[HN Gopher] "Good engineering management" is a fad
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"Good engineering management" is a fad
Author : jkbyc
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-11-23 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lethain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com)
| koliber wrote:
| One of the most important things about great performers in any
| discipline is to be adaptive. This also applies to engineering
| managers. I think the article is correct that it identifies that
| fads shifted. Great people were able to both adapt to new
| expectations while all the while adapting their approach to
| individual situations and people. If you are a one-trick pony
| sometimes your trick is in line with fads and expectations and
| you will do well. Sometimes it's not in line and you will
| struggle. If you are adaptive you will do well in a changing
| landscape.
| glouwbug wrote:
| Sometimes the real deliverable is a happy team
| bluGill wrote:
| Only to the extent that a happy team delivers something of
| value. Teams can be happy doing things that will drive the
| company bankrupt. there is only so much unhappiness they can
| stand
| khaled_ismaeel wrote:
| If value can only be delivered by making a group of people
| miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is
| fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Why misrepresent what someone else said to make your
| point?
| mjr00 wrote:
| Even outside the context of capitalism, society only
| functions when people perform unpleasant tasks which
| provide value. Nobody has fun collecting garbage, but it
| has to be done. Nobody finds happiness in digging graves,
| but it has to be done. Nobody is overjoyed at the
| prospect of telling a person they have a terminal
| illness, but it has to be done.
|
| So no, I don't really buy the idea that a team which is
| "forced" to work on boring, but profitable tasks for a
| business instead of getting to rewrite core
| infrastructure in Rust as a fun and interesting
| intellectual exercise is equivalent to slavery.
| elliotto wrote:
| This is a good article that is critical of narratives around
| behaviour within organisations. I particularly enjoyed his
| criticism of the 'morality tale'.
|
| The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in
| organisations more generally, working above these strange social
| structures largely unique to silicon valley. It wasn't the
| purpose of the article, but I wish he was a bit more critical of
| these structures in general.
| Exoristos wrote:
| > The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different
| things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of
| those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it's
| pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take
| any current morality tale as true, then you're setting yourself
| up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again
| in a few years, because "good leadership" is just a fad.
|
| Institutional rhetoric at high levels is always meant to
| manipulate labor markets, financial markets, popular opinion.
| This is basic worldly-wisdom. The question is how does one (who
| is not at a high level) survive the recurring institutional
| changes? There seem to be two approaches to an answer: Do one's
| professional best regardless of change, or try to anticipate
| changes and adjust with the wind. For the first, gods may bless
| you, but it is folly to think your bosses will respect you. For
| the second -- good luck, you're running with bulls. Either way,
| the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are
| grist to the mill.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers
| are grist to the mill
|
| Businesses exist to make money. If you want a commune instead,
| join one!
| Buttons840 wrote:
| For many workers, working towards the goal of making the
| company profitable would be an improvement.
|
| Many workers primarily work towards helping the boss grow
| their head count, or helping the middle-manager with their
| emotional state.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > helping the middle-manager with their emotional state.
|
| Hah, this is hilarious. So very "The Office".
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's generally a symbiotic relationship though, as the
| workers grow their own resume while helping their boss grow
| theirs (and generally the boss is growing his own while
| helping his boss grow theirs and so on. Sometimes it goes
| all the way up where even the founder just wants that
| lifestyle subsidized by investor money and does not care to
| actually ever build a profitable product).
|
| This kind of perverse incentive comes up when the rank and
| file has no meaningful way to profit off the company's
| success, and so it instead becomes more profitable (in
| future profits from the inflated resume, or
| kickbacks/favors from vendors, etc) to act _against_ the
| company. Just like in security bug bounties, companies
| should reward their employees _more_ than an external
| malicious actor would, otherwise they will choose the
| rational option.
| NumberCruncher wrote:
| Really sharp reasoning. This can be reversed to define an
| extra ordinary manager: don't care about your head count
| and just be a fucking grown up who's emotional state does
| not depend on his team's performance. IMHO this results in
| having a high head count and a team performing pretty well.
| Kinda stoic wisdom. Go and figure...
| stavros wrote:
| That's not the only reason why businesses can exist. It's the
| most common reason in US culture, but there are other reasons
| and cultures.
| Aloha wrote:
| I think my takeaway from this is there is no objective standard
| for good engineering management - whatever counts for _good_ has
| to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the
| organization.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Right, implementation od policy is equal to policy itself. If
| an org draws up a policy of maximized productivity with minimal
| staff, good is preventing turnover.
| bigiain wrote:
| > whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the
| culture and habits of the organization
|
| Within and outside the organization.
|
| A "good" manager during a time of mass recruiting uses a very
| different skillset to a good manager during times of mass
| layoffs.
|
| I suspect we won't really know what a good manager in the era
| of AI tools looks like for another 5 years or more.
| zkmon wrote:
| There is no absolute description of good leadership. But there is
| a relative one. It's about the degree of alignment with goals at
| the moment, at team level, and org level and being able to
| convince people about the achieved alignment.
|
| Knowing what these goals are, is just as difficult or even
| harder, than achieving those goals. Most of these goals are not
| the ones that are written in big font.
| ghaff wrote:
| And more broadly, goals/interests/skills can align really well
| with company needs and priorities at a time--and then they don't.
| You may be able to adapt but when the whole reason you were hired
| basically goes away, maybe it's not a great fit any longer.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| A manager's job isn't to guide the company, it's to make sure his
| team does the tasks they are assigned. Likewise, a worker's job
| isn't to "think about the big picture" and come up with a
| strategy for the organization.
|
| So who is supposed to do it? Because executives sure aren't.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The executives are supposed to, even if they aren't doing so.
