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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."
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.
I'd say that is applicable to medium and large business, but in small business where the engineer is also the proprietor or partner, it's a different story.
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.
I have met exactly one excellent engineering manager. Of course he was a licensed professional civil and HVAC engineer, and he didn't know anything about software engineering, but it turned out that didn't matter, because he was awesome at project management, documentation, using the right amount of process, and he really "got" engineers and engineering in general, and trusted us on the technical stuff. Then he got unceremoniously shitcanned by a blowhard asshat VP who didn't want to hear what he was saying, who himself proceeded to jump ship a year later. *sigh*.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Sorry, but good positions for engineering managers dont exist.
Source: I have an MSc and an MBA. I've heard that those are rare qualifications. What I have found: there are NO positions that want both. It's either one or the other, but never both. Business and technical are always very firewalled from each other in job postings. There are not positions that want both skill sets.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Managing needs a fundamental rethink. Lot of managers act like kings or generals, not partners or guides or communicators. And that's doing an injustice to good kings, who understood that they could not be slave-driving dictators. Engineers should have the authority to fire managers. Vote the bad managers out.
The West prides themselves on being fair democracies. Yet corporations are still handled with medieval traditions. Most are even passed on to heirs, under the odd medieval notion that, like entire kingdoms, a company can belong to an individual bloodline.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
the highly skilled engineer loves his job, the challenge that it gives him technically and the satisfaction of finding the solution and having it implemented. so go into management where it's all politics, meetings and knowing that those who were once your peers are now your staff. Who could resist such a plum job. I tried it once, never again I'd rather have a bottle in from of me that a frontal lobotomy.....
I was in design engineering for 30 years and had about ten managers over the course of my career. One of them was excellent. Of course, he got promoted...
Give the technical leads assistants to manage the scheduling, report writing and staff management. That way you get the same work but without the managers salary. You can also try using the right tools. Too many managers use spreadsheets to do project management.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
I'm not at all surprised that he's not able to recruit good engineering managers to work on yet another waste of venture money. It's not a company that develops anything new or different.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
No, it's different. The Peter Principle says, "you will be promoted until your job is too hard for you to do well."
This guy is saying that good engineers would rather not be promoted, even though they could do the job well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Impossible? No. Very difficult to get both people management and engineering skills in the same person? Yup. That's true, but that's why you take care of that person when you find them.
The first thing on their website is:
currently hiring: Director of Engineering
Sounds like a great place to work with blowhard like him there.
I work in a division of nothing but IT/IS guys (and girls) and our manager is a brilliant programmer. He's also a terrible boss. You want to be a good boss to your IS/IT/Engineering gang, here's how you do it: (1) Trust them to make the right decisions. This part alone is 90% of being a good manager. If you trust your employees, then number (2) won't even come up (2) Don't be a micro-manager. If you hired good people, give them a task, and sit back and let them do it. Quit getting in the way, it just breeds resentment or apathy. (3) Praise them in public, chastise them in private. If they do good, announce it loudly to everyone you work with, and everyone in the company. Show them you like what they did, and they will feel good about where they work. If they screw up, *gently* chastise them in private. Don't berate them, or belittle them, tell them what they need to do to fix things, and then let them fix it and go on. Don't keep bringing up their past mistakes. (4) Don't bog them down with pointless meetings and/or stupid paperwork. You hired idea people, don't kill their enjoyment of being creative by giving them scut work, take that upon yourself. (5) Look at the big picture. That's your job. Let them worry about how it's being built, you worry about the end result and where it fits in the company. (6) Back your team. Fight for them. If they need something (more resources for example) go get it, don't question them endlessly or needlessly about why, it's your job to ensure they have the tools to do their jobs. If questions are raised by other teams/managers about what they are doing or what they need (X) for, find out from them in private, but state it publicly. It's not hard to be a good manager, but too many people seem to be unable to do so. (posting anon since my boss reads this site)
I work for one of them. I've worked for two others previously.
Current boss likes being able to have his fingers in all the design pies, which he can do because he doesn't have to code any more. That could be a disaster if he were a micromanaging ego driven tool who wanted to own everything, but he knows what he doesn't know and defers to the area experts/leaders. He comes up with very good ideas or ties it together with another part of the project, so he's also contributing.
