But, you know, most of the time those better ways require an ounce of Trust from senior leadership, and that's like pulling water from desert sand.
There's not a ton of consistency across even relatively similar-looking tech companies in my experience, so you really should expect your mileage to vary. My N=3 large tech companies in my career is not so much better than your N=1 example, but it does allow me to say that these things are not consistent at all, with some notable exceptions, usually constrained by employment law.
Devs: "Overworked? Too many disparate responsibilities? Not being able to write enough code? No team cohesion? This is a systemic failure of leadership, start interviewing for other positions."
Devs: "We, as software developers, are underappreciated! People only pay attention to us when things go wrong!"
I like this caricature but remember that, since this is not a regulated industry, there are many different personalities, and those who think this way don’t succeed for long.
Can you design an organisation in which has managers, which would fall apart entirely if you took them away? Yes absolutely.
I'm not sure this really demonstrates that they added value so much as they just prevented value from getting subtracted by other dysfunctional parts of the organisation.
I've been at my current job for 12 years. For my first three years, I had no manager [1]. I then did an internal transfer to development, and had a 'meh' manager [2]. He burned out after a few years. The next manager I had was great. Technically, he shouldn't have been our manager as he was a director at the company, but due to financial politics, the company couldn't hire a manager for us. He just told us what we needed to do and otherwise, let us developers alone to do the voodoo that we do. He was eventually let go and one of the other developers on our team was promoted to manager. He too, was great, just telling us what to do, and trusting us to do the voodoo that we do. He retired. My current manager (from the company that bought us out) is bad. Enterprise development being shoved down our throats, not only telling us what to do, but how to do it.
So, in my mind, a good manager will tell the team what to do, listen to them, and let them do the how. Next up is no management---in my experience, I knew what needed to be done, and got it done. It was great, but I realize that was a bizarre case that normally doesn't apply everywhere, but because of the nature of the work I did, only a few other people actually knew the work involved. The 'meh' manager didn't hurt, but really didn't help. And bad management, well ... let's just say a bad manager can really damage a company.
Until bad management showed up, our team always delivered on time, had smooth deployments, very few bugs in production, and otherwise, was not a source of issues for anyone. Now, we've missed multiple deadlines, horrible deployments, bugs in production and our customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, is very pissed. And it's not the sole fault of my current manager, but of upper management in general.
[1] I was initially hired in QA to test the call processing side of our product (the bit that happens when a call is placed). The existing QA manager only knew how to QA the cell phone handsets, not the call processing server side. I knew next to nothing about the cell phone handsets. It was clear the QA manager was not a good fit for me.
[2] He wasn't great. I don't think he was as bad as some other employees said he was. He was a developer who was forced into a management role.
Surely you meant to communicate something different here and not a mathematical impossibility.
Do you mean most fall within 1 standard deviation of the average? That still means half the managers you encounter would be below the average quality assuming a normal distribution (which it’s clearly not - skills tend to follow the power law).
Most engineers are actually decidedly quite bad at software development itself for what it’s worth. The equivalent of a first level line manager is typically a first level engineer (not always but usually). Good managers get promoted to manage managers / multiple teams which dilutes their qualities (they now have to train other managers to be good). So think about whether you’d put a very junior engineer in charge of a project and what kind of results that might have, especially since if the manager is actually good they’ll be promoted away whereas an IC who’s hood is simply given more responsibility on the project but the role doesn’t change too much.
Really unclear what point you are trying to make. But yes my intention of using the word "about" average and not "exactly" average was to communicate that most people hover somewhere around the middle. If you want to get really specific and get into stddevs, be my guest.
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 lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.'
What engineers need is low-level clerical people to handle the day to day comms with others outside the org. We don't need managers, unskilled labor needs managers.
Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers. Obviously not "technical" managers in that they're doctors themselves or the doctor's "boss" but in that there are managers who are co-ordinating workforce, priorities, staffing, supplies etc etc. This is very much a thing and is more broad than engineering managers but is an incredibly important task so the daily admin work does not come to a doctor who is probably prioritising saving lives and helping people
> The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.'
This is incredibly demeaning of people in hospitals who actually have to do these jobs. There's a massive amount of work required here and it is by no means "clerical". When "customers" literally have their lives in a doctor's hands, the complexity increases hundredfold. There's legal sensitivities, paperwork, spending, collections and so much more stuff involved and this is not even counting the kinds of things they need to do which involves interfacing with patients and their kin about sensitive matters. This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff
Assuming there is an analogue between a very clinical and technical field like development and an incredibly volatile and human field like medicine is futile. They don't have many of the same problems we do
Instead they have to force doctors to break bad news to patients' relatives or do it themselves, get signatures from both parties for procedures, coordinate in/out patient streams, listen to doctors demand equipment and medicines and face upper management denying them their requests and tons of other such bullshit. Medical insurance and its intricacies is a whole big ball game that they have to constantly play with so that's fun
I have plenty of friends in the medical field and yes you hear stuff like this all the time. “Thirty and up” because maybe there is an underserved community. “Not diagnosing enough strep throat” because maybe there is a recently discovered epidemic and doctors hadn’t been testing for that.
People who have a high level view can direct the folks down in the trenches quite productively.
> Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers.
Maybe some places. In the US, most doctors are independent providers for hospitals, they don't have a traditional 'manager'. Outside of a hospital setting, this is also true.
> This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff
It may be, but it's lower skill work delegated to people that are subordinate to doctors, not their managers.
> In the US, most doctors are independent providers for hospitals, they don't have a traditional 'manager'
You are putting a round peg in a square hole. As I already stated, these are not the kind of managers we see in development where your manager is your "boss". Even as independent providers, doctors will have someone they are interfacing with who will see to the admin and other work so they are focused on medicine. Less than half of all practicing doctors in hospitals in the US are independent. Most of them are employed by the hospital. You are grievously misunderstanding the role of the "manager" here. There are certainly far fewer managers in independently practicing medical facilities like clinics but that's because the volume is far lower and the doctors themselves wear many hats
> but it's lower skill work delegated to people that are subordinate to doctors
Again, this is very insulting to the people working these roles. They are not "subordinate" and the work in not "low skill". These are parallel roles to doctors. Leaving this kind of work to doctors would result in a failure of the medical profession in its entirety because of the sheer volume and sensitivity of it
> As I already stated, these are not the kind of managers we see in development where your manager is your "boss".
We're talking about the kind of managers software engineers have. Doctors don't have those kind of managers, that's entirely my point.
> Again, this is very insulting to the people working these roles. They are not "subordinate".
They are definitely subordinate in any patient-care scenario. Anyway, I feel like you're missing the point of the analogy, analogies aren't perfect, and you know well what I meant.
If you want to argue lawyers and doctors have managers, fine, give engineers that kind of a manager. IMO, these are subordinate clerical people.
You are simply refusing to accept the fact that doctors have managers and are simply labelling it "clerical". It is in no way simply clerical at all. These are people they report to regularly, who help manage their schedules, help with career growth, set priorities and targets, interface with upper management to avoid cruft coming down, dispel distractions to force their focus on what matters and so on. I will strongly state once again that this is in no way, shape, or form "secretarial". Often times, for junior doctors, they are most definitely superiors. The reason for the change in power balance from engineering organisations is because doctors have the significantly more challenging aspect that they are dealing with human lives so managers tend to stay out of their way more but their role is not diminished
Your analogy is bad only because you have no idea what you're talking about. Technical people need managers because technical people will do things other than their actual jobs and I say this very frankly as a developer. It is remarkable how similar doctors and engineers can be in that they are lost if left to their own devices. Just as an experienced engineer will wear many hats and can manage themselves, experienced doctors also successfully set up their own practices where they can manage themselves. But a good hospital manager can literally save and change lives
I don't think "hospital administration" is really an analogy that helps your argument since the growth of that sector has a significant share of the blame for rising healthcare costs and all kinds of other issues. Some level of support and oversight is needed but it seems to frequently grow to the point where it becomes a net negative.
Doctors have professional bodies that they can be removed from, same with lawyers, and accountants, and any number of professional associations. But the big differentiator is that largely these professionals do their work solo. They may need to consult with peers from time to time, but their day-to-day bread and butter is their own. Software development is not solo for the vast majority of devs. They need order and the ability to be directed to create a piece of the larger pie.
This is from a 20 year dev who's spent a few of those in management, but enjoys development more.
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 blood pressure in a private practice is fairly independent. On the other hand, hospitals, especially teaching ones, often incredibly hierarchical, with med students at the bottom and layers of interns, residents, chief residents, fellows, and attending, with a department chair on top. Attendings can treat patients individually, but they also oversee the work of the more junior staff; they're even called "supervising physicians" in some places.
If any project has more than a few people, I'm not sure how a "team" can proceed without at least a de facto organize/leader, and if that leader spends most of their time leading....well, that's a manager.
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.
Maybe these articles are written by people who have never been managers themselves. I'd also posit that most of the defense of the position comes from managers. Do you not recognize the irony in this?
I'm sure you're aware of what they say: Its difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it. Do you have the self-awareness to recognize that this, alone, is a huge reason why managers immediately come to the defense of their position?
I've been in the industry for 20 years now. I've worked with good EMs; I've worked with bad EMs; I've been an EM (less often). That spectrum isn't even relevant to the underlying assertion that the core definition of the role is invalid. Its extremely rare to work with an EM whose entire scope of responsibilities wouldn't be more productively served by a peer PM. The only advantage to an EM title is in the organizational power structure, which is far too often leveraged to abuse their reports by trading quality output and mentorship for more working hours, burnout, and Jira graphs.
This is interesting. What, in your opinion, should the core definition be (if anything)? And how is that eroded when tasked to an engineering manager vs. a project manager?
One of the major issues I have with the article is they lean heavily on the "creative work can't be managed like manufacturing widgets" train of thought. It feels to me that they define developers as artists when the article is about engineering. I think those are different roles are different. Even though both require a certain amount of creativity/subjectivity, it's a mistake IMO to conflate the two.
A Project Manager is a non-executive role. They facilitate the flow of information that keeps a project on track, including reporting progress up.
A Technical Lead, Design Lead, and/or Product Lead is the final arbiter of executive decisions about how a project will be completed.
A Coach meets regularly with ICs to help debug workflows and interpersonal issues.
A Manager signs paychecks, and takes responsibility for the work actually getting done professionally, reporting to HR when it’s not and taking action on behalf if The Company when needed. They are the legally responsible person for the things happening underneath them in the org chart. In an ideal week they do nothing at all.
Engineering Managers tend to do some combination of all of these things, usually most of them poorly since that’s way too much work for a single individual.
Thanks, that's an good breakdown. I'm curious, is this an ideal or a pragmatic approach? At first blush, I understand the distinctions but it feels more like a theoretical organization rather than a real one. I've personally never worked in an org with all those roles so, as you say, they tend to get mashed together.
It does seem like there would be a naturally pressure to lump together the roles. I suspect that if your ideal week happens too much (where the manager does nothing at all), executives would question why they're needed.
In my opinion it’s a pragmatic approach. When these roles get lumped together it creates conflicts of interest that have materially adverse effects on productivity.
That said, you’re right most companies will hire 50 engineers and 10 managers before they hire a single coach or project manager. Or allow IC leads to make their own decisions. So for those companies it’s theoretical. :)
But these roles all exist. You’ll find job listings on LinkedIn for all of them. So they’re happening somewhere!
Not the GP but it's nigh on impossible for an EM to do their job. Roughly speaking they are supposed to be the voice of developers/engineering. But since they are not hands on the code they don't know the reality of the code base and so can't be an effective advocate. Ultimately they end up being a relayer of messages.
I think the role needs to exist but it's not a per team role. You need one for every 4 teams or so. They're there to build the teams, make sure they're running right, and do the high level resource allocation. Day to day management of the team should be a collaboration between a lead developer and a product owner.
Maybe part of the problem is there is no consensus on what an EM "should" be doing. Note that the comment above this one gives a much different synopsis of the role.
I think Software Development is far more creative than you give it credit. Let me list a few realities of modern software development:
1) You give a spec to ten different engineers. You'll get ten wildly different solutions, from decisions within a single programming language, to different programming languages, to microservices and serverless.
2) So: make the spec more specific to reduce the variability. Now an engineer has to write the spec; and we're back to square one where the spec is just an expression of how they would develop it. You give it to ten engineers, and you still get ten different solutions; but maybe less variable.
3) Of those ten solutions, most will fail in weird ways, because software breaks. That's what software is known for; breaking. Its hard, probably impossible, to write reliable software, and we're on a deadline, so like 30+% of the team's time is spent just on operations.
4) Of those ten solutions, most will fail to account for some edge case, because the spec didn't cover that edge case, because (reasons). Well, file a followup ticket.
Those bullet points represent so much variability in how the future will play out that any ability to "manage" it is an exercise in futility. Add in interruptions, add in PTO, add in cross-team coordination, incidents, every day longer that a project takes reduces the accuracy of estimates substantially; that can't be managed (well).
That's why product engineering is fundamentally a creative effort. Maybe not like Art or Music; I liken it to more like, well, video game development (which, you know, people write code in so its really confusing to me why Culture considers that creative but not typical software development, I guess its because they produce something Pretty and Fun).
Video games have deadlines. They have business demands. Customers. Product-market fit. Roadmaps. Coordination. Massive, massive variability in implementation. Massive unknowns about what the final product will look like. Massive technical problems involved in bugs, performance, optimizations, maintenance, different platforms.
Here are five careers pages for major video game studios. Seriously, go to all of them, and tell me how many positions they have open for "Manager of People Who Do Traditionally Creative Things": [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Its not many, if any. They have roles like this, for sure, but they're not phrased or labeled from the perspective of "Writer Manager"; they're phrased as Lead Writer.
And the critical point there is maybe one involved in the hierarchy and power relationship. But more importantly, its background! The Lead Writer WAS a Writer. That's experience in the domain of the people you're leading; that helps massively in every responsibility this role should have. Timelines? Hella. Roadmapping? Heck yeah. Mentorship? The forbidden word that big tech managers hate.
But Tech is a weird microcosm where EMs are just Managers. The best EMs have an IC background, but many job postings list ZERO requirement to that effect [6], and ask any Engineer-turned-EM: They ain't doing much Engineering anymore. That's not just a benign anomaly; its a problem with how our industry builds companies. And we sit around twiddling our thumbs wondering why engineers hop jobs every year or two; its because, well, the pay is probably better, but also because its a coin flip on whether your manager is actually good, or just some guy that talks good.
Hypothetically, what is a better path forward? Get rid of "Engineering Management". The team has a Lead Developer, who is legally or whatever, the person who "manages" the team (there's that word again, KILL IT WITH FIRE). That role is a peer to PMs, POs, Designers, etc. That role requires a long history of actually doing engineering; and still does it, at least from a high level (meetings are necessary and, yeah, its hard for Engineers-Turned-EMs to find time to code;...
Everything you've said can be related to any other engineering discipline. Think of how many mechanical ways your car can break. Or a building can degrade. They have creative ways of dealing with that too. But do we insist that automotive or architectural design can't be managed? The distinction is other disciplines have managed away a lot of those failures through the constraining the design alternatives to standards and best practices (and sometimes regulatory codes). In other words, software feels like it's more creative because it's less well managed. So to say it can't be managed because it's more creative is circular logic.
What you've really illustrated is that software is hard. Engineering is hard. The distinction is that other engineering disciplines have had a much longer time to codify good practice. I bet if you went into, say steam engine design in the mid-1800s, it would feel a lot more creative than today. For a variety of reasons, software development is not nearly as good at implementing standards and to go into all of them would be a digression. However, I think the distinction that we disagree on is that it's due to anything inherently different in software. I'd make the case that software is easier in some respects (e.g., it doesn't display wear out failure modes) and harder in others (e.g., it tends to have more interface failures). I'm saying it feels more creative because it's less well managed. If you've ever worked in a heavily regulated sector like safety-critical software, it definitively feels less creative than a CRUD web-app development effort for this very reason.
I personally think part of the issue is that EM becomes a career-track that can start immediately out of school. It's similar to the change in MBA programs. The better MBA schools used to require that you have worked in industry for about a decade before even applying; now it seems like most schools offer a management track without necessarily having any experience. The result is a self-selection for people who want to manage without necessarily having a concrete understanding of what they are managing.
> I'd also posit that most of the defense of the position comes from managers. Do you not recognize the irony in this?
That’s not irony. That’s someone with no domain expertise saying something and then someone with domain expertise refuting it.
If I, a casual baseball fan, made a claim about umpires being useless in baseball and then an umpire came in to explain otherwise, that would not be irony.
I’m also not an EM, though I have been one in the past.
I don’t understand your point about PMs. You’re saying that the responsibilities of an EM should be that of a PM. So you’re just arguing for a name change? Or something else?
> I don’t understand your point about PMs. You’re saying that the responsibilities of an EM should be that of a PM. So you’re just arguing for a name change? Or something else?
Well, its not just a name change, but generally Yes.
The biggest thing is from the Org Hierarchy perspective. I want to preface what I'm about to say to be perfectly clear: This is not true in every company.
EMs have the final say on resourcing for code-related tasks; but poor understanding of the code, systems, etc because the Lead/Senior devs live there. EMs have the final say on product decisions from PO/PMs under them; but a poor understanding of the product because the PO/PMs/etc breathe that. EMs have the final say on designs; but a poor understanding of UX because the designers have that.
The best EMs always have some background in one of the roles I outlined above. They come from an IC background, they were due a promotion, burned out in the IC role, ran out of promotions in the IC track, whatever.
