[HN Gopher] Coaching engineering managers to take on organizatio...
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Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems
Author : jammons
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-01-06 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jeffammons.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jeffammons.com)
| a_c wrote:
| Guess what, organization problem is a manifestation of a
| collective world view of the organization. And adding feature is
| always easier than refactoring/merging responsibility.
|
| It is easy for a company building single page app to form an API,
| an analytics team, an infra team, QA, slapping incremental
| solution to solve their incremental problem. After having
| specialised team, it is far harder to merge things into good old
| Django with nginx where you can parse the log for analytics and
| just serve fully rendered html. At this point people will start
| saying their organization is different, we do it for "scale up"
| sake. They are probably right and the WhatsApp/instagram path is
| probably not for everyone.
|
| Organization is the human version of software architecture. Do it
| too much, too early, too little understanding will all have long
| term, non-immediate, non-numerically justifiable effect. People
| love to talk about these.
| glitchc wrote:
| I have trouble with the premise. Organizational problems are not
| the hardest problems a company faces, not by a long shot. Rather,
| organizational problems are a manifestation of leadership
| dysfunction, and by leadership I mean senior leadership (board of
| directors, CEO and down). They are easy to fix when the right-
| minded people are in charge and impossible to fix when they're
| not.
|
| Unless engineering managers are promoted to the board, it's
| unlikely they can make any change possible. Since the article
| doesn't mention that, it's just marketing fluff.
| jmole wrote:
| Tell me you've never worked at a large company without telling
| me you've never worked at a large company
| subharmonicon wrote:
| It looks like the actual title here is "Growing Leaders to Solve
| the Hardest Problems", but the submission is different.
|
| I believe HN policy is to post actual titles if possible, is that
| right @dang?
| [deleted]
| pvg wrote:
| The title stuff is in the site guidelines
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| There's also a giant pile of additional title lore in the mod
| comments.
|
| @dang doesn't do anything but there's emailing which does work.
| jammons wrote:
| Sorry if I messed that up when posting it
| hgsgm wrote:
| No need to apologize for removing clickbait.
| jammons wrote:
| Thanks, yeah, I was trying to make it clear what the post
| was about for anyone clicking.
| mansoon wrote:
| Don't ever take on organizational problems. You are working at a
| company. The company is a sociopath. You have to act accordingly.
| groby_b wrote:
| "The company" is nothing, except what leadership makes it. As a
| manager, that includes you. If everybody chooses not to care
| about org problems? Guess what, that's a manifestation of
| sociopathic behavior.
|
| So, act accordingly.
| reese_john wrote:
| A company is not a single entity. Your experience can be very
| different depending on your team, manager and department.
| notyourwork wrote:
| The experience only differs because of how much or little you
| are sheltered from reality of the inter-organization
| politics.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| "Sheltered from the reality of inter-organization politics"
| is a pretty wide bucket. I've been on teams that constantly
| fight with each other to get resources and executive
| attention, and I've been on teams that collaborate with
| each other to make the best decisions taking into account
| everyone's constraints and capabilities. In my experience
| there's a huge qualitative difference that doesn't have
| much to do with hiding or disguising anything.
| mcrad wrote:
| [dead]
| shawnz wrote:
| And if that sociopath is offering you money to take on those
| organizational problems, what's the according act in that case?
| bb88 wrote:
| Your engineering manager may not know:
|
| * How to manage people.
|
| I realize this is snarky in tone but in 2023 this still rings
| true for many people.
|
| Much of management doesn't know anything about engineering. Many
| engineers don't know anything about managing people.
|
| The worse the management the worse the politics.
| mym1990 wrote:
| In my current situation it feels like much of management
| doesn't know anything about managing people :(
| t3estabc wrote:
| [dead]
| flerchin wrote:
| Was this written by ChatGPT? Very generic.
| jammons wrote:
| Hah! Nope, 100% wet-neuron generated work here.
| branperr wrote:
| I don't think the class of problems talked about in here are
| necessarily the biggest problems. Rather, it's politically
| motivated decision-making. Not in the sense of _insert your pet
| US politics issue_ , but rather about capturing influence within
| the organization to make themselves status-y. For example, Google
| managers over-inflating their team numbers to make their resume
| look better.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| marktangotango wrote:
| A lot of organizations have this problem, not covered in the
| article:
|
| > Anxiety, low abilities
|
| I was once a software engineering manager at a company in the
| financial services realm. This was a low margin business that had
| suffered a decade of layoffs when I joined. It was a morass of
| low effort, punch the clock, do just enough to get by teams and
| leaders. Making any sort of forward progress was nearly
| impossible. I gave it my best shot though, and managed to find
| like minded people throughout the organization. We had a good
| couple of years and made some real progress. Then the next round
| of layoffs saw some of these key people let go.
|
| It was very disappointing, but I too left after a time. After the
| layoffs, 75% of my remaining team quit for better pay. My boss, a
| director, gave me some support people who could spell "java" and
| told me to train them up, because we weren't hiring (no one would
| work for the company anyway, horrible reputation). Yep, that was
| it for me, I resigned.
|
| All that to say, at some point it's a business problem. I hope
| others in similar situations don't stress as much as I did.
|
| Edit: words
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I hope your stake in ownership was commensurate to your
| emotional stake!
| [deleted]
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