He spends the other half of the time doing all those horrible managery things the rest of us don't want to do. And for that he makes more money.
Everyone wins!
Of course this /requires/ someone who can manage his time and his ego effectively to work well, but they do exist.
People go into engineering to engineer. Not to tell other people how to do it. Let me explain my day:
Meetings: 2 hours, minimum, per day. Every meeting starts 2-10 minutes late, depending on the most senior person in the meeting. The more senior, the more they impress by being late to the meeting to demonstrate their importance. "Sorry I'm late, had to stop in the bathroom, fill up my coffee, and blah blah blah don't care". Anything discussed in the meeting could have been done in a 5 minute conversation or 10 minute email composition, but nobody "has time" to read email and comment, because they're in meetings all the time.
HR Crap: Wanna hire someone? That's at least 40 hours of solid work to pile through the paperwork, which by the way changed completely since the last time you did it, WHY ARE YOU DOING IT THE OLD WAY YOU MORON! Doing annual objectives. Doing semi-annual reviews. Approving timesheets. Approving expense reports. Sitting in on interviews for other teams so they have enough feedback to fill out their paperwork, so they return the favor when you need it. Touchy-feely manager training. Sexual harassment training. Diversity training. Interviewing training. Training training (not kidding).
Stupid Management Stuff: Talking to every single person on the team, asking about their kids, their favorite sports team, whatever. Every day. 1 hour/day or so. No, I don't care, but *I* get reviewed on that stuff as well. Dealing with making sure people are happy so you don't have to spend the 40 hours of interviewing and HR crap to hire someone else.
Bureaucratic Crap: Buying things (Budget approval, another approval to actually buy the thing, approval to install it, and security team approval to actually get access to it). Borrowing things. Getting office space, computers, and computer upgrades for the team. Putting in tickets when phones don't work, when people need security access to new systems. Acquiring software is the WORST, I work for a multi-million dollar corporation that has sales people expense accounts for a week over $20k, and it's taken me 8 weeks to get a $10k software acquisition approved.
Building things: fill out forms to make something. Spend a lot of time reviewing forms and approving them. Don't spend any time actually doing things, that might be fun, you have to delegate that onto your team. You might get some design work in, but you should leave that to your Architect, aren't you late for a meeting?
Mentoring: The only fun part of my job that's left. 2 hours per day. Max.
All of this and what do you get? Better pay? Nope, I got a guy working for me making the same money. An office. Well, yeah, sure...untilNO. YOU HAVE TO BE SENIOR MANAGER TO GET AN OFFICE. Until then, a cube like everyone else. Respect of peers? LOL.
Honestly, being a manager is a shitty, shitty, shitty job. It simultaneously doesn't pay enough and can't pay enough, so it doesn't even try. You don't get to do fun stuff anymore, and you get yelled at if you try. I got roped into it because everyone else took a step back faster when they were looking for volunteers.
Why yes, I am sending out resumes. Why do you ask?
Honestly, the best thing to do in IT once you hit a certain level is ask yourself "Do I want to be a manager". If the answer is no, you essentially have to quit and go be a consultant.
When the astronauts puss out and the cosmonauts go home for the day, who gets shit done? The muthafukin Zuggernauts that's who. When my boss hands me a project that I can't handle, I look at him and say "We are gonna need a Zuggernaut for this bro."
I seriously doubt this. Good engineers just aren't cut out for management: they have no interest in bullshitting, sitting in endless meetings, playing corporate politics, etc. Just because you're good at designing and building things doesn't mean you can deal with people well, and a manager needs to do the latter.
America no longer values leadership. America values drama.
There is a significant and growing crowd (which took their inspiration from assholes on the Internet) that takes personal offense at the very utterance of a declarative sentence. They are the self-proclaimed arbiters who stand ready to disprove anything given enough grist for their narcissist logic mill.
They are the people who start every sentence with "actually" or "yeah, but." They insist on consensus and then sabotage it. They litigate everything, right down to the flavor of the donuts. They like to refer to themselves as skeptics, but in reality they are just asses.
These people make real leadership impossible.