But in many situations the role of an EM becomes a mediocre mashup where the one thing they're actually good at is navigating the politics of org hierarchies; or if you want to be Business Proper, call it Communication. Ask any high school guidance councilor where "Communications" lands on the list of Valuable College Degrees and you'll get a pretty consistent answer. But: EMs somehow escaped this destiny, because tech has a weird distortion field on incomes right now.
Here's the sinister part: Because EMs hold power over everyone who reports to them, its common to see turf wars over responsibilities. Example: "We don't need to hire for a PM, I'm doing that". That's why it isn't just a simple name change; its their fundamental place in an org hierarchy that can make the role a net drag on an organization. Orgs hire them without a tactile definition on the responsibilities of the role [1]; just extrapolate "manage the engineers" to three paragraphs and call it good. You'll do roadmap planning (in collaboration with senior leadership and the PMs). You'll help prioritize incoming work from different stakeholders (in collaboration with the PMs, Customers, and Engineers). You'll help build the team (in collaboration with Recruiting). You'll mentor the engineers (but, we don't require any engineering background, so how you'll do this well is anyone's guess).
The role doesn't actually DO anything valuable; again, at best, the person has IC experience and can carve out a niche that's a hybrid of that IC experience and more coordination/communication. But at average, they're a message bus that attends meetings and parrots messages from someone that actually matters to someone else that actually matters [2].
> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role.
I think it doesn't help that you'll find about 1 manager for 8-10 engineers. The same spectrum, but lower raw numbers, might give an exaggerated impression of mediocrity.
> Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role.
Anecdotally, I've met a lot more people who don't want to manage (again) than people who don't want to be ICs. I think that indicates a different "spectrum" of humanity.
There are oodles of terrible managers. There are oodles of terrible everything and we definitely remember the bad experiences more than the good experiences. Especially since a lot of what a good manager does (deflect distractions, ensure consistent prioritization, hire people who don't suck) makes it seem like nothing is actually happening.
A very large number of people really are saying that these roles aren't necessary. Larry Page famously fired all of the managers at Google at one point in the past. I regularly see people say that zero management at all would be preferable, both for startups and megacorps. Heck, the article itself is about this very idea.
Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. This applies to managers and to engineers. Turn your argument around and ask what happens when good managers have to deal with crappy engineers, because there are a lot of crappy engineers too. (And note especially that engineers can be bad on many axes. It’s possible for people with excellent technical skills to bring negative value to the organization due to poor attitude or poor communication, among other things.) Do you want good managers to judge you and assume that you’re a bad engineer just because they’ve had to manage some other bad engineers? Bad engineers also taint the role and lead to a certain earned reputation.
But if everyone projects their worst fear on the role, then we’re all stuck making assumptions, being pessimistic, and missing the good people because we’re blinded by our stuck ideas incorrectly generalizing individual people to their roles. If we can’t stop to see the good things and what does work, then functioning together is difficult and it drags down the team.
What value do you see in good management, and what makes a good manager in your experience?
'more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do'
This is quite hyperbolical. A person can have a life experience of "mostly bad manager", but that does not mean "most managers are bad" or that "most people have experienced bad management".
I've been 16 years as a professional software engineer. I would not describe anyone to whom I was a direct report as "bad manager". Quite contrary, I've been quite happy with most of them. This does not mean a life without conflict or misunderstanding, of course.
Statistically, bad management is of course a non-neglible problem, but the above makes the situation sound hopelessly pathological.
I'd wager the percent of terrible managers is the same as that of terrible engineers. We all have worked with such coworkers at some point in our careers. Yet no one ever turns around and says "the engineering role is bullshit", simply because that would invalidate their own careers.
Eningeers get tons of actually effective training and schooling. Alot of people probably spent at least 4 years in school learning a science where there are right and wrong answers. It's easy to evaluate engineers. Most managers seemed to get to that role by accident, or because they knew the right person. I think there's way more underperforming managers. Managers aren't going to school for years, even when they do the degree they come out with feels useless.
I'm a PM, and I've had to live through a fair number of god awful engineers. It's miserable to work with them, too.
I don't malign the profession because I've had bad experiences. Engineers should be smart enough to know that experiencing a bad manager, or even a few bad managers doesn't mean that " people who live in these roles are overall bad, don't know how to effectively execute these tasks and present an aura of superiority over the technical roles when they're providing very little value at all."
> 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.
FWIW, all my engineering managers have been great.
> Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones"
I guess that's just your experience? Just because you've had a few bad apples doesn't mean all engineering managers are terrible.
> present an aura of superiority
Sounds like you're just projecting your experience onto other folks.
>because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do.
The irony is that I've heard the same said about engineers. It's easy to take the cynical point of view, but probably not wise or accurate. Like the OP, in my experience the people making those types of claims tend to have an overly simplistic view of the problem.
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.
There are just as many useless managers as there are useless reports. The reason you see so many 'managers suck' posts is because they're in a position of authority over the talent they manage. That's all.
Management shouldn't mean authority, it should be like HR or IT, a support role.
Who should be held responsible for engineering projects or initiatives that require more than one engineer? Who should be tasked with originating and prioritizing and staffing such projects?
"I should be paid 300k for only 3 years of experience, be able to work remotely without location-based pay, work 25 hours a week. Oh, and my managers should support me, not wield authority over me"
I'm gobsmacked by the entitlement of these people.
No, they are different roles. Technical leads makes technical decisions, not staffing decisions. Managers makes staffing decisions. They can be the same person, but often aren't.
One of my least favorite things about being on the technical side of things is this overarching smug sense of superiority that every other role is bullshit and doesn't do anything of real value. Or that other roles are malicious and/or incompetent and if engineers got their way the product would be perfect and free of defects of errors. e.g: "Don't blame the developers for X, we only put it in because of product or sales!"
Well product or sales probably don't like stuffing the product with ads, they only put it in there because you like collecting a paycheck every month.
Good way to bash that down is to ask 'would you want their role?' It makes them stop and think what does that person really do and they usually do not want to do it at all.
This was the question I asked myself that totally changed how I thought about sales and marketing people.
I cannot do sales, I do not want to do sales, but if I want a job someone needs to do sales. To me sales looks like an awful job, but some people really get a kick out of it and I'm glad they do because otherwise I would earn a lot less than I do.
We love to think that "if we build it they will come" but the reality is very different, and most of us work for companies that would struggle to grow without some form of sales or marketing operation, no matter how good the product might be.
You meet new people. They tell you about their problems. You explain to them how your product can alleviate them. You work on finding a common position regarding what you could bring at which price. When it works, you get a big cheque. It’s pretty fun really.
I've never personally felt that race-to-the-bottom capitalism would generally allow for such parasitic drains on productivity, but then again, if you're hiring on past contributions only, how would you as a non-expert in sales/marketing/etc know what makes efficiency?
I don't think your view is anywhere near as common as you think it is, but maybe in your immediate peer group there's some self-selecting cause for believing so.
I don't want the janitor's role either, but that person isn't in charge of me. Engineering managers are glorified secretaries. We should replace them with actual secretaries that are subordinate to engineers.
That's not a manager, that's a secretary, which is my point. Engineering groups don't need managers, they need lead engineers and clerical staff, similar to a group of lawyers or doctors.
Managers jobs are typically kind of like a secretary but more. But more of a jack of all trades. Making sure the budget is correct for this year so we can hire the right amount of people (accountant). Jim on the third row needs a lot more hand holding than usual because his wife is in chemo (HR). Going to the upper management to make sure that 3 of your co-workers get the recognition they deserve (cheerleader). Sitting in that 3 hour meeting working out who is going to pay for that feature the sales guys must have (negotiator). Plus a dozen other things. If that position did not exist you know who would be doing that? You and all of your coworkers would. Are a lot of people bad at that? Yep. But some are good too.
The point of my question is to make people stop and think about the chesterton's fence of why is that position there. For example your janitor example. Extremely well defined position. Most people do not want it (including yourself).
That is a terrible argument. Would you want to be the office elevator boy? I like to be useful so of a role would be useful I would want to do it even less.
As for what I think about managers: unsure, I have been a manager, worked under many managers (most of them bad) but I am still not sure if mangers should exist or be replaced with another role.
One of the best things I ever did was run a business on my own very early on.
I was terrible at it. Forced to actually contact customers I had no clue what to do. I had no idea how to price things. I communicated terribly and drove away initial customers.
I learned a healthy respect of other positions in a company, because when I tried them I had to accept they were actually hard.
You are right. Running a business is nuanced and smart people are required for it.
Imo, the real problem is that engineering work is disproportionately difficult compared to management and yet, management gets recognition, visibility and power to control engineer lives. This happens in every step. Engineering interviews are insanely harder than management, engineering promos are opaque and need grinding for years as opposed to management promos in growing companies and these days, senior engineers have to manage politics as well. Engineering managers are not useful in any way but yet, get higher compensation and recognition. Why?
The only manager that engineers like are those who have previously been strong engineers themselves. It's the earned respect that lets people be ok with bosses. Not titles themselves. Certainly not people management or glorified assistants managing spreadsheets for upper levels.
As someone who has switched between management and IC work, I’ve found management to be much, much more difficult to do well. Management should be managing people, which is much harder than managing code.
Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.
> Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.
I believe that the job is nearly impossible to do well. Which leads a lot of people to suspect that the role of Engineering managers is badly defined. Which leads to all the complaints above. Nobody is happy with the current org structure.
People with emotional issues aren't as likely to be promoted into management. Management is often way more stressful as you're getting dumped on from above, from peer managers, and all the negative feedback from devs all at the same time (plus needing to actually facilitate getting things built). Maybe you work at some poor company that can't promote devs high enough so they're forced into some form of management role to get a promotion. Those companies suck because they steal good IC talent for roles they're less suitable/valuable for, and causes the company to have perverse incentives to over bloat their management pool than necessary.
I've worked at several big corps and the managers are the ones who take all the stress. I would never ask one of my team (or one of my colleagues) to work to the point where they cried - this is a negative signal.
But in fuzzy disciplines like management you're allowed not to do well. Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code. Thus when bad managers demand that you do x by end of the day/week/month they put an insane amount of pressure on you because there's only one way out. You have to crack the code, you must figure the problem out.
Therefore technical people develop a special sort of humility, reminded everyday of their errors by the law of physics, that bad managers who fail forward never do.
> Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code
I mean, structural engineers are fighting physics. Software engineers, generally, are fighting information theory. FWLIW, I spent 15 years as a (quite successful) programmer with a lot of bullshittery going on about what code works. Have you never shipped buggy code and played it down b/c of time constraints or you were just tired or not motivated or realized this bit doesn't actually need to be perfect?
That's actually why I switched to being a people manager - I was a mediocre programmer that people thought was exceptional because I was good at the b.s. I find people management much more difficult to do well, and much more rewarding when growing junior eng into senior eng compared to shipping a bit of code.
I think the critical point is: You've done both. I don't know you, but I will go out on a limb and say: having that history as an IC makes you a better EM; one of the good ones I hope.
Great EMs have that experience; and it makes their/your job way harder because now you understand, at a deep enough level, what the people you manage are going through. When product reqs come across the desk of an IC-turned-EM, they can feel that gut punch immediately: "fuck, this is going to be so hard, that system is so legacy, and Sarah is super overloaded right now because she's the only one with any experience on the message bus transformer converter ingester"
Management track EMs actually do have it easier, because they get to think in the discrete world of tickets and human resources.
At a high enough level in any company: senior leadership needs to think about the world as perfectly discrete like that, because there's so much other bullshit going on that worrying about the specifics of the message bus transformer converter ingester would drive them off a cliff. But EMs aren't that. But many, many EMs think like that, and a big part is the incentive structure of their career path; their boss thinks like that, and their boss's boss thinks like that, so if I want to have my boss's boss role one day I need to think like that.
The strawman side of what I'm arguing is: "Well, you're just describing a bad EM". But the whole point is that that's quickly becoming the average in the industry, and that average is starting to define the role. Career-track management who get promotions, then write the hiring reqs for their replacements, and every other EM below them, combined with a massive shortage of engineering talent meaning companies need to define a different bar for their EM hiring reqs anyway.
Spot on. The fact that engineers keep having to learn things continuously for years, decades treading through anywhere from technically difficult issues to bad documentation, mostly on their own time for fear of falling behind, while running to honor daily and hourly deadlines and being imaginative, smart and personable at work is insane. Atleast managers get to rely on their experience that adds up while engineers jump through languages frameworks and libraries while attending leet code interviews is crazy. But peasant, get back to work and no quiet quitting for you, and you are a lower form of life is the prevalent attitude among many managers. There are good managers, most of them technical like you said, a smaller portion among them have empathy
As someone who's spent 25 years straddling the IC/EM line in companies of all sizes, I can tell you unequivocally that management—especially engineering management—is not easier.
I think it's fair so say that gross incompetence is easier to recognize in a programmer than a manager, especially to the untrained eye. It's also true that a well-functioning team may be easy to run and the manager shouldn't have to do much except not fuck it up.
But at any kind of scale, all problems are people problems, and there are never ending systematic dysfunctions and organizational problems. Everyone can be making a valid claim to doing their job, yet the output is nowhere near what it could be. These types of problems can be difficult to diagnose and extremely difficult to unsolvable at the high end. One must be technical enough to understand the details, able to zoom out and understand how costs of various paths interact with UX, operations, security and other concerns, and then say the right things in the right venues to nudge people in the right direction while also maintaining the morale and agency of all the ICs who do the actual work.
It is brutally difficult, and the reason most EMs are bad is not out of malice or sociopathic tendencies (though I will say the emotional toll is high for non-sociopaths which is probably one reason they are disproportionately represented in management and executive leadership).
I think these comments come mostly from engineers who have just started their software engineering journey or somewhere in their early stages. When you are at that stage, your odds of coming across an inspiring figure in other areas are very low, unless you have a natural proclivity to other areas in your life.
As you grow, you do realize that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and you mellow down and start to learn the interfaces with other functions. Even then your superiority bias won't away but will mellow down for sure. This is simply because your success as a mid-senior engineer is no longer a function of just your engineering skills. Its a function of how well you can sell your ideas, how you can articulate your messaging so that every other function can work with you, how do you get buy-in from competing parties etc.
But again, engineers will brush these aside as 'politics' unrelated to software engineering :)
When I was just starting out as an engineer, I was very interested in what management was doing. I went to every town-hall type meeting I could, every business planning meeting, every financial meeting. I really wanted to be steeped in it to understand the role.
Year after year after year I learned again and again that there's something truly toxic about middle-management and up. It's like the higher you go, the worse the air gets, and your brain starts to get clouded and fuzzy. Technical people stay in their roles for decades and get better and better over time; management plays musical chairs where they change roles every 2 or 3 years. The new role has almost nothing to do with their old role. If you saw a whole group of people randomly switch every couple years between being an Aerospace Engineer, then a Software Engineer, then an Environmental Engineer, then a Structural Engineer, you'd rightly go: wow, all these engineering jobs must be super easy! They just throw anybody into those roles. They don't take any time to learn, etc. etc. So why, when people randomly switch every couple years between product manager, director of operations, financial director, project manager, sales manager, director of internal innovation, director of digital growth, director of New-Techy-Buzzword -- why do you not conclude the same thing? All those jobs are stupid and worthless, clearly, because they come and go with the wind, and anyone in the mid-to-upper-management sphere can take on any of those roles. Clearly they require no training. Clearly they are not hard. Having an MBA degree does not qualify you to do all of those roles, unless those roles have absolutely nothing to them. Note that I intentionally excluded anything having to do with "legal" in there, because that's an actual job that takes an actual expert.
My long-winded point is that I did the exact opposite of what you claim. I used to believe that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and that all these other functions are an important part. But I learned, time and time and time again, that the primary driving force in corporate America is the Principal Agent Problem and that all these roles are just titles to be shuffled around among those in the Business Caste for their own personal benefit. Entire companies are nothing more than pawns in the game these guys (and it is mostly men) are playing with each other, jockying for the most impressive-sounding titles, extracting as much money as they can from the public sector into their own pockets. If they're actually doing their job well, they're losing at the game. You have to switch jobs every couple years to keep up.
Here's the thing. At the end of the day all of the "complexity and nuance" of running a business doesn't matter. The only way you even get to execute on that is if you're flanked by good engineers.
All roads lead to the engineer. Bad managers can be worked around. Mindless PMs can be worked around. But if every engineer at apple suddenly stopped working there would be real economic consequences. If managers and PMs stopped working they'd be replaced by engineers who are by and large more capable at adaptation anyway. Engineers should hold all the power. In most orgs management exists to prevent what is effectively an artificial union forming among engineers. Most, I'd argue even 99%, of engineers do not want to be sitting in meetings and spending 9 hours a day building CRUD. Without the guy cracking the whip over your head you wouldn't. I wouldn't. Anyone wouldn't. The power dynamic favors managers - hence all the hate.
MBAs take a lot of flak because much like the kid engineer coming out of school who believes he's legitimately God's gift to man the MBA does the same. The difference? The MBA controls your salary, whether you keep your job, whether you get your job, the direction of the company, the marketing of the product, the features that will be worked on, the finances of the company, etc. The MBA holds legitimately all power that is not engineering. As such, by generalizing and blaming "the MBA" you are more right than wrong on who is the real problem. I believe most engineers should go back for their MBA. Not to get better at business but to understand their enemy. An entire career is boiled down to a few excel formulas.
Do you know what makes me happy? Not even knowing my manager exists. Not even knowing my PM exists. In my a little over 10 year career I can name two managers and one PM that actually made a fundamental difference to me. I'd be infinitely happier if PMs and managers were replaced by robots that let me do my job and enjoy what I do. Instead, even something as trivial as "I'd like an extra day to optimize this because I can see it having problems under load" needs to be "scoped" and "talked about", then it needs to be "put into a future sprint", then it needs to be "pointed", "tagged", "etc". This is borderline tyranny to someone who is creative. Only a spreadsheet monkey sees value in this nonsense because at the end of the day I'm right (because I built it) but I won't be given time to do it until it breaks (because the MBA), when it does I will be on pagerduty and probably hearing about it (from my manager), and then I will need to ask for time and a meeting will be called to discuss and do JIRA nonsense (by the PM). You see? As an engineer it's always my fault. Even when I'm right. Who are the people who will arrive at my desk to blame me? Them.
