Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist"

hype7 writes "Here's a provocative article; the VP of engineering of a Sequoia-backed startup in Silicon Valley makes the case that good engineering managers aren't just hard to find — that they basically don't exist. The crux of his argument? The best engineers get all the benefits of being leaders, but without needing to take on the rather painful duties of management. So they choose not to move up. Compare this to the engineers who aren't as strong, and use the opportunity to move up as a way to get their voice heard."

Comments

they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

So... the good engineering managers are leading by example and managing through informal means. They are out there but since they do not have titles they do not exist. Only a manager would think like this.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[ackthpt]

Go back about 40 years ago, before CEOs gathered obscene salaries, bonuses, etc for doing sweet fanny adams, and you had generations of managers who rose up through the ranks and knew the work of their associates, as they once had done it themselves. They were gradually replaced by career managers who knew nothing about what the engineer was doing, but how to play the management game and crawl up the ladder. IMHO this is why so many companies are in such trouble all the time, they are run by people who do not understand what is actually going on.

There's a saying: Those who can't do, teach.

My variation on this is: Those who can't do, teach, but those who can't teach manage.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[James-NSC]

I'll second that observation. Ever since "manager" has become a career option in and of itself, it's attracted "those who can't do anything else and who don't produce anything of value". Prior to that being a self serving career path, managers were people who worked their way up the ranks and carried with them both the experience of being "worker bees" and the knowledge of what the pain points of the bees were. Once they became management, upper management benefited from their experience of being a worker, and the workers benefited from their experience of being "one of them" - everybody won. These days, you have managers (we have one where I work) who have never done anything else and as a result, bring absolutely nothing to the table.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[ackthpt]

I'll second that observation. Ever since "manager" has become a career option in and of itself, it's attracted "those who can't do anything else and who don't produce anything of value". Prior to that being a self serving career path, managers were people who worked their way up the ranks and carried with them both the experience of being "worker bees" and the knowledge of what the pain points of the bees were. Once they became management, upper management benefited from their experience of being a worker, and the workers benefited from their experience of being "one of them" - everybody won. These days, you have managers (we have one where I work) who have never done anything else and as a result, bring absolutely nothing to the table.

I learned these lessons from my father, who was an engineer. His manager was a managing-engineer. The person above him had been a managing-engineer. Two presidents I knew the children of, they attended the public schools, had been engineers at one time. Now the top tier of the company is a bunch of pros who live off the wealth prior generations brought to the company.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

This isn't true at all, it's actually quite the opposite. The older line of thinking of organizations was to have a pyramid of managers, which gave line workers less autonomy. Today line workers are more empowered and organizations tend to be flattened in comparison.

Proof: http://www.nber.org/papers/w96...

In the early 1900's the highly bureaucratized management structures were largely a result of Max Weber's business principles, which started to fall out of favor in the 70's, and newer businesses try to avoid that system as much as they can. Some workers need to be micromanaged (yes, believe it or not most minimum wage workers can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, which is why they make minimum wage) but firms where you're paid a higher salary want to avoid that as best as they can so that their employees can maximize their potential.

And before you go "aha you sound like a manager" no, I'm not in management, not interested in it either. I'm not morally opposed to being a manager either, like some who post on slashdot are, rather I just don't think it's a very fun thing to do. I'm actually the type who prefers to simply be handed a problem and asked to solve it within the defined parameters. You do that with management (especially project management,) but a lot of times you're bogged down with accounting, and I hate accounting (and things like it, such as logistics.)

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[JoeMerchant]

If you're ever completely out of date, you're doing it wrong. Sure, you might not stay at the cutting edge of the latest fads, but the good new tools and techniques take 5 to 10 years to get established. If you're so out of touch that you can't pick up the buzz of something worthwhile after 5 years, and take the time to learn and master that yourself, how did you ever get through engineering school in the first place?

Also, if your company "needs" new tech that didn't exist five years ago, maybe you are too old for that game. There's plenty of worthwhile work out there that doesn't involve gambling on picking "the next big thing" before it happens.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[CrankyFool]

That probably came across somewhat cranky, but is entirely accurate.

I'm an engineering manager. Until a year ago, I was an engineer. I'm a decent engineer, though prone to quick-and-dirty hacks sometimes to solve problems rather than good long-term design. I got promoted to managing an infrastructure software engineering group (after the engineers in that group gave me the thumbs up) and in my first one-on-one meeting with each of my engineers I asked them "so what would you like me to be doing around here?"