In any technical project requiring more than a few people a small number of the people assigned will gradually emerge as the technical leads, the alpha geeks. This isn't by designation. It's a meritocracy in action. Even though there is no official process, the results are fairly objective. Lower levels of management retain some vestiges of requiring technical competence but, the higher you go, the more the results of who gets promoted are governed by how well an individual shmoozes, kisses fanny, acts as their own PR and other subjective qualities. It is very difficult for higher management to differentiate between an easy project and a competent manager or a hard project and an incompetent manager.
If the above situation isn't enough to keep good engineers from becoming engineering managers, the reward you get for moving to the management track is technical obsolescence. The only thing you become qualified to do is be a manager. In larger companies the only thing you may be qualified to do is be a manager at that company since the bulk of you time is consumed by navigating the arcane bureaucracy that you are part of.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I know of several managers who were excellent engineers before they were promoted and have made excellent managers as well. This guy is just projecting his own personal view onto the rest of the world. His argument that good engineers won't accept a promotion is complete bullshit since there are many good engineers who would enjoy the increased pay and/or power. In general, money and power are the ultimate motivators, even if it isn't the case for this author.
Medium-sized company, small groups, but nevertheless excellent managers. And, incidentally, willing and able to pitch in and do some of the work occasionally. One of the interesting things is that both of the excellent managers always chose to use the slowest, oldest, hand-me-down PCs.
I've also... ONCE in my career... gone to engineering planning meetings led by the VP of R&D, who insisted on doing everything in detail with Microsoft Project, and... you'll never believe this, never... actually used the tool to get a picture of the overall project and the critical paths. Someone would say something like "So, according to the chart, we're going to be three weeks late here," and he might say "Well, that's when marketing says they want it, but they don't really need it and I'm pretty sure I can push that back."
Or he would stare at another part and say, "Well, this looks like the critical path, and why is it going to take eight weeks to get this lens made?" And the optical engineer would say "That's what XYZ in Rochester is quoting us." And the VP would say "Hmmm... is there any way to get that faster?" "Well, we could get it in five weeks if we placed an expedited order but that's very expensive." "How expensive?" "It will cost $22,000 instead of $8,000." Pause. VP says "Well, it looks to me like we'd better do that, then."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Good book, and one of the central tenets is that in a technical organization there will be a competence inversion. Good engineers will defy the Peter Principle by way of "Creative Incompetence", such that excellent technical leaders will stay at the bottom levels due to bad personalities, poor hygene, and similar.
Excellent book, but expect to be depressed as you see the behaviors it talks about in your own organization.
I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.
I've know a lot of really bad ones as well.
Managing includes a set of soft skills, as well as not being passive aggressive. So you need those skills as well as engineering understanding.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As said in TFA, engineers usually don't want to "move up" in the company, but my experience tells me that a good portion of us day dream about making an app that will make them millionaires. For me, that is a inherent sense of entrepreneurship.
Simply put: why are you going to take in more responsibility to enrich someone else while you can work on your own projects during your spare time and hit the jackpot?
Of course, that mindset might not be realistic: the cruel reality is that most of us will never become millionaires. But if corporations were willing to change the "take this fixed amount of money and I'll try the hardest I can to suck the life out of you" to "you and your team own this project, and your compensation will contain part of that project's profits", then maybe more engineers would be willing to manage.
Tom Kelly, Werner Von Braun, Sergei Korolev and Kelly Johnson.
Management is a different skill than engineering. If less than stellar engineers move into management, their skill in engineering should have no bearing on whether they can manage engineers. If they try to micromanage, that makes them bad managers.
In organizations where they're not burdened with a lot of Bullshit and Bureaucracy. They're not found however in organizations that have leadership that's based in Finance or the MBA world of idiocy.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I've had the good fortune to work for several good managers, either as direct supervisors or as senior managers, up to the Corporate VP level. That includes people in small companies, in Fortune 500 companies, and even active duty Army officers.
What I've observed is that the top levels of management DO NOT want to listen to what the good engineering managers try to tell them, about topics like staff training and retention, schedules or resources (e.g. hardware/capital expenditures.) Instead, the CxO level people promote those who tell them what they want to hear. It's not universal, but many of the good managers I've had are products of deliberate leadership/management training, rather than being promoted from 'nerd' to 'boss' and left to figure it out on their own. Part of that training is how to talk to the CxO level and how to make arguments in terms of corporate business case, objectives, etc.