> much like the kid engineer coming out of school who believes he's legitimately God's gift to man
(other people doing stuff, inducing mild amounts of accountability)
> This is borderline tyranny to someone who is creative.
> most engineers should go back for their MBA. Not to get better at business but to understand their enemy.
That's an incredibly adversarial attitude severely lacking in self-reflection and empathy. It's really tough to work with people wound so tight. Having been a manager, if I were yours, I'd be working on helping you grow up a bit, and if that didn't work, I'd be helping you find a different role that was more suited to your...ahem...creativity. A role far away.
It's weird you assume I openly post this where people know my face.
I play ball at work because if I play ball I continue to make enough money where at the end of the day I don't care. I'm fully capable of reading a room and know full well the consequences of stepping out of line. Frankly a manager "helping you find empathy" strikes me as a form of indoctrination.
But thank you for the deep psychological analysis. Frankly I'm glad you're not my manager because the saccharin nature of your psuedo intellectual post would probably have me quitting anyway. It's always the "empaths" who are the first to fire the shots across the bow in the face of valid (albeit direct) criticism.
I'm only going by the words that you wrote. You come hot out of the gate and people's reaction to that validates your internal drama where everyone's an enemy. But all we're talking about is your feelings at this point, so I'll just stop because that tangle really does escape me.
> If managers and PMs stopped working they'd be replaced by engineers who are by and large more capable at adaptation anyway.
It's funny how these ultracapable genius engineers don't just start their own company free of these bullshit manager and PM roles and just steamroll the competition, isn't it?
Avoid confusing sales with managers. Most "genius engineers" still need
money, and they still need that fabled creature known as the salesman
who can convince someone to pay for a software system he doesn't need.
1. They would rather be building cool things than doing all the other things involved in running a company. Nobody said managers are doing literally nothing, just that they're generally not very good and they really don't deserve or earn the authority they have. Their role is a support role, like a typist or a document manager or something. They should be considered basically secretaries to the engineers, so your question is "why don't the engineers all go become secretaries then?". Not to bash secretaries, but rather to give you the point that their authority comes not from what they do, but rather from the caste they were born into and/or the college they graduated from.
2. Many of them would go and start their own (likely very successful) companies, if doing so weren't a gated community open only to either (A) those who already have lots of connections and lots of family money to fall back on as a safety net if they fail, and (B) those who are willing to subsist on dry Top Ramen and live out of their car for years while they devote 100% of their time to their startup. Most of the good engineers out there have responsibilities like kids and/or mortgages, because it takes a long time to become a good engineer. And most people aren't born into the "business caste" that starts companies and becomes high-level managers at companies in the US.
3. They do. When it does happen, they become wildly successful and do completely fucking steamroll the competition, because the competition actually truly veritably is garbage run by chucklefucks who are only there because they were born into the Business Caste.
The real reason is a lot of us are risk adverse. We’ve seen startups go bad many times. It seems easier to work a mediocre but relatively high paying job, save, and invest.
I work with a lot of technical founders who struggle to accept the inevitable truth that taking the time to specify, coordinate, and resource what they want to do leaves no time to be the one doing any of those things. They eventually solve this problem by hiring other engineers to focus on the implementation step while they keep everything on the straight and narrow. When the company grows and they run out of time to directly supervise every engineer an engineering manager is born.
Engineers who don't appreciate the role of the product/marketing/management layers don't seem to understand that if they had to take on those responsibilities it would leave them with no time left over to write any code. If nobody takes on those responsibilities then our company won't make money to pay anybody to write code. It's not chicken and egg, it's cart and horse.
If you don't want to become a marketing expert as well as a product design expert for the sake of doing all these things simultaneously consider being glad others are taking things off your plate and coordinating work without you so you can focus on writing code.
Over the first 10 years of a an engineers career they might only be exposed to a few different management roles. It's possible that the manager isn't fulfilling the actual role so what you have left with is just the distraction.
Regardless if the manager is helping the team they almost always drain resources to aggregate information that they can synthesize upstream. It's a system that is so fragile it's not hard to see why we have an industry full of people that experience this.
Sure, but none of this is free. That's all extra work that has to happen. The fact that I'm doing it in "down time" doesn't make it free, I have a million other things I could theoretically do at any given down time.
Not to say this work is necessarily not worth the cost, but it absolutely costs something.
> Here’s an idea: Provide this information before they have to ask, when it’s convenient for you. Like between tasks.
Sometimes that's all the manager wants, and the team lets them down. Sometimes the team takes hours estimating work that no one can reliably estimate, because management wants a burndown chart to feel good about, even though the last n burndown charts were wildly inaccurate.
As with any situation, issues happen at every level. What's unique to managers, though, is that they combine overwhelming power on the team with zero accountability to the team. Obviously when something goes wrong the team is going to be mad about it.
I think you'r point is that people with 10 or fewer years of experience (which I think is many people in this thread based on the comments) might have a sample bias issue that stems from working around fewer total managers and fewer companies, where those companies also may be worse than average at selecting managers? I would agree that there are probably plenty of people who fit that mold given the state of our industry recently.
As for "draining resources" to do whatever reporting they need to do I don't think I understand what is fragile about it or why it would be anything other than necessary. It's like log aggregation/introspection, you do it because you want to see what's going on at a lower level without dealing with the minutia of every point of data.
To this end as engineers we design code that fills management roles all the time in our systems, and we understand perfectly why their role is needed but sometimes fail to realize that human systems are analogous. Nobody is arguing why a load balancer can be an important part of a system, or the values provided by ORMs, but here we are arguing about what managers do in a complex human system.
I see that the phrase "draining resources" can be taken to only mean a net negative. I was attempting to state that it takes time away from the team for the manager to function. That manager could see positive or negative returns on the time it took.
>it takes time away from the team for the manager to function.
I think a more accurate take is that it can "drain resources" from the individual to provide a net positive impact to the team (ideally). The problem with a lot of the cynical takes here is they appear to be only considering the perspective of the individual.
It's like the idea that if somebody stops by my office to ask a question; it's great for them to get an answer, but a detriment to me because it interrupts my work. If all I cared about was personal productivity, I would lock my door but the overall team productivity would likely suffer. A good manager puts together a system/culture that balances all those competing goals to the betterment of the team.
I still think there's an issue here just from the phrasing. "Taking time away from the team" implies that the team has better things to be doing. A manager isn't stealing a team's time by aggregating information to share upstream. A good manager is keeping the team aligned and informed so that they're working on the right thing at the right time. If the manager isn't there, the team needs to do that work, or be potentially wasting their time.
I see this as a rephrasing for a bias towards the management. Obviously a manager can completely waste the time of the team and company. Anecdotally I've had more managers do this than not that reported to me. I have been lucky with the people I've reported to myself especially earlier in my career.
I'll point out that the world is pretty diverse and there are actually lots of people who think that ORMs were a mistake and lots of people who think that using them is always a no-brainer. There's an interesting phenomenon that it seems like a lot of folks manage to build up reasonably long careers while only running into one side of this divide or the other and not even realize that the verdict on ORMs isn't a settled fact where one choice is always right.
Perhaps it's similar with engineering management and we should be having a more nuanced conversation.
I think that a helpful abstraction is that writing code is just one of many "levers" that one can deploy to transform one's ideas into a massively impactful, scalable system. Writing specifications, unblocking colleagues, and building team culture are equally powerful and often provide even more leverage. And if it's 10x better leverage, even if you're a slightly less efficient manager than you were a coder, that can still result in a net enhancement in your team's ability to turn ideas into reality. Of course, this won't be for everyone, and one's enjoyment of the day-to-day is perhaps even a larger factor. But if what you enjoy is seeing things come alive, it can be worth taking the plunge into uncharted waters.
> Engineers who don't appreciate the role of the product/marketing/management layers don't seem to understand that if they had to take on those responsibilities it would leave them with no time left over to write any code. If nobody takes on those responsibilities
Spending on marketing is like building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal in this respect: It is to everyone's detriment (yes, everyone) but if the competition does it, you must also.
You clearly only read the first third of the (admittedly) somewhat roundabout and meandering commentary. I know because your comment was what I was thinking until about a third of the way through, when I realized that that was not at all what this person is saying.
He only read the headline and now we're all discussing his feelings instead of reading the article which is about something else entirely. I recommend anyone still following this dysfunctional thread to go ahead and read it.
In fairness, the Agile Manifesto is about pushing developers to work directly with the business people and each other in order to cut out the 'middlemen' you speak of. Each of the twelve principles highlight areas where developers need to pick up the slack when product/program/project management is cut out of the picture.
For better or worse, this is what we, as an industry, have adopted and a generation has grown up not knowing any better.
The complaint about OKRs - using only specific meazurements to destroy the ability to decide/agency to land actual outcomes/results - seemed pretty spot on. It's not even engineering managers necessarily; knowledge working orgs in general, and, in my view, it's not immature to grumble about, it's immature orgs that ruin their best potential, that dont get knowledge work & actively obstruct it.
Having these ideas in mind, particularly backed up by some good background as is present here - some discussion on knowledge work, Peter Drucker quotes - is context orgs ought to try to be aware of, prevent from happening.
Sad to see such a well written well explained article reduced to "grow out of their mindset" antagonism. There's not any argumentation in this rebuttal, just personal badmouthing & berating. The conflict described is real, but apparently people who feel tensions & dissonance of it all are all just "immature".
There’s a lot of roles needed to build a product. As the engineering load grows, the engineers have less time to handle those other duties themselves as much as we might like to.
When that happens, other people have to be involved to take over.
There are real requirements to communicate with other parts of the business, customers, coordinate who is doing what and triage what is needed when.
So generally, I agree with you that the mindset isn’t a great one.
At the same time, there are methodologies that aim to alleviate exactly this problem by ensuring engineers directly control more than they often do.
Scaled Agile (SAFe) is my favorite because of two core tenets.
1. There are 2 backlogs, one managed by product/business and one managed by dev/ops/arch. Going into planning, capacity allocations are given to each (usually 70-30 product dev). Priority among those backlogs is entirely handled by the group managing it.
2. PI Planning where backlog items are presented from each group and dev is responsible for planning out those priorities over the next 8-12 weeks in the manner that they believe is best. Everybody who could potentially answer questions that devs have is present with their schedules cleared to streamline the decision making process. Plans are discussed with management, risks assessed and finally agreed on.
I love this process. It gets everybody on the same page as far as who is doing what, when and why. It reduces friction and lets devs focus for 2-3 months at a time without a directional shift.
Planning from product is focused on the next PI instead of the constant “we have to drop everything and work on X now!” situations that so often happen.
I wish more orgs would adopt it. I hear so often about devs stuck in orgs claiming to do so that aren’t actually doing any of the things that make it great and it’s frustrating.
> The field is oversaturated with incompetent PMs, team leads and CTOs.
The exact same thing can be said of programmers/developers; there are TONS of bad ones. The fact that there exist bad managers/pms/etc does not invalidate the need for good ones.
> Your ego knows no bounds to assume the entire world aligns to your own experience.
Yet, you also used just five examples, presumably from your own experience, to tar entire professions.
Yes, there exist incompetent PMs, Architects, Team leads, and so on. There are also competent ones. Just like there are incompetent and competent engineers. No profession has a monopoly on bullshit.
what you guys fail to understand is that the priorities at the micro level, are not the priorities at the macro level. of course any developer would like to prioritize having perfect code, latest tools, no interruptions, but money needs to come from some place, on time and you have to find a balance in what you put your focus on. that's what a good manager does.
it doesn't matter if you have the best product in the market, if the competition releases before you and has obtained all the clients. for the client, the task of moving to a slight better solution may not cover the cost.
just because people have other jobs, it does not make them stupid. of course, what i've said in here is over simplified, there are a lot of other jobs required in order to have a healthy, viable product with clients and cash flow.
My pet problem is not with those roles, they are needed, it is with the overpaying of those roles and downplaying of the requirement of actual engineers and thus lowering their standing an payment. An engineering manager should in my view never earn more than the rest of the team and where I live they do earn more by default.
It's hard to identify failing managent, especially from the top looking down, and the burden of management failures fall on those below them. This leads to a lot of frustration and blog posts like this, wondering if all managent is bullshit.
It seems really unfair to a developer, who thinks "if I screw up the entire company halts, if you screw up I have to work harder". And so the developer can't shake the feeling that management is bullshit.
> the complexity and nuance that goes into running a business
Unfortunately one of the side effects of having something so important also be so complex, hard to reason about, and hard to prove causation for, is that there are a lot of empty suits attracted to an area where it's hard to disprove that they contributed, but a lot of money to be made if they can convince the right people that they did.
By definition we can't know how many are genuinely hardworking contributors, how many are parasites, and how many are somewhere in the middle (e.g. did some good work but is phoning it home these days, got lucky but misattributed their own success so now just doles out bad advice). Claiming that only one of these three groups exists is of course naive - but when running into people who have a different perspective or make different claims, it's worth keeping in mind that the subset of these groups they've run into might differ from your own.
Interestingly Musk fired the entire Marketing / PR department. Hasn’t seemed to affect Tesla quite yet.
I love how you also snuck Scrum master in there, a role no one needs. Project managers are also often shoved into places they’re not needed (I’ve generally found them to be a net negative vs having the manager be responsible for it).
>Here, we see engineers reduce the contributions of such common roles as: Product Manger, Program/Project Manager, Scrum Master, Marketer
Cow dung is common too, but not necessarily useful. Maybe for manure...
Most actual work happens despite those roles, not because of them... Or even against them - and is dilluted, sabotaged, rushed, and crapped upon all the time by the decisions of the roles above.
If you meant "software production needs this role", then no. Software production (from Xerox Parc to the Linux kernel) can be just fine without them.
If you meant "a modern corporate bureucracy needs those roles to make a product", then maybe, but that's part of the reason those enterprise products are shitty.
What may look like cynicism at first is actually just fair criticism. It does not lack maturity, rather the opposite given it has some thoughtful research and examples of why EM can be in fact bullshit.
I agree. It feels like half of programming posts are just the same 10 topics discussed over and over
Yes we know management metrics can't predict every end date, we know agile doesn't solve every problem, we know blockchain is a solution without a problem, we know code complete and the mythical man month are some of the best programming books.
Managment offers an escape route to people who struggle with tech competency. Just grind it out for a few years a dev, then transition into management.
This is a standard formula for years and i've seen many many people follow this.
The real issue is that in most software engineering teams, these roles are better done by a SWE who is good at X than somebody who exclusively does X, but especially at big companies the person doing X doesn't really understand software engineering.
Being younger and 'technical' it's easy to feel as if you're a linchpin to the whole process and everything else is peripheral (This happens in every department though btw). I think everyone should try their hand at starting a business or launching a product (technical or non-technical). You will be amazed the labor and efforts that go into even the most mundane things and you will quickly be wishing you could hire on someone to help manage your product/project, help you market and network, help you find out which forms you need to fill out for taxes you didn't realize you needed to pay, what these terms actually mean, how to find capital, etc, etc, etc. If your product takes off I would guarantee you aren't going to hire an engineering manager to 'analyze' your engineers in order to optimize them as much as you are wanting someone to keep up with day-to-day issues and priorities so you don't have a dozen engineers sheering yaks or you aren't spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with a dozen engineers individual issues while trying to run a business and allocate yourself in a dozen other directions. Like you mention you become a lot more happy when you realize the tremendous efforts people on your team make (there are always exceptions) that may or may not be in your department.
Not so sure about that. In the beginning of my career I looked up greatly to a lot of people in these roles. The older I get the more that has faded. Truth is I can do their jobs fine, but they can’t do mine; yet they have a tendency to look down on me.
(I’m in Sweden though, and the MBAs still have a very strong grip on the Nordics. Might be a different social dynamic in the US.)
Heh, a bit harsher than I would have stated it but I can't help but agree. Of course, 30 years ago, I would have disagreed with you. Probably in a few decades the author of the article will agree with you too! So there's that.
I believe the take you see is mostly coming from enterprise developers that have witnessed the immense inefficiency and waste of larger organisations. The solution to a non-engineering savvy manager in such organization is to add more people and more frameworks.
Mind you - to "them", these "dreaded MBAs", the development organization is a problem, often regarded as cost, and development is done by... developers. Sometimes the developers is the actual problem and they have gradually sunk the software in to a unmaintainable swamp of crappy code and debt - but this is a competency and hiring problem. It will not be solved by any framework or project manager. But you need the competency in your leadership to understand what's what and this is missing from pretty much any large org I've set foot in.
The high functioning teams is these settings are more a stoke of luck, and they often have to utilize guerrilla tactics to keep delivering value.
I've seen my fair share of global CIO's talking us through cloud and blockchain, never have to actually deliver and move on to the next company or fancy role.
I've seen CIO/CTO not trusting developers and believing no-code and citizen development to be the end all. Guess what - more unmaintainable crazy stuff
I've seen large organizations falling in to the "one system" trap on all levels, even trickling down to the software teams - a dedicated 8 person jira team for the whole org! What could possibly go wrong.
I've also witnessed amazing autonomous development teams that move at amazing speed with quality. In these settings you have management that understands the process of supporting a business with valuable code.
Most of the time IMO it's the business themselves that cause a lot of the problems facing developers by not understanding that it's they who own the processes getting digitized.