| bornpsy wrote:
| Every skill eventually boils down to empathy, alignment is just
| being empathic
| criemen wrote:
| I've been thinking lately a lot about this. What is it I do
| when I want to convince someone of something (i.e. "creating
| alignment" in corporate speak)? I listen to them, am empathic,
| ask meaningful questions etc. Afterwards, that opens a space
| for me to make a proposal that is well-received.
| simonw wrote:
| Make sure you get as far as the four core management skills and
| the four growth management skills, which are very clearly
| explained and make a ton of sense to me.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| I also hear that middle management is being cut from all
| companies. Some kind of management is necessary though, no?
| Otherwise people will get misaligned an all that. I'm not sure
| what is the point of the article. I guess a good manager doesn't
| need a bullet list to be able to function so why this person is
| writing a new one?
| davidw wrote:
| The article is giving me PTSD.
| constantcrying wrote:
| This is about software and management for software. But software
| developers have no engineering culture, they have a craftsmanship
| culture, favoring things like individualism and "taste". The
| article pretty clearly demonstrates this, as this is not how any
| actual engineering organization or any actual engineer thinks
| about management.
|
| Software has something, which no engineering discipline has.
| Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train
| _everything affects everything_. Management exists, for the sole
| reason of creating anything in such a world. What the corporation
| wants from an engineering manager, is someone who solves that
| communication problem, what the engineer wants from his manager
| is someone who figures out what is happening in the rest of the
| organization.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| It isn't good leadership/management that is a fad. What is a fad
| is what that looks like to the C-suite and how that is measured.
| There is no substitute for ability no matter how many management
| courses or frameworks you know. What is constant is the higher-
| ups ignoring this and going for the latest management philosophy.
| madrox wrote:
| I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you
| proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior
| and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this
| tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no
| idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-
| jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you
| see many successful, seasoned EMs become political animals over
| time.
|
| My suspicion about why this is the case is rooted in the
| responsibilities engineering shares with product and design at
| the management level. In an environment where very little
| unilateral decision making can be made by an EM, it is difficult
| to know if an outcome is because the EM is doing well or because
| of the people around them. I could be wrong, but once you look
| high enough in the org chart to no longer see trios, this problem
| recedes.
|
| The author really got me thinking about the timeless aspects of
| the role underlying fads. I have certainly noticed shifts in
| management practice at companies over my career, but I choose to
| believe the underlying philosophy is timeless, like the
| relationship between day to day software engineering and computer
| science.
|
| I worry about the future of the EM discipline. Every decade or
| so, it seems like there is a push to eliminate the function
| altogether, and no one can agree on the skillset. And yet like
| junior engineers, this _should_ be the function that grows future
| leadership. I don 't understand why there is so much disdain for
| it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it.
|
| I do. It's often done by people that become tyrants over their
| little fiefdom.
| viccis wrote:
| I read more of the author's blog posts and it's actually insane
| to me that he not only was involved in one of the worst product
| deliveries in internet history (Digg v4), but he still justifies
| it somehow??
| kaashif wrote:
| This really taints the article for me. Maybe I should evaluate
| the article on its own merits or whatever, but to justify the
| Digg fiasco...
| simonw wrote:
| Presumably you're talking about this -
| https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism
| born of necessity"
|
| Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content?
| Because it's a _fantastic_ insider 's war story about one of
| the most infamous product launches in our industry's history.
|
| Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if
| you like but seems like a very interesting piece of insight to
| me:
|
| > Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a
| catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn't
| have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days
| I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was
| significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month,
| we had recently raised money and knew we couldn't easily raise
| more. If we'd had the choice between launching something great
| and something awful, we'd have preferred to launch something
| great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing
| or turning in our bat quietly.
|
| > I'm glad we took the last swing; proud we survived the rough
| launch.
|
| > On the other hand, I'm still shocked that we were so reckless
| in the launch itself. I remember the meeting where we decided
| to go ahead with the launch, with Mike vigorously protesting.
| To the best of my recollection, I remained silent. I hope that
| I grew from the experience, because even now I'm uncertain how
| such a talented group put on that display of fuckery.
|
| I can't imagine how reading that could make you think they were
| less rather than more credible as a source of information on
| engineering management!
| pnathan wrote:
| The question of leadership is much larger, more general, and more
| timeless than the last 15 years. I invite those curious about it
| to look into the American Army.
|
| > Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing
| purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and
| improve the organization.
|
| taken from -
|
| -- https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf
| geoffbp wrote:
| The job of EM is to be accountable for a team (or teams) which
| deliver(s) software. A software engineer's job is to develop
| software.
| Zigurd wrote:
| If you're talking about the relationship of engineering
| management with senior management, the most important "core
| skill," though I wouldn't really call it a skill, is alignment.
| Thing is, you won't get alignment without being closely aligned
| with product management, and if product management is weak,
| acting just as a features accountant, you're screwed no matter
| how good an engineering manager you are. You have no support to
| disagree with or shape senior management inputs. Everything else
| is nice and correct but not determinative the way that alignment
| will be.
| armcat wrote:
| I think there is this troika of "Leadership", "Management" and
| "Followship". You don't have to be an engineering manager to be a
| leader, and just because you are a leader doesn't mean you have
| any "followers". As someone who's been a team lead, a tech lead,
| an EM, and a C-level, I feel the goal is to hit that balance
| between those three. You want to embody a leader by actually
| being technically great, visionary, empathetic, and leading by
| example; but you also want to manage people and expectations; and
| ultimately you want people to follow you - to basically say "I
| love working for/with this person". Finding this triangulation is
| essentially what makes you timeless and relevant no matter the
| fad.
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