The only good news is that at least in this millennium, the number of top managers/CxOs who actually know something about software, has increased. They're still a minority, but you may well find a VP who understands that software isn't "that crappy stuff that always makes our systems late, so we'll 'fix' it by throwing more cheap bodies at it." (I got really tired of the engineering VPs whose experience was in hardware, and whose ideas of software systems engineering was framed by "that FORTRAN course I took in college...")
One interesting model that was popular in the early '90s may deserve another look. Some research labs* split managerial duties, separating technical leadership from administration. Where some organizations got into trouble with that model was not treating both classes of managers as equals. The technical leaders too often got marginalized, because the administrators were the ones that talked about the kinds of stuff CEO/CFO wanted to discuss. It takes a tremendous investment at the CxO level to institute a program that recognizes and grows technical leadership as distinct from, frankly, beancounting.
* It runs in my mind that DEC's Western Research Labs was one of the organizations that implemented this approach successfully.
Pournelle's Iron Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy
I'm fairly sure that is a facet of that law. You have a less than stellar engineer who goes into management to cover his sins with real engineers flesh. They do tend to keep an organization alive. It would be helpful if there were a clandestine organization that assasinated upper level beurocrats in both government and quazi government entities but that's never going to happen.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Probably originally noted by the Sumarians when they tried to get the Zuggernauts higher than two stories.
Too true. Supervillians rarely appeared more than twice in ancient middle-eastern comics.
When the astronauts puss out and the cosmonauts go home for the day, who gets shit done? The muthafukin Zuggernauts that's who. When my boss hands me a project that I can't handle, I look at him and say "We are gonna need a Zuggernaut for this bro."
My kingdom for some mod points ...
Technical managers promoted from the engineering pool often have trouble "leaving the bench behind" and letting the managed do their thing. They often become micromanagers, excessively involved in the detail work, which isn't good for either side.
The key transition is learning that instead of using compilers or soldering irons as your tools, you're now using *people* as your tools to build bigger more complex systems. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone *wants* to do that.
The other thing that managers need to be able to do is to "read a calendar" and adjust the work accordingly. How many developers do you know that say "just give me the spec and I'll crank out the code". Well, if you get that spec, and you tell the manager it's going to take 4 months, and the manager has a commitment to deliver in 3, something's got to give. Good managers are good at eliciting what sort of descope or increased risk is going to get that. Poor managers (or poor devs) can't do that. Poor managers and head down devs are a VERY bad combination.
Yes, many companies fell into the MBA trap of "it's just management, and as long as there are metrics, we can manage by the numbers". But I think that is more rare these days (although it will take some time to purge the ranks of those "generic managers"). But an engineer, who can read a calendar, and has had some management training (be it MBA or otherwise) can be a huge asset. But they're rare, and isn't that the point of the article.
Maybe the author should consider that engineering and managing are different skill sets. A person can be good at one of them without being good at the other. Or can enjoy one without enjoying the other.
I'm not sure why it's always considered "moving up" to go from engineering to management. Ideally they're two separate but equally important roles in the creation of a product.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
No. Its the Dilbert Principle.
Have gnu, will travel.
*All* the benefits?
I don't think so, I think it's just inertia. Our industry pays middle management comparatively poorly. In software engineering / web development which is my line of work, manager get paid barely more than senior engineers. Now I'm not one of those people who feels it's wrong to have an engineer making more than his boss (I've managed people earning more than me before, they were all awesome) but if you want the best people to step up and take a lot more pain you need to pay them a lot more.
In most other industries managers earn significantly more than their reports. Take a look at retail, at sales and many other professions. Someone in retail in the UK earning £16k/annum on a checkout line will have a manager who earns around double that - 30k or so. Same for customer services.
So, take a software engineer earning 55k/annum in London - his manager probably earns around 65k-70k, and has a MUCH more stressful and less enjoyable job, and almost certainly longer hours. His pro-rata take home is probably only around 5% better.
So how about we pay our Development Managers 100k? I bet you'd have a few more of the stronger candidates stepping up to the plate.
Yours sincerely, a (fairly, IMHO) good Development Manager in London - considering taking a step down or sideways because the money just doesn't justify the extra hassle...
A number of software companies are designed around the flat org structure, which is an interesting way of running things. Another idea is a rock-paper-scissors approach where no group has ultimate authority.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
But all the manage to do is to stay engineers without being promoted or outsourced.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"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."