They buy software from vendors, staff up a project team to integrate, fire and forget.
This "fire and forget" project mentality is what accumulates in a shitty org, and shitty orgs start from the top.
If you haven't read "Turn the ship around" it embodies all of this. This condensed video is really worth a look:
Instead of actually reading the article and critiquing what the author wrote, you've taken it personally and really just haven't provided any valid points.
The last 2 paragraphs of your comment can be applied to your behavior actually.
When it comes to managers, it's hard not to say their role is BS for many of us. I've never had a truly good manager (19 in 10 years). Many of their perceptions don't match with mine or the other team members.
A good manager is often invisible. If you forgot they were there, you were either lucky that everything in the org was going right (or was so far away it didn't matter), or they were really good at shielding you from the fact that everything was not going right (and making it seem like that didn't matter). :)
If you have something to explain about the roles of non-eng professions, then do so. All this post does is argue how you’re more mature and superior to everyone else in the thread (without explaining exactly how that is, or giving any particular insight).
Instead of an ad-hominem attack against a strawman, can you actually address the points made by these people you're labeling as professionally immature and unwilling to understand these non-engineering roles? Can you actually provide anything that illustrates your point at all? Just calling us all immature children does nothing to change my mind; it only makes me think you're defensive because you know deep down that your role is actually truly worthless bullshit. How many hours per day do you spend in meetings?
Every other part of a business runs on politics (i.e. bullshit). If you don’t want to be dealing with that 100% of the time, you need someone else to do it for you. And they will necessarily have to expose you to some of it, sometimes, to get info from you so they can communicate what’s going on to the rest of the business. Without the rest of the business doing what they do, you have nowhere to work.
And sorry, unlike a program you’re writing, you don’t have any say in how the logic works (or doesn’t). The rules are set and you’re in the system. You might be able to find some variations in other companies.
"...actual smart people can make real contributions in non-engineering roles."
Can they? Certainly. Do they? Well, not as often as you might like.
I used to work for a government contractor who had what I liked to think of as a "butts in seats" strategy. The contractor got paid by taking something like 50% off the top of what the customer paid for the employees (back when I was a contractor in industry, that was more like 15% but that is neither here nor there). The "complexity and nuance" that goes into running that business for a maximal profit involves keeping the direct customers happy---and they're managers, not users---while having as many employees as possible. You need to ride the line between leaving money on the table and having so much broken that higher levels of the customer start to get upset. Laying down narratives is a very important part of that process.
This isn't, however, limited to government contracting. I've ridden quite a few projects into the ground in industry because the goals and incentives of Product Managers, Program Managers, etc., were not aligned with the goal of a successful project simply because there are many ways to be a successful manager and a track record of successful products is not the easiest.
Yes, they were all smart people. Many were even likable, skilled leaders. But if your goal as an engineer is to be part of a successful product and not to be a well-rewarded part of a successful manager's organization, then you will not be happy. Is that what you mean by "professional immaturity"?
this is just personal and professional immaturity. bonecrusher2102's empty comment does not respond to any of the arguments in the blog post. instead it's repeating the same tired prejudice that the commenter inhibits against anyone who is trying to articulate a critique of business management. i really hope bonecrusher is able to grow out of this mindset. they'd be a lot happier and more productive
During my time writing software professionally I've had good, bad, and neutral managers.
I've found most of my good managers at companies that produce software as a product. These managers were technically trained and rose to their management roles through working as engineers at other companies. In two cases these managers were actually the CTO.
Most of my bad managers have been at companies that rely on software to facilitate their business, but do not consider software to be their business. These managers knew little about software and our teams were usually bloated by non-technical roles and often unproductive. Every idea ultimately had to be passed through engineers for validation / refinement and engineering became a very constrained resource.
Neutral management is where I would place most of my managers. They don't really aid in or detract from my productivity. They're there and doing things (even if those things are not always visible to me). They demonstrate enough value to dispell the feelings of: "If you weren't here then we could hire another engineer to actually work on this problem".
That said, you are 100% correct that if I didn't think about these things at all then I'd be much happier. After all, happiness is reality minus expectation.
This is most accurate to my experience as well. While I don't think it's helpful to disparage management as a whole, I do think it's beneficial to talk about where bad management exists, why, and how frequently. On the flip side, people talking as if bad management doesn't exist or is some minority I think are forgetting not every SWE works in the valley at a FAANG or bootstrapped to-be-unicorn company.
My issue with the converse is that being a good engineer and understanding how to do things doesn't necessarily make you a good manager. I've worked in plenty of orgs where they don't treat leadership as a skill unto itself and assume just because you're a good engineer, you'll be good at managing an engineering team.
I think if you have to pick a base for leadership, doing the thing you're managing other people in is probably the best.
The worst in my opinion is finance-- it's like driving using the rear view mirror. No business has ever succeeded or failed because their accounting was really tip top.
No doubt, I just think too often leadership is looked at as an afterthought to the skill they are managing? It's akin to the Peter Principle. Just because you are a good developer does not mean your skills translate to great leadership.
People would laugh at the idea of a good leader being thrust into a SWE role based solely on their leadership skills. Yet we often think transitioning from a SWE to a leader is just picked up. I'm asserting that they are different skillsets. Will being a good developer help lead a team of SWE? Absolutely, but that alone doesn't provide the requisite knowledge and skills to perform a manager role, but we often think that's the bulk of what's necessary.
I don’t discount the importance of Managers. The thing I struggle with is Engineers trying to do the job of Manager without having any training or even really identifying as a manager. They still think their job is to supervise technical decisions.
Meanwhile there are numerous process and personnel challenges that go completely ignored, because these Engineering Managers think their primary responsibility is as some kind of overseer preventing employees from doing their jobs wrong.
I would love if software companies started hiring dedicated, trained Managers. But that doesn’t seem like a thing they do. Instead they just promote an Engineer to Engineering Manager and hope for the best.
Some of you people strawman like a murder of crows is attacking your field.
Coordination is necessary. Communication is valuable. Running a business is complex. Product managers do valuable work. Designers do valuable work. QA does valuable work. Leadership does valuable work. Engineers do valuable work.
The core of an EXTREME number of complaints about modern professional software development lies in the pervasiveness of Career Management; and EMs are an extremely attractive entrypoint for people into this kind of track, who have no experience in any of the IC-facing roles, yet now they're managing ICs.
Just go look at the vast majority of job postings for EMs. The requirements are extremely bare on actual, hard engineering experience; maybe you see the last requirement read something like "built an app in java or c++", and it never gets covered in the interviews.
You can't manage a role you haven't held, I will die on this hill. Senior leadership is fucking hard; that takes specialized skills, MBAs maybe, a little bit of crazy as well. EMs are not that, and anyone who tells you what EMs do is remotely as specialized as what the people higher up do is probably an EM. At their best, EMs should have an engineering background (or at least PM/PO; having worked with engineers as peers); they should know what it takes to build modern software systems from the inside; they should know how to mentor. At their worst, EMs who don't know any of this, but know management, spend their days as a Jira parrot and can make the lives of the people they manage miserable.
Its actually astounding to me that this is controversial, and that people don't recognize that the only reason companies change the requirements bar for EM positions is because, if they made the bar what I describe, that candidate would also make a great engineer; and companies are short engineers, not short "people who manage people". Its not out of some grand design that the best managers live on the management track. Many, many other specialized disciplines don't do what Big Tech does. The tracks for Engineers and Engineering Managers shouldn't be separate; they should be one track. But Big Tech companies don't want their engineers leaving the IC role, so they make do; and the irony of it all is all this does is lower the average quality of EMs in the org, which causes engineers to leave anyway; just to competitors.
That's why Engineering Management is bullshit. It doesn't have to be. Much of what that role does is necessary; its just overwhelmingly filled by the wrong people, who then morph the role into some bastardization of what it should be, get promoted, then write the job spec for their replacement.
Engineers that have to do management and paperwork stuff cry that they're so busy with paperwork that they can't engineer. So management hires a guy for them and they cry about how that guy doesn't do anything.
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.
Because organizations of 'meaningful scale' should be separated down into organizations that do their piece well.
The reason we don't do that, is because we haven't gotten past being in a famine, zero sum mentality where hoarding power/resources is seen as obviously well and good.
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.
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, <insert hyped company name here>.
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.
> Nobody ever got fired for copying Google, Spotify, Twitter
This. I see it over and over. People are thinking that copying management practices of successful companies is going to make them successful too. But it only works if those practices are what made the likes of Google successful. And it's not: Google is famous for it's search engine, not for it's managers. It's also famous for it's graveyard of failed projects. Somehow smartest people in the world created the most hated frontend framework.
Having infinite power doesn't typically create good leaders, it creates dictatorships.
Do you think having infinite money naturally leads to good management practices?
Its REALLY important to note the macroeconomics of our current climate. Tech is so, so, so rich right now. There's so much money flowing around that we just brute force our way through every problem. Cruft doesn't matter. Too crufty? Hire someone else to do that cruft. Split that cruft off into another team, that's growth and now my title is Director. Woah, don't touch that cruft, that's my cruft and I'm a Director, I'll die on my paycheck to defend that cruft.
Conway's Law: organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
A Correlate to Conway's Law: in capitalist systems, an organization's communication structure is a mirror of its macroeconomic climate. Rich economic climates breed excess.
I'd posit that if you normalized the Y axis on the graphs "amount of time employees at tech companies spend on paperwork" and "the US M2 money supply", they'd correlate pretty well over the past thirty years. If you take the position that's a coincidence, or that the correlation doesn't imply causation in this case... just wait to see what happens to all that previously critical paperwork, pushed by previously critical people in indispensable roles, when the latter graph flatlines or inverts.
I'm in a IDC role now where I do basically zero paperwork other than writing my own pull request notes. It's incredible. Can confirm that all paperwork I did in the past was nonsense and created by managers.
In the scrum guide, the scrum master is considered to have a management role. Although it's a management role, I don't believe it's a people management role. That's what the Engineering Manager does and ideally they wouldn't be attending the scrum.
I had a scrum master that literally did nothing. He tried to get me to do his work, like running planning poker, updating sprint status slides, and other assorted nonsense, while he literally phoned it in from his kid’s baseball game. I was the tech lead on the team and flat out refused. Eventually he got one of the more junior engineers to do it.
The purpose of engineering management is to create a buffer between the engineers and the a’holes, who, if permitted to manage the engineers directly, would drive them from the company. This is a critical, but not full-time job, as evinced by the fact that most engineering managers are themselves engaged in technical issues.
i've seen some pretty dysfunctional orgs, but none that has been that bad. a bit of diplomacy, a bit of corner cutting, a bit of bullshitting, some inflated sizings, a bit of politics, and you can buy the team enough time to clean up, get organised, and get back in shape
In a well oiled org managers aren't needed. I know it because I've been part of one. It needs specialised skilled workers i.e., product owner, product designer, project manager, and engineers. There'll be a tech lead among engineers who will be point person for the project manager. That's it. At the top you need execs or business heads liaising with product owners and/or project managers.
Managers however become essential when this well oiled machine is thrown off by a sudden expansion of the team or when there's a chronic uncertainty about the work that's going to happen next month. Then you need whose who are good at navigating this chaos through networking, politics etc., to get the work done as well as making sure the team survives should the axe fall.
all that means is that you're making either the tech lead or your project manager the engineering manager. whoever is between business and the engineers, saying yes/no to the former based on the needs of the latter, is the EM
I like to think that management is a noble profession if done right. I've seen a handful of examples over a 10+ year career thus far.
You get to empower people to be better versions of themselves everyday. What other job allows you to do that?
The reality however is that most EM jobs are in fact bullshit jobs. They usually have people who are simply managers/operators, not often leaders nor coaches. To summarize a people manager's job, it's two main things:
1) Get results
2) Grow & retain your people
The challenge is that many EMs are also "assholes" so both of these goals are hard to accomplish. They fit into an asshole category in itself:
- political assholes master the art of corporate politics but do nothing but take credit for everyone else's work.
- controlling assholes micromanage to the point of strangling creativity and joy out of their team while taking credit for others creative ideas and call them their own.
- asshole assholes are mean, jealous, and insecure jerks who find ways to lie and manipulate others for their gain.
- mission-driven assholes are people who are crazy passionate and trample over how things are "done around here" to see the mission succeed.
Note: I use the term "asshole" in reference to Tony Fadell's book "Build". It's a fun way to think about it.
Most engineering teams tend to optimize for the incentive of the engineering manager, not the whole team. It's winner-take-all. The good EMs are the ones who see through this and ensure their whole team is empowered at the potential cost of their own incentive. These EMs usually win-win in the long term.
I would guess these pieces are usually written by people who sees one side of the story. In manufacturing, or maybe economy in general, states that there are 3 kinds of activity that create value, the idea, the manufacturer and the marketer. Of which the manufacturer has the lowest margin. My adaption of the smiling curve to software engineering is creation, maintenance and marketing.
There are engineers out there who sees themselves as "idea compiler" ,which is totally fine imo. Not everyone needs to see the "big picture". But the maintenance and marketing aspect of any software project is not to be underestimated. And it is beneficial to not undermine things that one doesn't understand. You don't know what you don't know. Keeping an open mind helps you to reduce the realm of unknown.
Engineering management is not bullshit in my opinion. It is, and always been, an organization-specific role. This leads to the ambiguities that can be frustrating.
There are two distinct roles in an engineering organization: staffing, process and engineering resources (indirect), and product/project development and delivery (direct).
Relegating staffing, process and resource decisions to non-engineers (e.g. HR) is not the best solution. It takes experience and expertise to build a good staff and engineering culture. That is the job of engineering managers.
Do engineering managers act as mentors? Sure, and they can also provide technical input. But that’s just one of their many responsibilities.
Roughly 30 years ago, this same discussion was happening around something called a “matrix organization.” It was the same confusion of responsibilities under a different name.
Everything works fine when everyone stays in their lane (managers, I mean) and pushes in the same direction. It takes coordination, and it’s not something that people can reinvent on a daily basis.
In short: Make a plan for your organization, write it down, show it to everyone (over and over again like beating a drum) and then stick with it. For those who don’t comply, send them packing.
your reply echos my reply and working in a matrix organization. are there terrible managers -- yes, but in a well functioning organization with definitive role a manager should be as you describe and not what is written in the article.
what's crazy to me are all the comments here that echo what the article is saying where managers seem to be some sort of rulers and be all in an oganization, which would totally suck and i'm glad i don't work somewhere like that.
The best manager I've had described his job as "working for developers". Like a shared assistant that acts as the communication point for stakeholders, gladhands needy customers, completes rfps/security questionnaires/other paperwork, finds talent, etc. Seems like any other position - a great manager is priceless / a bad one is pernicious
Even as an engineer, I hope FFS no one notices my vacations. It means everything is running smoothly and I actually get to have a little down time and not think about work
Every job I've worked at, when a co-worker goes on vacation, it's up to the other engineers and laborers to compensate. When the manager goes on vacation there's no extra work leftover
Engineers having to compensate for your vacation sounds like a bad engineering org. Ideally, any gap in engineering should not be missed. If there are fires while you're out, there's something worse going on that needs to be addressed, whether it's bad management or bad engineers
Engineers generally don't take over the manager's responsibilities unless they're technical or reporting responsibilites. Generally it's another manager. Most companies require management involvement in P0 incident response for an example. At most companies I've worked at an engineer generally wouldn't be an acceptable substitute. A peer or the manager's boss usually takes it in their absence. It's not unusual that a significant portion of management responsibilities aren't visible to their individual contributor direct reports.
Bell curves apply to every profession. There are a few truly terrible managers, a bunch of mediocre ones, and a few truly great ones. Same with developers, engineers, teachers, nurses, or whatever.
For someone in some profession 'A' at the top 5% of their peer group, everyone else seems incompetent by comparison. However, it's easy to ignore the incompetence of their own peer group. There are a few reasons for this. For example, if you're good at 'A' and someone is bad at 'A', you can more easily fill the gaps with your own knowledge and paper over that problem, which makes it seem less important. Similarly, highly skilled people tend to work in teams with other similarly skilled peers, etc...
However, when looking at random samples from profession 'B' (whatever that is), then the top-5%-at-A person will typically come across median 'B' people. That's just statistics.
So what does a top 5% at 'A' person think of median people in profession 'B', 'C', and 'D'? That they're all idiots and that their jobs are not as complex or meaningful as whatever 'A' is, of course!
Don't assume anything about what 'A' is. Could be engineering, science, finance, or whatever. The statistics is the same.
Management however gets significantly more flak than other professions, because they're forced onto employees. You don't generally get to choose your manager, you're assigned one. You don't get to fire your "superiors", even if they're clearly in the bottom 5% of the management profession and you're in the top 5% of your profession.
This is why you hear skilled engineers grumbling about bad management. So does every other skilled member of every other profession, including skilled managers, which have random managers above them!
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 great at Google. But first, a research team tried to prove the opposite: that managers actually don’t matter, that the quality of a manager didn’t impact a team’s performance. This hypothesis was based on an early belief held by some of Google’s leaders and engineers that managers are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, a layer of bureaucracy.
The team defined manager quality based on two quantitative measures: manager performance ratings and manager feedback from Google’s annual employee survey. This data quickly revealed that managers did matter: teams with great managers were happier and more productive.
Google currently asks Engineering Managers to focus on three areas: Leading work, developing people, and building community.
What are some ways I spend my time?
1. Making sure my people are supported in their lives and careers. This can mean giving someone a task they will take a long time to finish, because it's the right thing for them (and the team) to have that person learn about that area. You are trading off project/feature delivery for personal and team growth. It can also mean helping someone find ways to still have impact when they are struggling with some aspect of their job.