And you know ... yes. It turns out that if meetings need to be attended, and we have a choice between a world-class engineer attending them and a manager attending them and then passing back whatever relevant information engineers want to know, my engineers seem to prefer that I attend those meetings (sometimes. Sometimes they just call their own meetings if they think they need to).

Generally, I consider my job to be "the stuff we need to do the engineers don't want to do" (e.g. recruiting). And I get paid less than about half my engineers (and I think my salary's a little below median for my group). Which is fair -- their impact on the organization is higher than mine.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[jhol13]

In essense, good managers work for the engineers, bad managers work for upper management.

Re: they exist but do not have titles?

[malloci]

I too work at a place where my management is promoted from the ranks of geeks. The problem? Geeks often don't make good managers. People skills are often lacking; they try to maintain that role of geek (which they were great at) and fail at the additional duties of managing.

I'm not saying it can't be done, and i agree that Having a manager that understands technical details can be great. Having one that understands how to really manage people is 100x more useful.

It's personality

[docwatson223]

The best engineers I've met in 20 years can't deal with people or their problems. The best managers I've met have enough engineering to know what's going on and when to get out of the way.

Re:It's personality

[jgotts]

No, those aren't the best engineers. Those are terrible engineers, people who have done a great job memorizing their university textbooks and they probably got all A's and can tell you 100 useless computer science facts about trees.

The best software engineers were child prodigies who began programming as children, saw the forest for the trees at the university and didn't care much about their grades, people who have done hobbyist software work throughout their lives. These people can explain engineering to a child, admit when they make mistakes, and you can discuss with them any subject whatsoever. These people find what they need using Google, because they are great general problem solvers.

Re:It's personality

[kzadot]

Heh I agreed with the first bit. But I thought the second bit was going somewhere else.

The best engineers are self managing, communicative, get on well with others, have a customer focus, understand the market and the domain and have an understanding of how knowledge work flows through a product development system. They understand risks and can make decisions. They don't get bogged down in the details of the latest tech toy, and are able to deliver, constantly what the customer wants with high quality.

Good engineers can still fall short in one or two areas, that is why we need managers.

Re:Dilbert

[ThePhilips]

No.

That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.

Re:Dilbert

[ColdWetDog]

He's not even the first. It's basically the Peter Principle. And he wasn't even the first.

Probably originally noted by the Sumarians when they tried to get the Zuggernauts higher than two stories.

He's really just whining and his rant shows you how out of touch these Silicon Valley guys really are. Companies like Boeing, Lockheed, the consortium that made the LHC - they work on engineering projects that would make a Silicon Valley company curl up in a little ball. You can argue that some of the megacorps are indeed getting to big to manage. Witness Boeing's stupid attempt to outsource pretty much the entire 787 in order to curry favor from various countries. As well as Lockheed's inability to get the F-35 going.

But those projects are several orders of magnitude larger than his. He just needs to learn something from the pros.

Re:I know one

[Trepidity]

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.

I see his point

[rilister]

Having worked as an engineer and a manager in Silicon Valley, I see his point. But I've also worked in Germany, and it's interesting to see how many senior business leaders in Germany are engineers. I personally think that as a culture we (American engineers) devalue and even laugh at leadership skills. We think they're irrelevant to being a good engineer: call it Dilbertism.

Culturally, German engineers (in comparison) see leadership of people and teams as one of their natural requirements. Engineers are reknowned for their high-handedness and taking lead in any given situation. I remember trying being in an informal situation setting a large number of tables for a party: when I started suggesting a plan, two german language students started saying "look at the engineer, taking over as usual".

So, again, as an ex-engineer, I think our mutually reinforced disparagement of managers is part of the problem. Leadership is something we should be naturally good at, and all engineers offended by Juan's assertion should take it as a challenge, not an insult.

Re:not exactly

[Grishnakh]

The most talented might have some other quirks, such as not enjoying endless meetings, pointless bureaucracy, idiotic politics, and this would render them unsuited for a job in management. Of course, the other managers rephrase this as "doesn't play well with others".

Re:I know one

[khasim]

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.

"Not a team player."

But which team and what game is never directly stated.

The "team" is not the people you manage. It is the other managers and the executives. You burn "worker bees" to protect the people on the real team.

And that is the game. Protect the careers of the managers and executives. That's why there are management meetings and executive retreats and golf games. So you will be able to bond with the people who will be protecting you and who will expect your protection in exchange.