/.
Truest thing I've ever read on
I read the article, and posted there, but let me post here too.
This may be the dumbest article I've read this year (plenty of time, but still a stand-out). It doesn't do a good job of explain what an "engineering manager" is. It doesn't consider how to create them by mentoring, training, or different recruitment strategies. The author just wants to go out and buy one. If you want a perfect house, you build it, you don't expect them ready-made, "off the peg". Recruit for potential, and put in the work to get what you want.
Much worse, the author fails to think outside the box. My advice is: "If you have a problem which has no answer, ask a different question".
IMHO, the company or author may be dysfunctional. The old joke is "the definition of madness is to keep beating your head against the wall, and expect it to stop hurting". An organisation, repeatedly asking for the perfect "engineering manager", and never finding one is dysfunctional.
The cause of that failure may be many reasons. It may be they don't exist.
It may be the good engineering managers do a good job of figuring out whether a company is worth working for, and that company is so dysfunctional they stay away.
It may be good engineering managers start their own companies.
It may be they are so well respected and rewarded, they don't need to move.
It may be that the only way to get what you need is to mentor, train and promote from within because an outsiders won't understand the business, people, technology or processes, they won't cut it inside that company.
It may be the author is aiming too high, and all the people who could do what he wants, because they are already doing it, wouldn't take the demotion.
etc.
A better summary than "they don't exist" is "they won't come and work here"
I am an engineer, and have lead large groups, responsible for the technical integrity of several thousand peoples work. I have worked with some fantastic managers. I may have been able to do things they could not do, however, they could do things that I could not.
We worked together to do the best for our company, our people and our products. We spent late evenings, early mornings and long journeys, discussing how to do the right thing. Then tried hard to do it. Often I have been 'at the top' and the buck stopped with me, and not those people managers. However, without those people, we would not have been successful.
If you need stand-out talent to handle people management, but can't find anyone with stand-out engineering ability too, in one person, figure out how to organise yourself to use two or more people. Good organisation design, with clear, helpful, appropriate roles and responsibilities is not trivial, but IMHO it is better to fix that than whine about asking the wrong question, "please hire me a perfect engineering manager", and getting no answer.
We should not *need* to explain such obvious stuff repeatedly, but I am certain we will.
Some people are good at programming and working with people. It happens, believe it or not. And it can be done without bullshitting or sitting in endless meetings.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>Honestly, the best thing to do in IT once you hit a certain level is ask yourself "Do I want to be a manager". If the answer is no, you essentially have to quit and go be a consultant.
Hardly, you just have to work someplace you're appreciated. Such organizations have engineering roles up to the VP level.
Principal Engineer is usually equivalent to a director, Distinguished Engineer VP, and Fellow somewhat higher.
Consider Microsoft - Principal Engineer is level 65-67 position like a director. Distinguished Engineer is a level 70 position like VP. Technical Fellow is level 80.
Such positions involve leadership but not people management and handle bigger technical problems than the ones companies delegate to consultants.
If you got to make the cool decisions about what work to do and didn't have to stuff that sucks like handle bad performers and did have to take the smack talk dished out about managers, why would you become a manager?
In _The Mythical Man Month_ Fred Brooks suggests that management track be paid less than the technical track of the same notional level to counteract the perceived status of being "the boss". Clearly we need to go the other way and pay the management track more to overcome the stigma of being "pointy-haired".
This applies to managers, engineers and engineers that have taken management roles.
I currently work as a CS professor, but I still do some tele-consulting for a company I used to work for full time. Because I do tops 8 hours/week, I now consult under someone who used to be my subordinate while I was there. That may sound awkward, but it isn’t. My supervisor has a CS degree but his engineering skills aren’t rockstar, so he gravitated to organization and leadership roles, and that was precisely the best thing for him. I find him very easy to work with because he is technical enough that I can communicate with him, he listens to what I say, and because he manages me at exactly whatever level I need for any given task. If I’m having trouble keeping track of what I need to do (because it’s easy to lose track when I work for him once a week and have a whole other day job to do), he’s right on top of it. If I have a really clear idea of what I need to do, he gives me space and is available to answer questions, discuss strategy, etc. I’m used to being the babysitter, keeping junior engineers and grad students from getting off track. This guy does that for me, but he does it in a way that isn’t awkward at all; in fact, he makes me feel respected for the work I do. (Incidentally, he also directs an engineer that used to be an owner of said company before it was sold, and they have a very good working relationship as well.)