2. Clarifying strategies and priorities. There are only so many things the team can do successfully, and someone needs to be the person who says No. I am also the person best situated to look outward to other groups and teams to identify areas of collaboration.
3. Making sure we are organized appropriately and effectively, and that we are following good Engineering processes. I hate unnecessary process as much as anyone -- I've always said process should be something that helps you get your job done properly and effectively, not a hoop you need to jump through in order to do your job.
As an EM (and when I worked as a developer), I have had my own share of high-quality and poor-quality managers and Directors above me. If you feel EM is bullshit, I'm sorry you've never experienced what it's like to work on a team with a good, supportive manager.
Most companies are 10% difference makers, and 90% paid interns. To the
extent those interns need to feel like they're contributing, yes,
managers are important.
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.
Changing perf/promo processes can be challenging. You can't always roll out minor changes (because the problems may be systematic), nor do them quickly; at Google's scale you need documentation and tooling to support your processes. You can try to fix some parts, but that can make other parts worse. But maybe that's OK. You can't optimize for everything, so you try to achieve the things you believe are most important and accept the remaining flaws.
Promotion policies continue to evolve at Google based on internally-sourced data. They changed most recently a few months ago. It's a constant that people don't like the current process, but they also don't like it when it changes :-). But I do appreciate that Google recognizes that the perf/promo processes could be better, and then they try to make them better.
Read about Admiral Rickover. He built the first practical nuclear submarine in the world, for the US navy, in record time of 3 years. He cleared bureaucratic hurdles, played the politics when needed, kept tight control, delved deep into the technicalities of the project, recruited and trained a large number of people into the program, and ultimately made the project successful.
Dig deeper into any other large scale projects, you'll find great engineering management. The Manhattan project is another example (It should be categorised mostly under engineering management & not scientific management, according to some of the members in the team).
I think there is a huge difference between managers who can get a project over the finish line and ones who can get multiple large projects over the finish line. I'm not saying that Admiral Rickover didn't/couldnt do that but many managers are effective at cracking the whip and making X happen but at the expense of their teams health which leads to burnout and turnover.
I'd also say military management is significantly different than civilian. If my manager tells me to jump I'm not going to say how high. I'm going to say why are you asking me to move its early and i havnt had coffee yet.
Rickover was near the top echelons of US navy for ~60 years, as far as I know. Definitely, he knows a thing or two about burnout and turnover. He executed many, many sophisticated projects throughout his life. That's why he had such a long & successful career. I'd recommend reading his book - The never-ending challenge of Engineering. In my readings, this has been the best book on Engineering management.
Secondly, about burnout and turnover. Let's discuss from an empirical standpoint. The number one proximal cause of turnover is lack of "commitment". There are longitudinal empircal studies which demonstrate this. Job satisfaction is important as well; however commitment dominates every other factor.
Hence, it is important for managers to generate commitment, one way or another. I believe from these aspects, Rickover truly understood engineers and technical folks... In fact, he went against the US military books, and emphasised Individual initiative and judgement, regardless of what the rulebooks said. In a way, Rickover was able to work around the navy rules to create sufficient commitment to get complicated jobs done.
Agile Software development done well is a good way to combat BS because it makes building a product into a team sport where everything is out in the open. Grooming, planning, sprints, standups, retrospectives, demos are all ceremonies which increase transparency and accountability. They also provide a way where development productivity can be measured against the collective assessment of the team.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadHigh impact management work isn't mentioned here. These are things like developing your people and networking. It's a lot of work to get somebody promoted, even if that person is a well-known high performer. Networking with other managers, product managers, finance, IT... building influence with other parts of the company, this pays huge dividends for your team.
High-impact managers focus their efforts around the people on their teams.
"Rather than focus on delivering results (which again is difficult(!), might be wrong, and often not easily identified by leadership), these people spend time making alliances and crafting narratives about outcomes instead of delivering. Title acquisition becomes the goal, seeking to maximize the expected organizational rewards, at the expense of direct results, all while working to minimize accountability."
Where it becomes fascinating is the 10+ year EM. They used to know what to do, but clearly don't anymore. They either accept that, and lean on their leads for technical decisions and just focus on politics, or dont accept it and thats what it can get bad fast.
Of course organizations have politics. It will always be that way unless you get rid of all the humans.
To be clear, I'm addressing this narrow aspect of management, I've had managers who helped me resolve disputes, get access to resources and opportunities I couldn't have gotten on my own, et cetera, and I see the value in that without qualification.
But "adversarial" management is just a reality in company that has $X to spend and 12 different ways to spend it.
Business decisions often have to made with limited data. A engineers "super cool feature that should obviously be implemented" is not so obvious at the CEO level where there are multiple competing projects.
As such there is a need to "sell" ideas internally -> that's politics.
Generally I find that managers are awesome at facilitating stuff and making sure information gets where it needs to go but that when they dictate it leads to bad decision making because they don't have the proper insight. This becomes exacerbated as you add levels of indirection are between the manager dictating decisions and the people on the ground implementing them. That isn't per say their fault, it's just the dynamics of hierarchies. As information travels up the hierarchy it becomes more essentialized and nonspecific. It loses fidelity. Statistics can travel up the hierarchy, experience can't. So that engineer who's close to the problem has this rich first hand information about the system, and the CEO has a spreadsheet and third- or forth-hand accounts of the situation on the ground.
There's certainly a lot of global, systemic insights you can make from that position and useful work to be done. But it's probably not whether a individual feature of a broader project should or should not be implemented. Internal salesmanship is a bandaid, but structuring the organization differently is a solution.
Business decisions are rarely black and white which is why if you can’t articulate why you should get resources, you won’t - someone who can articulate their value better will get resources. And if they can convince someone else their idea is best, now you’ve got two people advocating (i.e. politics).
The larger orgs get the more politics because there is simply to much going on for any one person to have all the information needed to make a decision - they can only rely on others to argue for their own priorities.
But OPs post / self described high impact activities pretty much fit the definition of (company) politics perfectly.
The many pertinent questions I am asking are: Is it useful or necessary, to have people doing company politics full time, what are the incentives? What does this say about an organisation? Is such (internal) politics healthy for an org, how much is it predicated on, and much does it foster internal tribalism?
Is it? Why? Sounds like a problem created by managers to me.
> Networking with other managers, product managers, finance, IT... building influence with other parts of the company, this pays huge dividends for your team.
I sincerely hope no engineering manager acts or thinks this way, or they will soon be just another MBA manager who doesn't know anything, other than how to navigate among other MBAs who also, don't know anything.
Do you not get the problem with people who don't know anything besides politics being in charge of delivering real world products and services?
The few who did have impact (1) were skilled engineers in their own right and were able to translate that into more management, (2) understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively. Those are very few and far in-between imo.
The model of manager as a babysitter is, I think, what happens when an organization gets to a certain size. Once the organization gets big enough, management becomes a vehicle for bureaucratic surveillance. At that size, an organization uses managers to give a human face to bureaucratic machinations.
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
Ok, that’s how the world works, do we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend we can ignore it? Or do we embrace it and accept the rules of the game?
Imagine having this attitude about literally any other widespread problem.
"Ok, everyone is spewing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Do we close our eyes and ignore it, or do we join them and roll coal? LET'S BURN SOME FUEL BOYS"
"Ok, everyone is dumping toxic waste into the river. Do we just ignore it and keep drinking, or do we embrace it and just chuck our own toxic waste in there?"
"Ok, everyone is eating each other in Satanic canniablistic rituals. Do we just pretend it's not happening and go about our day, waiting to be eaten? Or do we fire up the grill and go on a hunt!?"
Um, how about a third option: we be vocal about how the problem is an actual problem and work together toward fixing it?
It’s a nuanced thing. An EM should share accurate context, filter distractions, and deliver it in the most effective way for that team.
There’s also the shielding aspects in dysfunctional organizations which is a whole other thing.
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 anything. Turns out he spent most of his time in higher level meetings finding out what projects were coming and ensuring we were properly staffed and projects got scheduled reasonably. He'd go into a meeting uninvited because "this project doesn't involve software" only to discover that there would be a software component to the project and make sure that was covered. Turns out once I knew what he was actually doing I'd say he was one of the more effective managers I've worked for. Things usually ran smoothly and random shit never dropped from other parts of the company unexpectedly. He did zero engineering (but he had previously), and most of what he did was unseen to us. Life was good because we lived behind an invisible shield.
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."
It's like good infrastructure, if you don't notice it and you can proceed through your life with minimum distractions, that means it's working as intended.
As someone who's been on all sides of this (currently an EM, been a tech lead and an individual contributor in the past), I really think there is a lack of understanding among large parts of the tech community about what engineering managers do. A good manager's first and primary responsibility is to reduce chaos for their team. In an ideal world you won't even know I'm here, because I am shielding you from all the stuff that is going on further up in the company and clearing out obstacles so that you can work without interference.
Good managers reduce chaos, bad managers create chaos. In my experience, engineering managers are a lot like all other employees: you have a few outstanding performers, a significant number of average/acceptable/mediocre managers, and some number of pretty bad ones. The difficulty comes in knowing which type you have, and often that only becomes clear when a manager leaves. Either a new EM makes things better, or things get dramatically worse because a good EM is no longer helping the team.
It's like that Futurama episode where Bender meets God: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
1) The EM looks up far more often than down.
2) The ICs miss out on collaboration which could be critically valuable to their projects, careers, and broader understanding of the business.
But that's the average! Some EMs pat themselves on the back and say "look at all these meetings y'all didn't have to attend, so you could focus and get the good work done all day" when in reality they didn't do anything remotely near the title of their role: Engineering Management. Managing the Engineers; not managing project dependencies, not managing leadership, not managing politics, but leading the people who report to them.
Great engineers swim in that complexity; and great EMs expose their team to (the relevant parts of) it.
Wait, saying "no" to upper management _is_ managing upwards. If you have a high performing team you can damned near ignore them as long as you're paying attention to what matters to them so that you can manage up effectively and keep bullshit off their place. If you have a team that needs a lot of help then yes, you have to focus on managing "down" -- but that's the less common scenario in my experience.
I suspect you're defining "managing up" as "brown-nosing" -- which is just managing up ineffectively. Being good at managing up and out is honestly the bulk of the job at most organizations; engineers can usually just do their thing.
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 unwillingness to understand, the complexity and nuance that goes into running a business, and to recognize that actual smart people can make real contributions in non-engineering roles.
It's just personal and professional immaturity. Every time I ready these comments and articles, I really hope that the folks writing them are able to grow out of this mindset. They'd be a lot happier and more productive.
Everything would grind to a halt if it weren't for people who do X. Everybody else exists because X people are doing X.
Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary, they're saying that the people who live in these roles are overall bad, don't know how to effectively execute these tasks and present an aura of superiority over the technical roles when they're providing very little value at all.
I don't know how it is everywhere, but in my neck of the woods good developers are hard to recruit and expensive to lose - they have a lot of leverage and they know it.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a large number of users in this community have actually worked in a bubble of tech outside the norm where most devs were actually pretty solid overall. A developer who is truly incompetent (not just mediocre) would have a very hard time even getting hired at a FAANG or similar, let alone stick around very long.
I will concede this though. When that bad person is a manager, EVERYONE on the team can suffer, the entire culture can suffer. When that person is just a team member, others on the team can usually figure out how to just avoid that person so that the problem can be compartmentalized. Better still, a good manager will not tolerate the bullshit because they know that it can poison the team if not handled properly. When that person is a manager, there's no avoiding the problem and team policies and culture will be poisoned accordingly so that the best people leave and nothing good is left.
The "old" saying (well, I've heard it said a few times) is: bad software (probably) won't kill your business. There's a litany of examples to this effect. However, bad management will, with increasingly leveraged effects the further that bad management is from the line worker.
They can also pester everyone with mountains of trivia in PRs and refuse to change anything in their own and so on and on.
My own boss says "the main thing is to hire nice people - everything else can be improved" and that changed my perspective a lot. I think he's right.
A bad EM can do more damage of course. :-)
These articles are undoubtedly written by people who have never been managers themselves, and frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for. Which is fine - everyone starts that way. But to then assume the job is useless is classic sign of imaturity.
> Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary
That’s literally the premise of the article posted.
What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
The world may not work like that, but it isn't immature to fight for it.
But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.
Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity.
> means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything
You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing.
> If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
> By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
Its not really the same because there's only one manager. If i had redundant managers maybe then a couple bad ones could get by. bad engineers have a tons of checks to prevent them being a real drain. theres no code review for a manager.
> Often just attracting bad personalities.
> Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager.
You are saying these things as though they are simple truths that I am just supposed to accept. But I do not.
People who end up as managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support, more often than not.
Often attracting great personalities since the job is about interfacing with people, more often than not.
It's always someone who wants to do management, whether or not they want to continue engineering, more often than not.
> Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job.
Yea, sounds terrible. It's a darn good thing we don't hire engineers or managers like this.
> managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support
This support im questioning. Its all on the job training. I went to business school, i actually have a business degree. I didn't leave that school feeling like i should manage or lead. The "training" is on the job, the people who teach are your small peer of manager peers and maybe some corporate style training. Corporate training has never been effective from what I have seen.
The average engineering manager may be a net benefit, or a net detriment. The rest we can extrapolate from there.
It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work.
If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YOU have on your career. If you find yourself on a team with a truly bad manager who is having a negative affect on your career, get out...but this is truly a rare occurrence in my experience.
You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career.
100% agree that they need to be advocating for you/your team, finding the right projects for you/your team, etc, etc. But at the end of the day your career is your responsibility, and it's only a fraction of your manager's responsibility.
A good manager helps remove the hurdles that will make those 40+ hours immensely more productive. A bad manager adds to those hurdles, potentially whittling productive hours to nothing.
If your manager has little more leverage than you do, that's true. In many orgs, managers have considerably more leverage than their reports, and their help is mandatory to get some things (promotions, pay increase, access to conferences and trainings, changing teams, passing messages up the chain or laterally, support for escalation, etc).
The only trump card the report has is leaving, but they pay for that by losing all the social capital acquired at the current company.
That is not how averages work. It depends on the distribution.
But regardless, that's missing the point. The point is that the distribution of engineering manager quality is likely pretty similar to that of any other role. So claiming that "there are way more bad engineering managers than good ones" seems likely to be untrue unless you also believe that about nearly any other engineering/management/product position.
Sorry it hit a sore spot; especially in a community such as this we should at least try to speak accurately regards statistics.
That's not what I'm saying. The OP is stating that it holds for averages. It doesn't. It might in this case but we don't have the stats.
The statement just doesn't make sense - you can say exactly the same about a random value. It will hold in some cases. Average too. However it will not hold in all cases.
I do understand what OP said somewhat though. Mostly due to Peter's principle, thus, managers are not "about average" but "mostly incompetent". It is easier to promote people managers than ICs in growing organization, hence it is easier to play out Peter's principle in real life for people managers.
[1] Prof. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
Being promoted because you are excelling in your position and taking on responsibilities of the one above is the rarest main reason from what I have seen.
There are definitely a wide range of non-engineering skills required to produce good software but that doesn't automatically justify the existence of a dedicated engineering manager role in most or even any teams.
So then they find a job somewhere else and another otherwise productive engineer has to step up.....
Meanwhile the other engineers continue on blissfully unaware, patting themselves on their backs for how they don't need to be managed.
I've also seen it work poorly. We've already established that there are good and bad EMs; there's good and bad in everything. That doesn't justify the role of the EM!
I've also seen PMs do this. This is the far more common situation, and it works! Workload planning ends up being a collaborative effort on the team, with the senior engineers holding domain knowledge over operations, maintenance, architecture, implementation, while PMs/Designers/etc hold domain knowledge over the business, customers, etc. Work once in an environment like this; well, at least a good one; and it will make anyone and everyone question why EMs exist at all. There's no room for them. They wouldn't contribute anything even if they were added to the mix.
Developers just developing, without interference from evil managers and clueless PMs! Amazing! The ideal work environment for the genius bootstrappy engineer! Sounds like heaven, right? It was not. It was total chaos.
1. Nobody knew what they should be doing and what were priorities. Someone from sales would run downstairs and say "I just sold Foo to a giant customer! You need to build Foo now!!" and everyone would go off and start building Foo. Then the CEO would fly in and ask "Why are you not building Bar? I'm personally interested in Bar, please show some results! Oh, and any product changes need to be personally approved by me now. Byeeeeee (gets on his plane again)". So developers kept developing but had no idea what to develop.
2. Joel Test[1] was 0 out of 12. Since it was just developers developing, nobody had time to write a spec, or set up source control, or design a build/release process. Those were icky tasks that stupid PMs and managers did. Developers want to develop. So the software engineering process was a clown show. Releases to customers were always late, and when they happened they were built directly from an engineer's workstation (they would just find a tree that actually built without errors, and that was the release).
3. If the software failed in the field for a customer, and this happened constantly, there were no useless support staff to talk with that customer, do basic tier 1 and 2 support, diagnose, and so on. Customers simply got angry, and since it was just developers developing, they had nobody to call and rage at, so they'd call the CEO. Then CEO mad. CEO would make a developer fly out to the customer's site with a laptop and debugger to pacify the customer. Now, that particular developer wasn't developing and was sad.
4. Things like career growth, mentorship, training, learning new best practices, none of that existed. It was just developers developing, so there really was no knowledge transfer or any distinction between junior, senior, staff, and so on. Nobody's job was to set these things up, so it never happened. There were no levels so no concept of promotion. If you wanted a raise, you'd go to the CEO who would just say no. That was basically your career development.
So yea, go find a place without managers and MBAs and let me know how it goes.
1: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
There are two critical differentiators in the role of an EM: power over those managed, and the bias toward management over productive output. The people who predominately fill those roles are those who are good at management, not those who are good at production (and, by the way, the "good EMs" which DO exist are generally people with a history as an IC, and treat the role more as a PM).
Sorry, but then you and your colleges were not senior enough to handle an environment like this. This is not a question of missing management, but also missing (technical) leadership.
While I do not know if it would have solved all your problems, you can make this environment better, without adding a management layer in between.
Now wait, how do developers develop without source control?
As an individual contributor, I consider a number of things in that paragraph good practice. Specs, say. But source control? That's just so fundamentally basic that I lack vocabulary to express how essentially important I consider it to be. How does a team get anything done without one?
As an example: I worked in a Big Tech org where the only way to get anything from another team was an org hierarchy jump. ICs could reach out directly; ignored. Some teams didn't even have a way to reach out to them. You had to go EM, then maybe a Director, then it filters down, and maybe a day, maybe a week later, you'd get an email introduction. It doesn't have to be like this, no one even decided it should be like this, but because they had the hierarchy that's how the culture evolved.
The better comparison is to look at companies who don't have that role, or define that role significantly differently from the traditional Big Tech definition. There are many; of course, not as many as the latter. And just like companies who do have the role traditionally defined, there are success stories and there are failure stories. To me, the more I've read up on those stories, the more I've realized how pointless the role is.
Or, maybe more accurately; how much of the role's responsibility is really to be a crutch for bad culture, bad upper management, bad hiring practices, bad interviewing, etc. That ain't totally pointless, but if you're also flipping a coin on the quality of each EM you hire, and moreover the coin is rigged because we don't even have an industry standard definition for what defines success in the EM role in the best cases; there are better ways of reaching the same destination.
But, you know, most of the time those better ways require an ounce of Trust from senior leadership, and that's like pulling water from desert sand.
Devs: "We, as software developers, are underappreciated! People only pay attention to us when things go wrong!"
Also Devs: "Managers are so useless lmao"
I'm not sure this really demonstrates that they added value so much as they just prevented value from getting subtracted by other dysfunctional parts of the organisation.
So, in my mind, a good manager will tell the team what to do, listen to them, and let them do the how. Next up is no management---in my experience, I knew what needed to be done, and got it done. It was great, but I realize that was a bizarre case that normally doesn't apply everywhere, but because of the nature of the work I did, only a few other people actually knew the work involved. The 'meh' manager didn't hurt, but really didn't help. And bad management, well ... let's just say a bad manager can really damage a company.
Until bad management showed up, our team always delivered on time, had smooth deployments, very few bugs in production, and otherwise, was not a source of issues for anyone. Now, we've missed multiple deadlines, horrible deployments, bugs in production and our customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, is very pissed. And it's not the sole fault of my current manager, but of upper management in general.
[1] I was initially hired in QA to test the call processing side of our product (the bit that happens when a call is placed). The existing QA manager only knew how to QA the cell phone handsets, not the call processing server side. I knew next to nothing about the cell phone handsets. It was clear the QA manager was not a good fit for me.
[2] He wasn't great. I don't think he was as bad as some other employees said he was. He was a developer who was forced into a management role.
Surely you meant to communicate something different here and not a mathematical impossibility.
Do you mean most fall within 1 standard deviation of the average? That still means half the managers you encounter would be below the average quality assuming a normal distribution (which it’s clearly not - skills tend to follow the power law).
Most engineers are actually decidedly quite bad at software development itself for what it’s worth. The equivalent of a first level line manager is typically a first level engineer (not always but usually). Good managers get promoted to manage managers / multiple teams which dilutes their qualities (they now have to train other managers to be good). So think about whether you’d put a very junior engineer in charge of a project and what kind of results that might have, especially since if the manager is actually good they’ll be promoted away whereas an IC who’s hood is simply given more responsibility on the project but the role doesn’t change too much.
> 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 lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.'
What engineers need is low-level clerical people to handle the day to day comms with others outside the org. We don't need managers, unskilled labor needs managers.
Yes. If a doctor is working in a hospital, there are most certainly managers. Obviously not "technical" managers in that they're doctors themselves or the doctor's "boss" but in that there are managers who are co-ordinating workforce, priorities, staffing, supplies etc etc. This is very much a thing and is more broad than engineering managers but is an incredibly important task so the daily admin work does not come to a doctor who is probably prioritising saving lives and helping people
> The 'communicate with customers' nonsense is delegated to lower-paid clerical staff, not 'managers.'
This is incredibly demeaning of people in hospitals who actually have to do these jobs. There's a massive amount of work required here and it is by no means "clerical". When "customers" literally have their lives in a doctor's hands, the complexity increases hundredfold. There's legal sensitivities, paperwork, spending, collections and so much more stuff involved and this is not even counting the kinds of things they need to do which involves interfacing with patients and their kin about sensitive matters. This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff
Instead they have to force doctors to break bad news to patients' relatives or do it themselves, get signatures from both parties for procedures, coordinate in/out patient streams, listen to doctors demand equipment and medicines and face upper management denying them their requests and tons of other such bullshit. Medical insurance and its intricacies is a whole big ball game that they have to constantly play with so that's fun
People who have a high level view can direct the folks down in the trenches quite productively.
This shouldn't be middle managers. technical leader is better for that or most senior on the team. An actual leader on the team.
Maybe some places. In the US, most doctors are independent providers for hospitals, they don't have a traditional 'manager'. Outside of a hospital setting, this is also true.
> This is not simply "admin work". This is critical, life saving stuff
It may be, but it's lower skill work delegated to people that are subordinate to doctors, not their managers.
You are putting a round peg in a square hole. As I already stated, these are not the kind of managers we see in development where your manager is your "boss". Even as independent providers, doctors will have someone they are interfacing with who will see to the admin and other work so they are focused on medicine. Less than half of all practicing doctors in hospitals in the US are independent. Most of them are employed by the hospital. You are grievously misunderstanding the role of the "manager" here. There are certainly far fewer managers in independently practicing medical facilities like clinics but that's because the volume is far lower and the doctors themselves wear many hats
> but it's lower skill work delegated to people that are subordinate to doctors
Again, this is very insulting to the people working these roles. They are not "subordinate" and the work in not "low skill". These are parallel roles to doctors. Leaving this kind of work to doctors would result in a failure of the medical profession in its entirety because of the sheer volume and sensitivity of it
We're talking about the kind of managers software engineers have. Doctors don't have those kind of managers, that's entirely my point.
> Again, this is very insulting to the people working these roles. They are not "subordinate".
They are definitely subordinate in any patient-care scenario. Anyway, I feel like you're missing the point of the analogy, analogies aren't perfect, and you know well what I meant.
If you want to argue lawyers and doctors have managers, fine, give engineers that kind of a manager. IMO, these are subordinate clerical people.
Your analogy is bad only because you have no idea what you're talking about. Technical people need managers because technical people will do things other than their actual jobs and I say this very frankly as a developer. It is remarkable how similar doctors and engineers can be in that they are lost if left to their own devices. Just as an experienced engineer will wear many hats and can manage themselves, experienced doctors also successfully set up their own practices where they can manage themselves. But a good hospital manager can literally save and change lives
This is from a 20 year dev who's spent a few of those in management, but enjoys development more.
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 blood pressure in a private practice is fairly independent. On the other hand, hospitals, especially teaching ones, often incredibly hierarchical, with med students at the bottom and layers of interns, residents, chief residents, fellows, and attending, with a department chair on top. Attendings can treat patients individually, but they also oversee the work of the more junior staff; they're even called "supervising physicians" in some places.
If any project has more than a few people, I'm not sure how a "team" can proceed without at least a de facto organize/leader, and if that leader spends most of their time leading....well, that's a manager.
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.
LMAO. Yes. They are doctors who went into management.
I'm sure you're aware of what they say: Its difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it. Do you have the self-awareness to recognize that this, alone, is a huge reason why managers immediately come to the defense of their position?
I've been in the industry for 20 years now. I've worked with good EMs; I've worked with bad EMs; I've been an EM (less often). That spectrum isn't even relevant to the underlying assertion that the core definition of the role is invalid. Its extremely rare to work with an EM whose entire scope of responsibilities wouldn't be more productively served by a peer PM. The only advantage to an EM title is in the organizational power structure, which is far too often leveraged to abuse their reports by trading quality output and mentorship for more working hours, burnout, and Jira graphs.
One of the major issues I have with the article is they lean heavily on the "creative work can't be managed like manufacturing widgets" train of thought. It feels to me that they define developers as artists when the article is about engineering. I think those are different roles are different. Even though both require a certain amount of creativity/subjectivity, it's a mistake IMO to conflate the two.
A Technical Lead, Design Lead, and/or Product Lead is the final arbiter of executive decisions about how a project will be completed.
A Coach meets regularly with ICs to help debug workflows and interpersonal issues.
A Manager signs paychecks, and takes responsibility for the work actually getting done professionally, reporting to HR when it’s not and taking action on behalf if The Company when needed. They are the legally responsible person for the things happening underneath them in the org chart. In an ideal week they do nothing at all.
Engineering Managers tend to do some combination of all of these things, usually most of them poorly since that’s way too much work for a single individual.
It does seem like there would be a naturally pressure to lump together the roles. I suspect that if your ideal week happens too much (where the manager does nothing at all), executives would question why they're needed.
That said, you’re right most companies will hire 50 engineers and 10 managers before they hire a single coach or project manager. Or allow IC leads to make their own decisions. So for those companies it’s theoretical. :)
But these roles all exist. You’ll find job listings on LinkedIn for all of them. So they’re happening somewhere!
I think the role needs to exist but it's not a per team role. You need one for every 4 teams or so. They're there to build the teams, make sure they're running right, and do the high level resource allocation. Day to day management of the team should be a collaboration between a lead developer and a product owner.
1) You give a spec to ten different engineers. You'll get ten wildly different solutions, from decisions within a single programming language, to different programming languages, to microservices and serverless.
2) So: make the spec more specific to reduce the variability. Now an engineer has to write the spec; and we're back to square one where the spec is just an expression of how they would develop it. You give it to ten engineers, and you still get ten different solutions; but maybe less variable.
3) Of those ten solutions, most will fail in weird ways, because software breaks. That's what software is known for; breaking. Its hard, probably impossible, to write reliable software, and we're on a deadline, so like 30+% of the team's time is spent just on operations.
4) Of those ten solutions, most will fail to account for some edge case, because the spec didn't cover that edge case, because (reasons). Well, file a followup ticket.
Those bullet points represent so much variability in how the future will play out that any ability to "manage" it is an exercise in futility. Add in interruptions, add in PTO, add in cross-team coordination, incidents, every day longer that a project takes reduces the accuracy of estimates substantially; that can't be managed (well).
That's why product engineering is fundamentally a creative effort. Maybe not like Art or Music; I liken it to more like, well, video game development (which, you know, people write code in so its really confusing to me why Culture considers that creative but not typical software development, I guess its because they produce something Pretty and Fun).
Video games have deadlines. They have business demands. Customers. Product-market fit. Roadmaps. Coordination. Massive, massive variability in implementation. Massive unknowns about what the final product will look like. Massive technical problems involved in bugs, performance, optimizations, maintenance, different platforms.
Here are five careers pages for major video game studios. Seriously, go to all of them, and tell me how many positions they have open for "Manager of People Who Do Traditionally Creative Things": [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Its not many, if any. They have roles like this, for sure, but they're not phrased or labeled from the perspective of "Writer Manager"; they're phrased as Lead Writer.
And the critical point there is maybe one involved in the hierarchy and power relationship. But more importantly, its background! The Lead Writer WAS a Writer. That's experience in the domain of the people you're leading; that helps massively in every responsibility this role should have. Timelines? Hella. Roadmapping? Heck yeah. Mentorship? The forbidden word that big tech managers hate.
But Tech is a weird microcosm where EMs are just Managers. The best EMs have an IC background, but many job postings list ZERO requirement to that effect [6], and ask any Engineer-turned-EM: They ain't doing much Engineering anymore. That's not just a benign anomaly; its a problem with how our industry builds companies. And we sit around twiddling our thumbs wondering why engineers hop jobs every year or two; its because, well, the pay is probably better, but also because its a coin flip on whether your manager is actually good, or just some guy that talks good.
Hypothetically, what is a better path forward? Get rid of "Engineering Management". The team has a Lead Developer, who is legally or whatever, the person who "manages" the team (there's that word again, KILL IT WITH FIRE). That role is a peer to PMs, POs, Designers, etc. That role requires a long history of actually doing engineering; and still does it, at least from a high level (meetings are necessary and, yeah, its hard for Engineers-Turned-EMs to find time to code;...
What you've really illustrated is that software is hard. Engineering is hard. The distinction is that other engineering disciplines have had a much longer time to codify good practice. I bet if you went into, say steam engine design in the mid-1800s, it would feel a lot more creative than today. For a variety of reasons, software development is not nearly as good at implementing standards and to go into all of them would be a digression. However, I think the distinction that we disagree on is that it's due to anything inherently different in software. I'd make the case that software is easier in some respects (e.g., it doesn't display wear out failure modes) and harder in others (e.g., it tends to have more interface failures). I'm saying it feels more creative because it's less well managed. If you've ever worked in a heavily regulated sector like safety-critical software, it definitively feels less creative than a CRUD web-app development effort for this very reason.
I personally think part of the issue is that EM becomes a career-track that can start immediately out of school. It's similar to the change in MBA programs. The better MBA schools used to require that you have worked in industry for about a decade before even applying; now it seems like most schools offer a management track without necessarily having any experience. The result is a self-selection for people who want to manage without necessarily having a concrete understanding of what they are managing.
That’s not irony. That’s someone with no domain expertise saying something and then someone with domain expertise refuting it.
If I, a casual baseball fan, made a claim about umpires being useless in baseball and then an umpire came in to explain otherwise, that would not be irony.
I’m also not an EM, though I have been one in the past.
I don’t understand your point about PMs. You’re saying that the responsibilities of an EM should be that of a PM. So you’re just arguing for a name change? Or something else?
owner/board -> worker teams (up to 5 individuals) -> team helper (this is the previous manager role)
Edit: I will also add that it's strange, the more experience I have of incompetent managers, the more I'm told I don't understand them!
Well, its not just a name change, but generally Yes.
The biggest thing is from the Org Hierarchy perspective. I want to preface what I'm about to say to be perfectly clear: This is not true in every company.
EMs have the final say on resourcing for code-related tasks; but poor understanding of the code, systems, etc because the Lead/Senior devs live there. EMs have the final say on product decisions from PO/PMs under them; but a poor understanding of the product because the PO/PMs/etc breathe that. EMs have the final say on designs; but a poor understanding of UX because the designers have that.
The best EMs always have some background in one of the roles I outlined above. They come from an IC background, they were due a promotion, burned out in the IC role, ran out of promotions in the IC track, whatever.
But in many situations the role of an EM becomes a mediocre mashup where the one thing they're actually good at is navigating the politics of org hierarchies; or if you want to be Business Proper, call it Communication. Ask any high school guidance councilor where "Communications" lands on the list of Valuable College Degrees and you'll get a pretty consistent answer. But: EMs somehow escaped this destiny, because tech has a weird distortion field on incomes right now.
Here's the sinister part: Because EMs hold power over everyone who reports to them, its common to see turf wars over responsibilities. Example: "We don't need to hire for a PM, I'm doing that". That's why it isn't just a simple name change; its their fundamental place in an org hierarchy that can make the role a net drag on an organization. Orgs hire them without a tactile definition on the responsibilities of the role [1]; just extrapolate "manage the engineers" to three paragraphs and call it good. You'll do roadmap planning (in collaboration with senior leadership and the PMs). You'll help prioritize incoming work from different stakeholders (in collaboration with the PMs, Customers, and Engineers). You'll help build the team (in collaboration with Recruiting). You'll mentor the engineers (but, we don't require any engineering background, so how you'll do this well is anyone's guess).
The role doesn't actually DO anything valuable; again, at best, the person has IC experience and can carve out a niche that's a hybrid of that IC experience and more coordination/communication. But at average, they're a message bus that attends meetings and parrots messages from someone that actually matters to someone else that actually matters [2].
[1] https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/engineering-manager-payment-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I
(said tongue in cheek, but the confusion is so often carefully maintained that...)
I think it doesn't help that you'll find about 1 manager for 8-10 engineers. The same spectrum, but lower raw numbers, might give an exaggerated impression of mediocrity.
Anecdotally, I've met a lot more people who don't want to manage (again) than people who don't want to be ICs. I think that indicates a different "spectrum" of humanity.
A very large number of people really are saying that these roles aren't necessary. Larry Page famously fired all of the managers at Google at one point in the past. I regularly see people say that zero management at all would be preferable, both for startups and megacorps. Heck, the article itself is about this very idea.
But if everyone projects their worst fear on the role, then we’re all stuck making assumptions, being pessimistic, and missing the good people because we’re blinded by our stuck ideas incorrectly generalizing individual people to their roles. If we can’t stop to see the good things and what does work, then functioning together is difficult and it drags down the team.
What value do you see in good management, and what makes a good manager in your experience?
This is quite hyperbolical. A person can have a life experience of "mostly bad manager", but that does not mean "most managers are bad" or that "most people have experienced bad management".
I've been 16 years as a professional software engineer. I would not describe anyone to whom I was a direct report as "bad manager". Quite contrary, I've been quite happy with most of them. This does not mean a life without conflict or misunderstanding, of course.
Statistically, bad management is of course a non-neglible problem, but the above makes the situation sound hopelessly pathological.
A lot of the time, what makes someone good or terrible in their role is maturity and professionalism.
I don't malign the profession because I've had bad experiences. Engineers should be smart enough to know that experiencing a bad manager, or even a few bad managers doesn't mean that " people who live in these roles are overall bad, don't know how to effectively execute these tasks and present an aura of superiority over the technical roles when they're providing very little value at all."
That's just being irrational and salty.
FWIW, all my engineering managers have been great.
> Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones"
I guess that's just your experience? Just because you've had a few bad apples doesn't mean all engineering managers are terrible.
> present an aura of superiority
Sounds like you're just projecting your experience onto other folks.
The irony is that I've heard the same said about engineers. It's easy to take the cynical point of view, but probably not wise or accurate. Like the OP, in my experience the people making those types of claims tend to have an overly simplistic view of the problem.
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.
There are just as many useless managers as there are useless reports. The reason you see so many 'managers suck' posts is because they're in a position of authority over the talent they manage. That's all.
Management shouldn't mean authority, it should be like HR or IT, a support role.
I'm gobsmacked by the entitlement of these people.
AKA the manager.
Well product or sales probably don't like stuffing the product with ads, they only put it in there because you like collecting a paycheck every month.
I cannot do sales, I do not want to do sales, but if I want a job someone needs to do sales. To me sales looks like an awful job, but some people really get a kick out of it and I'm glad they do because otherwise I would earn a lot less than I do.
We love to think that "if we build it they will come" but the reality is very different, and most of us work for companies that would struggle to grow without some form of sales or marketing operation, no matter how good the product might be.
You meet new people. They tell you about their problems. You explain to them how your product can alleviate them. You work on finding a common position regarding what you could bring at which price. When it works, you get a big cheque. It’s pretty fun really.
Once that connection has been made I can definitely see the attraction.
I don't think your view is anywhere near as common as you think it is, but maybe in your immediate peer group there's some self-selecting cause for believing so.
The reason most engineers don't have secretaries is because we usually prefer doing the same thing with automation and scripts.
Edit: To clarify lead engineer, they have authority over technical decisions, not people management.
The point of my question is to make people stop and think about the chesterton's fence of why is that position there. For example your janitor example. Extremely well defined position. Most people do not want it (including yourself).
As for what I think about managers: unsure, I have been a manager, worked under many managers (most of them bad) but I am still not sure if mangers should exist or be replaced with another role.
I was terrible at it. Forced to actually contact customers I had no clue what to do. I had no idea how to price things. I communicated terribly and drove away initial customers.
I learned a healthy respect of other positions in a company, because when I tried them I had to accept they were actually hard.
There is no meaningful correlation between title, schooling, and/or effectiveness in management.
Imo, the real problem is that engineering work is disproportionately difficult compared to management and yet, management gets recognition, visibility and power to control engineer lives. This happens in every step. Engineering interviews are insanely harder than management, engineering promos are opaque and need grinding for years as opposed to management promos in growing companies and these days, senior engineers have to manage politics as well. Engineering managers are not useful in any way but yet, get higher compensation and recognition. Why?
The only manager that engineers like are those who have previously been strong engineers themselves. It's the earned respect that lets people be ok with bosses. Not titles themselves. Certainly not people management or glorified assistants managing spreadsheets for upper levels.
Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.
I believe that the job is nearly impossible to do well. Which leads a lot of people to suspect that the role of Engineering managers is badly defined. Which leads to all the complaints above. Nobody is happy with the current org structure.
And engineers who don’t invest in their work emotionally are not usually the best
>> Maybe you work at some poor company that can't promote devs high enough so they're forced into some form of management role to get a promotion.
How does this follow from what I said? Also, I have a bit of experience so it’s not one company
Therefore technical people develop a special sort of humility, reminded everyday of their errors by the law of physics, that bad managers who fail forward never do.
I mean, structural engineers are fighting physics. Software engineers, generally, are fighting information theory. FWLIW, I spent 15 years as a (quite successful) programmer with a lot of bullshittery going on about what code works. Have you never shipped buggy code and played it down b/c of time constraints or you were just tired or not motivated or realized this bit doesn't actually need to be perfect?
That's actually why I switched to being a people manager - I was a mediocre programmer that people thought was exceptional because I was good at the b.s. I find people management much more difficult to do well, and much more rewarding when growing junior eng into senior eng compared to shipping a bit of code.
Great EMs have that experience; and it makes their/your job way harder because now you understand, at a deep enough level, what the people you manage are going through. When product reqs come across the desk of an IC-turned-EM, they can feel that gut punch immediately: "fuck, this is going to be so hard, that system is so legacy, and Sarah is super overloaded right now because she's the only one with any experience on the message bus transformer converter ingester"
Management track EMs actually do have it easier, because they get to think in the discrete world of tickets and human resources.
At a high enough level in any company: senior leadership needs to think about the world as perfectly discrete like that, because there's so much other bullshit going on that worrying about the specifics of the message bus transformer converter ingester would drive them off a cliff. But EMs aren't that. But many, many EMs think like that, and a big part is the incentive structure of their career path; their boss thinks like that, and their boss's boss thinks like that, so if I want to have my boss's boss role one day I need to think like that.
The strawman side of what I'm arguing is: "Well, you're just describing a bad EM". But the whole point is that that's quickly becoming the average in the industry, and that average is starting to define the role. Career-track management who get promotions, then write the hiring reqs for their replacements, and every other EM below them, combined with a massive shortage of engineering talent meaning companies need to define a different bar for their EM hiring reqs anyway.
I think it's fair so say that gross incompetence is easier to recognize in a programmer than a manager, especially to the untrained eye. It's also true that a well-functioning team may be easy to run and the manager shouldn't have to do much except not fuck it up.
But at any kind of scale, all problems are people problems, and there are never ending systematic dysfunctions and organizational problems. Everyone can be making a valid claim to doing their job, yet the output is nowhere near what it could be. These types of problems can be difficult to diagnose and extremely difficult to unsolvable at the high end. One must be technical enough to understand the details, able to zoom out and understand how costs of various paths interact with UX, operations, security and other concerns, and then say the right things in the right venues to nudge people in the right direction while also maintaining the morale and agency of all the ICs who do the actual work.
It is brutally difficult, and the reason most EMs are bad is not out of malice or sociopathic tendencies (though I will say the emotional toll is high for non-sociopaths which is probably one reason they are disproportionately represented in management and executive leadership).
As you grow, you do realize that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and you mellow down and start to learn the interfaces with other functions. Even then your superiority bias won't away but will mellow down for sure. This is simply because your success as a mid-senior engineer is no longer a function of just your engineering skills. Its a function of how well you can sell your ideas, how you can articulate your messaging so that every other function can work with you, how do you get buy-in from competing parties etc. But again, engineers will brush these aside as 'politics' unrelated to software engineering :)
Year after year after year I learned again and again that there's something truly toxic about middle-management and up. It's like the higher you go, the worse the air gets, and your brain starts to get clouded and fuzzy. Technical people stay in their roles for decades and get better and better over time; management plays musical chairs where they change roles every 2 or 3 years. The new role has almost nothing to do with their old role. If you saw a whole group of people randomly switch every couple years between being an Aerospace Engineer, then a Software Engineer, then an Environmental Engineer, then a Structural Engineer, you'd rightly go: wow, all these engineering jobs must be super easy! They just throw anybody into those roles. They don't take any time to learn, etc. etc. So why, when people randomly switch every couple years between product manager, director of operations, financial director, project manager, sales manager, director of internal innovation, director of digital growth, director of New-Techy-Buzzword -- why do you not conclude the same thing? All those jobs are stupid and worthless, clearly, because they come and go with the wind, and anyone in the mid-to-upper-management sphere can take on any of those roles. Clearly they require no training. Clearly they are not hard. Having an MBA degree does not qualify you to do all of those roles, unless those roles have absolutely nothing to them. Note that I intentionally excluded anything having to do with "legal" in there, because that's an actual job that takes an actual expert.
My long-winded point is that I did the exact opposite of what you claim. I used to believe that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and that all these other functions are an important part. But I learned, time and time and time again, that the primary driving force in corporate America is the Principal Agent Problem and that all these roles are just titles to be shuffled around among those in the Business Caste for their own personal benefit. Entire companies are nothing more than pawns in the game these guys (and it is mostly men) are playing with each other, jockying for the most impressive-sounding titles, extracting as much money as they can from the public sector into their own pockets. If they're actually doing their job well, they're losing at the game. You have to switch jobs every couple years to keep up.
All roads lead to the engineer. Bad managers can be worked around. Mindless PMs can be worked around. But if every engineer at apple suddenly stopped working there would be real economic consequences. If managers and PMs stopped working they'd be replaced by engineers who are by and large more capable at adaptation anyway. Engineers should hold all the power. In most orgs management exists to prevent what is effectively an artificial union forming among engineers. Most, I'd argue even 99%, of engineers do not want to be sitting in meetings and spending 9 hours a day building CRUD. Without the guy cracking the whip over your head you wouldn't. I wouldn't. Anyone wouldn't. The power dynamic favors managers - hence all the hate.
MBAs take a lot of flak because much like the kid engineer coming out of school who believes he's legitimately God's gift to man the MBA does the same. The difference? The MBA controls your salary, whether you keep your job, whether you get your job, the direction of the company, the marketing of the product, the features that will be worked on, the finances of the company, etc. The MBA holds legitimately all power that is not engineering. As such, by generalizing and blaming "the MBA" you are more right than wrong on who is the real problem. I believe most engineers should go back for their MBA. Not to get better at business but to understand their enemy. An entire career is boiled down to a few excel formulas.
Do you know what makes me happy? Not even knowing my manager exists. Not even knowing my PM exists. In my a little over 10 year career I can name two managers and one PM that actually made a fundamental difference to me. I'd be infinitely happier if PMs and managers were replaced by robots that let me do my job and enjoy what I do. Instead, even something as trivial as "I'd like an extra day to optimize this because I can see it having problems under load" needs to be "scoped" and "talked about", then it needs to be "put into a future sprint", then it needs to be "pointed", "tagged", "etc". This is borderline tyranny to someone who is creative. Only a spreadsheet monkey sees value in this nonsense because at the end of the day I'm right (because I built it) but I won't be given time to do it until it breaks (because the MBA), when it does I will be on pagerduty and probably hearing about it (from my manager), and then I will need to ask for time and a meeting will be called to discuss and do JIRA nonsense (by the PM). You see? As an engineer it's always my fault. Even when I'm right. Who are the people who will arrive at my desk to blame me? Them.
lol, okay, maybe before you have a couple $50k/yr revenue customers that rely on that legacy/tech-debt to run their business.
ask windows/office devs or linux kernel devs how often they get to fix all that tech debt.
(other people doing stuff, inducing mild amounts of accountability)
> This is borderline tyranny to someone who is creative.
> most engineers should go back for their MBA. Not to get better at business but to understand their enemy.
That's an incredibly adversarial attitude severely lacking in self-reflection and empathy. It's really tough to work with people wound so tight. Having been a manager, if I were yours, I'd be working on helping you grow up a bit, and if that didn't work, I'd be helping you find a different role that was more suited to your...ahem...creativity. A role far away.
I play ball at work because if I play ball I continue to make enough money where at the end of the day I don't care. I'm fully capable of reading a room and know full well the consequences of stepping out of line. Frankly a manager "helping you find empathy" strikes me as a form of indoctrination.
But thank you for the deep psychological analysis. Frankly I'm glad you're not my manager because the saccharin nature of your psuedo intellectual post would probably have me quitting anyway. It's always the "empaths" who are the first to fire the shots across the bow in the face of valid (albeit direct) criticism.
It's funny how these ultracapable genius engineers don't just start their own company free of these bullshit manager and PM roles and just steamroll the competition, isn't it?
1. They would rather be building cool things than doing all the other things involved in running a company. Nobody said managers are doing literally nothing, just that they're generally not very good and they really don't deserve or earn the authority they have. Their role is a support role, like a typist or a document manager or something. They should be considered basically secretaries to the engineers, so your question is "why don't the engineers all go become secretaries then?". Not to bash secretaries, but rather to give you the point that their authority comes not from what they do, but rather from the caste they were born into and/or the college they graduated from.
2. Many of them would go and start their own (likely very successful) companies, if doing so weren't a gated community open only to either (A) those who already have lots of connections and lots of family money to fall back on as a safety net if they fail, and (B) those who are willing to subsist on dry Top Ramen and live out of their car for years while they devote 100% of their time to their startup. Most of the good engineers out there have responsibilities like kids and/or mortgages, because it takes a long time to become a good engineer. And most people aren't born into the "business caste" that starts companies and becomes high-level managers at companies in the US.
3. They do. When it does happen, they become wildly successful and do completely fucking steamroll the competition, because the competition actually truly veritably is garbage run by chucklefucks who are only there because they were born into the Business Caste.
Engineers who don't appreciate the role of the product/marketing/management layers don't seem to understand that if they had to take on those responsibilities it would leave them with no time left over to write any code. If nobody takes on those responsibilities then our company won't make money to pay anybody to write code. It's not chicken and egg, it's cart and horse.
If you don't want to become a marketing expert as well as a product design expert for the sake of doing all these things simultaneously consider being glad others are taking things off your plate and coordinating work without you so you can focus on writing code.
Regardless if the manager is helping the team they almost always drain resources to aggregate information that they can synthesize upstream. It's a system that is so fragile it's not hard to see why we have an industry full of people that experience this.
Here’s an idea: Provide this information before they have to ask, when it’s convenient for you. Like between tasks.
Took a 5min break? Move the damn story over to done. Got stuck and seeking clarity but are blocked? Leave a quick comment.
If your manager has to ask what’s going on, you’re not communicating enough.
Not to say this work is necessarily not worth the cost, but it absolutely costs something.
Sometimes that's all the manager wants, and the team lets them down. Sometimes the team takes hours estimating work that no one can reliably estimate, because management wants a burndown chart to feel good about, even though the last n burndown charts were wildly inaccurate.
As with any situation, issues happen at every level. What's unique to managers, though, is that they combine overwhelming power on the team with zero accountability to the team. Obviously when something goes wrong the team is going to be mad about it.
As for "draining resources" to do whatever reporting they need to do I don't think I understand what is fragile about it or why it would be anything other than necessary. It's like log aggregation/introspection, you do it because you want to see what's going on at a lower level without dealing with the minutia of every point of data.
To this end as engineers we design code that fills management roles all the time in our systems, and we understand perfectly why their role is needed but sometimes fail to realize that human systems are analogous. Nobody is arguing why a load balancer can be an important part of a system, or the values provided by ORMs, but here we are arguing about what managers do in a complex human system.
I think a more accurate take is that it can "drain resources" from the individual to provide a net positive impact to the team (ideally). The problem with a lot of the cynical takes here is they appear to be only considering the perspective of the individual.
It's like the idea that if somebody stops by my office to ask a question; it's great for them to get an answer, but a detriment to me because it interrupts my work. If all I cared about was personal productivity, I would lock my door but the overall team productivity would likely suffer. A good manager puts together a system/culture that balances all those competing goals to the betterment of the team.
I'll point out that the world is pretty diverse and there are actually lots of people who think that ORMs were a mistake and lots of people who think that using them is always a no-brainer. There's an interesting phenomenon that it seems like a lot of folks manage to build up reasonably long careers while only running into one side of this divide or the other and not even realize that the verdict on ORMs isn't a settled fact where one choice is always right.
Perhaps it's similar with engineering management and we should be having a more nuanced conversation.
This doesn’t mean that both groups are right though.
Spending on marketing is like building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal in this respect: It is to everyone's detriment (yes, everyone) but if the competition does it, you must also.
For better or worse, this is what we, as an industry, have adopted and a generation has grown up not knowing any better.
Having these ideas in mind, particularly backed up by some good background as is present here - some discussion on knowledge work, Peter Drucker quotes - is context orgs ought to try to be aware of, prevent from happening.
Sad to see such a well written well explained article reduced to "grow out of their mindset" antagonism. There's not any argumentation in this rebuttal, just personal badmouthing & berating. The conflict described is real, but apparently people who feel tensions & dissonance of it all are all just "immature".
When that happens, other people have to be involved to take over.
There are real requirements to communicate with other parts of the business, customers, coordinate who is doing what and triage what is needed when.
So generally, I agree with you that the mindset isn’t a great one.
At the same time, there are methodologies that aim to alleviate exactly this problem by ensuring engineers directly control more than they often do.
Scaled Agile (SAFe) is my favorite because of two core tenets.
1. There are 2 backlogs, one managed by product/business and one managed by dev/ops/arch. Going into planning, capacity allocations are given to each (usually 70-30 product dev). Priority among those backlogs is entirely handled by the group managing it.
2. PI Planning where backlog items are presented from each group and dev is responsible for planning out those priorities over the next 8-12 weeks in the manner that they believe is best. Everybody who could potentially answer questions that devs have is present with their schedules cleared to streamline the decision making process. Plans are discussed with management, risks assessed and finally agreed on.
I love this process. It gets everybody on the same page as far as who is doing what, when and why. It reduces friction and lets devs focus for 2-3 months at a time without a directional shift.
Planning from product is focused on the next PI instead of the constant “we have to drop everything and work on X now!” situations that so often happen.
I wish more orgs would adopt it. I hear so often about devs stuck in orgs claiming to do so that aren’t actually doing any of the things that make it great and it’s frustrating.
The exact same thing can be said of programmers/developers; there are TONS of bad ones. The fact that there exist bad managers/pms/etc does not invalidate the need for good ones.
Yet, you also used just five examples, presumably from your own experience, to tar entire professions.
Yes, there exist incompetent PMs, Architects, Team leads, and so on. There are also competent ones. Just like there are incompetent and competent engineers. No profession has a monopoly on bullshit.
it doesn't matter if you have the best product in the market, if the competition releases before you and has obtained all the clients. for the client, the task of moving to a slight better solution may not cover the cost.
just because people have other jobs, it does not make them stupid. of course, what i've said in here is over simplified, there are a lot of other jobs required in order to have a healthy, viable product with clients and cash flow.
Your comment added nothing because it was responding to a straw man rather than the article itself.
It seems really unfair to a developer, who thinks "if I screw up the entire company halts, if you screw up I have to work harder". And so the developer can't shake the feeling that management is bullshit.
Unfortunately one of the side effects of having something so important also be so complex, hard to reason about, and hard to prove causation for, is that there are a lot of empty suits attracted to an area where it's hard to disprove that they contributed, but a lot of money to be made if they can convince the right people that they did.
By definition we can't know how many are genuinely hardworking contributors, how many are parasites, and how many are somewhere in the middle (e.g. did some good work but is phoning it home these days, got lucky but misattributed their own success so now just doles out bad advice). Claiming that only one of these three groups exists is of course naive - but when running into people who have a different perspective or make different claims, it's worth keeping in mind that the subset of these groups they've run into might differ from your own.
I love how you also snuck Scrum master in there, a role no one needs. Project managers are also often shoved into places they’re not needed (I’ve generally found them to be a net negative vs having the manager be responsible for it).
Cow dung is common too, but not necessarily useful. Maybe for manure...
Most actual work happens despite those roles, not because of them... Or even against them - and is dilluted, sabotaged, rushed, and crapped upon all the time by the decisions of the roles above.
If you meant "software production needs this role", then no. Software production (from Xerox Parc to the Linux kernel) can be just fine without them.
If you meant "a modern corporate bureucracy needs those roles to make a product", then maybe, but that's part of the reason those enterprise products are shitty.
Yes we know management metrics can't predict every end date, we know agile doesn't solve every problem, we know blockchain is a solution without a problem, we know code complete and the mythical man month are some of the best programming books.
Not so sure about that. In the beginning of my career I looked up greatly to a lot of people in these roles. The older I get the more that has faded. Truth is I can do their jobs fine, but they can’t do mine; yet they have a tendency to look down on me.
(I’m in Sweden though, and the MBAs still have a very strong grip on the Nordics. Might be a different social dynamic in the US.)
Mind you - to "them", these "dreaded MBAs", the development organization is a problem, often regarded as cost, and development is done by... developers. Sometimes the developers is the actual problem and they have gradually sunk the software in to a unmaintainable swamp of crappy code and debt - but this is a competency and hiring problem. It will not be solved by any framework or project manager. But you need the competency in your leadership to understand what's what and this is missing from pretty much any large org I've set foot in. The high functioning teams is these settings are more a stoke of luck, and they often have to utilize guerrilla tactics to keep delivering value.
I've seen my fair share of global CIO's talking us through cloud and blockchain, never have to actually deliver and move on to the next company or fancy role.
I've seen CIO/CTO not trusting developers and believing no-code and citizen development to be the end all. Guess what - more unmaintainable crazy stuff
I've seen large organizations falling in to the "one system" trap on all levels, even trickling down to the software teams - a dedicated 8 person jira team for the whole org! What could possibly go wrong.
I've also witnessed amazing autonomous development teams that move at amazing speed with quality. In these settings you have management that understands the process of supporting a business with valuable code.
Most of the time IMO it's the business themselves that cause a lot of the problems facing developers by not understanding that it's they who own the processes getting digitized.
They buy software from vendors, staff up a project team to integrate, fire and forget. This "fire and forget" project mentality is what accumulates in a shitty org, and shitty orgs start from the top.
If you haven't read "Turn the ship around" it embodies all of this. This condensed video is really worth a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8
The last 2 paragraphs of your comment can be applied to your behavior actually.
There is way-way more to it than the title. Nowhere did the author reduce the contribution of non-engineering roles.
An excellent read!
And sorry, unlike a program you’re writing, you don’t have any say in how the logic works (or doesn’t). The rules are set and you’re in the system. You might be able to find some variations in other companies.
Can they? Certainly. Do they? Well, not as often as you might like.
I used to work for a government contractor who had what I liked to think of as a "butts in seats" strategy. The contractor got paid by taking something like 50% off the top of what the customer paid for the employees (back when I was a contractor in industry, that was more like 15% but that is neither here nor there). The "complexity and nuance" that goes into running that business for a maximal profit involves keeping the direct customers happy---and they're managers, not users---while having as many employees as possible. You need to ride the line between leaving money on the table and having so much broken that higher levels of the customer start to get upset. Laying down narratives is a very important part of that process.
This isn't, however, limited to government contracting. I've ridden quite a few projects into the ground in industry because the goals and incentives of Product Managers, Program Managers, etc., were not aligned with the goal of a successful project simply because there are many ways to be a successful manager and a track record of successful products is not the easiest.
Yes, they were all smart people. Many were even likable, skilled leaders. But if your goal as an engineer is to be part of a successful product and not to be a well-rewarded part of a successful manager's organization, then you will not be happy. Is that what you mean by "professional immaturity"?
During my time writing software professionally I've had good, bad, and neutral managers.
I've found most of my good managers at companies that produce software as a product. These managers were technically trained and rose to their management roles through working as engineers at other companies. In two cases these managers were actually the CTO.
Most of my bad managers have been at companies that rely on software to facilitate their business, but do not consider software to be their business. These managers knew little about software and our teams were usually bloated by non-technical roles and often unproductive. Every idea ultimately had to be passed through engineers for validation / refinement and engineering became a very constrained resource.
Neutral management is where I would place most of my managers. They don't really aid in or detract from my productivity. They're there and doing things (even if those things are not always visible to me). They demonstrate enough value to dispell the feelings of: "If you weren't here then we could hire another engineer to actually work on this problem".
That said, you are 100% correct that if I didn't think about these things at all then I'd be much happier. After all, happiness is reality minus expectation.
The scary part is, if you went to a selective enough school, it kinda works.
The Ivy League undergrad -> elite MBA -> management consulting -> C-suite pipeline is especially frightening.
The worst in my opinion is finance-- it's like driving using the rear view mirror. No business has ever succeeded or failed because their accounting was really tip top.
People would laugh at the idea of a good leader being thrust into a SWE role based solely on their leadership skills. Yet we often think transitioning from a SWE to a leader is just picked up. I'm asserting that they are different skillsets. Will being a good developer help lead a team of SWE? Absolutely, but that alone doesn't provide the requisite knowledge and skills to perform a manager role, but we often think that's the bulk of what's necessary.
Meanwhile there are numerous process and personnel challenges that go completely ignored, because these Engineering Managers think their primary responsibility is as some kind of overseer preventing employees from doing their jobs wrong.
I would love if software companies started hiring dedicated, trained Managers. But that doesn’t seem like a thing they do. Instead they just promote an Engineer to Engineering Manager and hope for the best.
Coordination is necessary. Communication is valuable. Running a business is complex. Product managers do valuable work. Designers do valuable work. QA does valuable work. Leadership does valuable work. Engineers do valuable work.
The core of an EXTREME number of complaints about modern professional software development lies in the pervasiveness of Career Management; and EMs are an extremely attractive entrypoint for people into this kind of track, who have no experience in any of the IC-facing roles, yet now they're managing ICs.
Just go look at the vast majority of job postings for EMs. The requirements are extremely bare on actual, hard engineering experience; maybe you see the last requirement read something like "built an app in java or c++", and it never gets covered in the interviews.
You can't manage a role you haven't held, I will die on this hill. Senior leadership is fucking hard; that takes specialized skills, MBAs maybe, a little bit of crazy as well. EMs are not that, and anyone who tells you what EMs do is remotely as specialized as what the people higher up do is probably an EM. At their best, EMs should have an engineering background (or at least PM/PO; having worked with engineers as peers); they should know what it takes to build modern software systems from the inside; they should know how to mentor. At their worst, EMs who don't know any of this, but know management, spend their days as a Jira parrot and can make the lives of the people they manage miserable.
Its actually astounding to me that this is controversial, and that people don't recognize that the only reason companies change the requirements bar for EM positions is because, if they made the bar what I describe, that candidate would also make a great engineer; and companies are short engineers, not short "people who manage people". Its not out of some grand design that the best managers live on the management track. Many, many other specialized disciplines don't do what Big Tech does. The tracks for Engineers and Engineering Managers shouldn't be separate; they should be one track. But Big Tech companies don't want their engineers leaving the IC role, so they make do; and the irony of it all is all this does is lower the average quality of EMs in the org, which causes engineers to leave anyway; just to competitors.
That's why Engineering Management is bullshit. It doesn't have to be. Much of what that role does is necessary; its just overwhelmingly filled by the wrong people, who then morph the role into some bastardization of what it should be, get promoted, then write the job spec for their replacement.
[1] https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/engineering-manager-payment-...
[2] https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/77396557743170246-en...
[3] https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/3135805?gh_jid=...
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?
The reason we don't do that, is because we haven't gotten past being in a famine, zero sum mentality where hoarding power/resources is seen as obviously well and good.
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, <insert hyped company name here>.
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.
This. I see it over and over. People are thinking that copying management practices of successful companies is going to make them successful too. But it only works if those practices are what made the likes of Google successful. And it's not: Google is famous for it's search engine, not for it's managers. It's also famous for it's graveyard of failed projects. Somehow smartest people in the world created the most hated frontend framework.
Having infinite power doesn't typically create good leaders, it creates dictatorships.
Do you think having infinite money naturally leads to good management practices?
Its REALLY important to note the macroeconomics of our current climate. Tech is so, so, so rich right now. There's so much money flowing around that we just brute force our way through every problem. Cruft doesn't matter. Too crufty? Hire someone else to do that cruft. Split that cruft off into another team, that's growth and now my title is Director. Woah, don't touch that cruft, that's my cruft and I'm a Director, I'll die on my paycheck to defend that cruft.
Conway's Law: organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
A Correlate to Conway's Law: in capitalist systems, an organization's communication structure is a mirror of its macroeconomic climate. Rich economic climates breed excess.
I'd posit that if you normalized the Y axis on the graphs "amount of time employees at tech companies spend on paperwork" and "the US M2 money supply", they'd correlate pretty well over the past thirty years. If you take the position that's a coincidence, or that the correlation doesn't imply causation in this case... just wait to see what happens to all that previously critical paperwork, pushed by previously critical people in indispensable roles, when the latter graph flatlines or inverts.
Basically I've got skin in the game over the entire product, not just my silo.
But anyway my point was that he does a bad job at communicating what he does for us.
I much prefer "clear the runway".
The great teams I've worked on, shared context oozes from the team and managers often don't know what that shared context is, but they protect it.
Once one studies complexity science, it becomes less "bullshit" and more "navigating complexity" and that's how i approach it.
You're gonna have a bad time in engineering if you think everything not engineering is BS.
Managers however become essential when this well oiled machine is thrown off by a sudden expansion of the team or when there's a chronic uncertainty about the work that's going to happen next month. Then you need whose who are good at navigating this chaos through networking, politics etc., to get the work done as well as making sure the team survives should the axe fall.
You get to empower people to be better versions of themselves everyday. What other job allows you to do that?
The reality however is that most EM jobs are in fact bullshit jobs. They usually have people who are simply managers/operators, not often leaders nor coaches. To summarize a people manager's job, it's two main things:
1) Get results
2) Grow & retain your people
The challenge is that many EMs are also "assholes" so both of these goals are hard to accomplish. They fit into an asshole category in itself:
- political assholes master the art of corporate politics but do nothing but take credit for everyone else's work.
- controlling assholes micromanage to the point of strangling creativity and joy out of their team while taking credit for others creative ideas and call them their own.
- asshole assholes are mean, jealous, and insecure jerks who find ways to lie and manipulate others for their gain.
- mission-driven assholes are people who are crazy passionate and trample over how things are "done around here" to see the mission succeed.
Note: I use the term "asshole" in reference to Tony Fadell's book "Build". It's a fun way to think about it.
Most engineering teams tend to optimize for the incentive of the engineering manager, not the whole team. It's winner-take-all. The good EMs are the ones who see through this and ensure their whole team is empowered at the potential cost of their own incentive. These EMs usually win-win in the long term.
There are engineers out there who sees themselves as "idea compiler" ,which is totally fine imo. Not everyone needs to see the "big picture". But the maintenance and marketing aspect of any software project is not to be underestimated. And it is beneficial to not undermine things that one doesn't understand. You don't know what you don't know. Keeping an open mind helps you to reduce the realm of unknown.
There are two distinct roles in an engineering organization: staffing, process and engineering resources (indirect), and product/project development and delivery (direct).
Relegating staffing, process and resource decisions to non-engineers (e.g. HR) is not the best solution. It takes experience and expertise to build a good staff and engineering culture. That is the job of engineering managers.
Do engineering managers act as mentors? Sure, and they can also provide technical input. But that’s just one of their many responsibilities.
Roughly 30 years ago, this same discussion was happening around something called a “matrix organization.” It was the same confusion of responsibilities under a different name.
Everything works fine when everyone stays in their lane (managers, I mean) and pushes in the same direction. It takes coordination, and it’s not something that people can reinvent on a daily basis.
In short: Make a plan for your organization, write it down, show it to everyone (over and over again like beating a drum) and then stick with it. For those who don’t comply, send them packing.
what's crazy to me are all the comments here that echo what the article is saying where managers seem to be some sort of rulers and be all in an oganization, which would totally suck and i'm glad i don't work somewhere like that.
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 - good managers means +22% in revenue
[1] https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1561408118906568704
If the upside of managers is only 33%, they're probably not worth the added complexity/friction/expense !
(it's worse in a company as it's the shareholders who earn +30%, not you)
So in companies with lots of P0s, managers are missed more? Interesting take.
For someone in some profession 'A' at the top 5% of their peer group, everyone else seems incompetent by comparison. However, it's easy to ignore the incompetence of their own peer group. There are a few reasons for this. For example, if you're good at 'A' and someone is bad at 'A', you can more easily fill the gaps with your own knowledge and paper over that problem, which makes it seem less important. Similarly, highly skilled people tend to work in teams with other similarly skilled peers, etc...
However, when looking at random samples from profession 'B' (whatever that is), then the top-5%-at-A person will typically come across median 'B' people. That's just statistics.
So what does a top 5% at 'A' person think of median people in profession 'B', 'C', and 'D'? That they're all idiots and that their jobs are not as complex or meaningful as whatever 'A' is, of course!
Don't assume anything about what 'A' is. Could be engineering, science, finance, or whatever. The statistics is the same.
Management however gets significantly more flak than other professions, because they're forced onto employees. You don't generally get to choose your manager, you're assigned one. You don't get to fire your "superiors", even if they're clearly in the bottom 5% of the management profession and you're in the top 5% of your profession.
This is why you hear skilled engineers grumbling about bad management. So does every other skilled member of every other profession, including skilled managers, which have random managers above them!
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 great at Google. But first, a research team tried to prove the opposite: that managers actually don’t matter, that the quality of a manager didn’t impact a team’s performance. This hypothesis was based on an early belief held by some of Google’s leaders and engineers that managers are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, a layer of bureaucracy.
The team defined manager quality based on two quantitative measures: manager performance ratings and manager feedback from Google’s annual employee survey. This data quickly revealed that managers did matter: teams with great managers were happier and more productive.
https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/managers-identify-what-...
Google currently asks Engineering Managers to focus on three areas: Leading work, developing people, and building community.
What are some ways I spend my time?
1. Making sure my people are supported in their lives and careers. This can mean giving someone a task they will take a long time to finish, because it's the right thing for them (and the team) to have that person learn about that area. You are trading off project/feature delivery for personal and team growth. It can also mean helping someone find ways to still have impact when they are struggling with some aspect of their job.
2. Clarifying strategies and priorities. There are only so many things the team can do successfully, and someone needs to be the person who says No. I am also the person best situated to look outward to other groups and teams to identify areas of collaboration.
3. Making sure we are organized appropriately and effectively, and that we are following good Engineering processes. I hate unnecessary process as much as anyone -- I've always said process should be something that helps you get your job done properly and effectively, not a hoop you need to jump through in order to do your job.
As an EM (and when I worked as a developer), I have had my own share of high-quality and poor-quality managers and Directors above me. If you feel EM is bullshit, I'm sorry you've never experienced what it's like to work on a team with a good, supportive manager.
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.
Promotion policies continue to evolve at Google based on internally-sourced data. They changed most recently a few months ago. It's a constant that people don't like the current process, but they also don't like it when it changes :-). But I do appreciate that Google recognizes that the perf/promo processes could be better, and then they try to make them better.
Read about Admiral Rickover. He built the first practical nuclear submarine in the world, for the US navy, in record time of 3 years. He cleared bureaucratic hurdles, played the politics when needed, kept tight control, delved deep into the technicalities of the project, recruited and trained a large number of people into the program, and ultimately made the project successful.
Dig deeper into any other large scale projects, you'll find great engineering management. The Manhattan project is another example (It should be categorised mostly under engineering management & not scientific management, according to some of the members in the team).
"Errors are not in the art but in the artificer"
I'd also say military management is significantly different than civilian. If my manager tells me to jump I'm not going to say how high. I'm going to say why are you asking me to move its early and i havnt had coffee yet.
Secondly, about burnout and turnover. Let's discuss from an empirical standpoint. The number one proximal cause of turnover is lack of "commitment". There are longitudinal empircal studies which demonstrate this. Job satisfaction is important as well; however commitment dominates every other factor.
Hence, it is important for managers to generate commitment, one way or another. I believe from these aspects, Rickover truly understood engineers and technical folks... In fact, he went against the US military books, and emphasised Individual initiative and judgement, regardless of what the rulebooks said. In a way, Rickover was able to work around the navy rules to create sufficient commitment to get complicated jobs done.