My point is that the technical skill of the manager is only somewhat important. Even more important is people skill and the ability to keep track of all the high and low-level details necessary to keep employees on track. You don’t have to know all the implementation details in order to maintain a clear vision of what everyone is trying to accomplish and help them get the resources to do it. In the most successful companies, “managers” spend little time “directing.” Instead, they primarily work to serve the needs of their subordinates, insulating them from company politics and ensuring that the engineers have all the tools and support they need to work effectively without distraction.
I really like technical challenges. But I also like to help others and do bigger picture strategy. As you start mentoring more and more people you end up with a choice at somepoint because both demand a lot of time: put helping the rest of the team with architectural and training type tasks (and using connections across departments to pull in resources you need) or being that guy who codes for 10hr stints of genius coding without washroom breaks. Both are interesting to me but I think at sometime I'll for the most part hang up my compiler and do more management type stuff because I actually enjoy helping people or even bouncing ideas off them and have them come back with a better idea. You can only be the go to guy for so many parts of a project before you spend all your time doing design and code reviews anyways, it becomes next to impossible to make forward progress on your own tasks with interruptions every 10min. Might as well make the interruptions the job.
Off the top of my head I can think of more than a dozen excellent engineering managers. I know a lot of lousy ones, too. But to say that there are no good engineering managers is just plain stupid.
...you've basically done it all.
For example, I've done 3D graphics, Virtual Reality, 3D modeling, Internet Banking, Hospital/Medical middleware, parallelization scalable computing, computer vision, physical secuity, research (photogammetry), consulting, 3D game engines, HIPAA compliant client/server systems, mobile, AKF cube scalability big data, et cetera...
At a point like this it become more interesting to be invovled in the team building/manager/mentoring side of things while still getting to take on the really hairy jobs. It's why I love what I do.
In my honest opinion, quality software engineers, who never ever end up leading teams for the majority of their time, tend to be such control freaks that they can't let go. Now, that's not always the case, but in my experience it has been the general case. I, myself, am a control freak about the code; however, I have learned (like many an NHL or NBA coach) that there is great satisfaction in leading a new generation to solve problems in ways that appeal to you - all while maintaining the "oh, sh**, the old man is going to implement this feature, it must be hairy..." mystique. LOL.
It's the main reason I've been writing software for almost 25 years and I still LOVE doing it.
WTH
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So, he's a manager (VP Engineering) and it appears he thinks he's not a very good engineering manager (since such beasts don't exist in his view). So why does he think anyone would care about the views of an inferior engineering manager on what constitutes a good engineering manager? Very odd argument he has here!
And, he's not correct. Good engineering managers are hard to find, just as good engineers are. But, to assume that the only reason someone would go into management is because they can't cut it as an engineer is naive. It's not unusual for people to be very good at something but actually prefer to do something else (which they may also be very good at). I, for example, am very good at a wide variety of menial tasks (washing windows, vacuuming and the like) because I am careful, through, and have high standards for doing a job well - however I avoid doing them whenever possible because I really prefer to do other things that I'm also good at.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
No. It still requires bullshitting and sitting in endless meetings. That's just crap that someone who is cut out for management can actually deal with (and do so effectively).
The whole point of society is so that people can specialize and do what they do best rather than being some deluded jack-of-all-trades that could just be his own boss anyways.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It still requires bullshitting and sitting in endless meetings.
You're doing it wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Engineers should think of managers like gardeners: they plant seeds (hire talent), provide sun & water (get their team the resources they need), & sell the crops once they've been harvested (promote team deliverables & make sure they're marketed). They don't actually grow or have intrinsic value, but they make good engineering possible.
You forgot "and supply an endless supply of bullshit that they think will result in nourishment"
Didn't RTFA, but this sounds like the theory of an engineer who's on an ego trip. "Good engineering managers don't exist because I like engineering and I'm a shitty manager. Doing a better job than me is impossible, because I'm brilliant."
Sorry, no. Good managers are a rarity. Just in general, ignoring the "engineering" part of it, management is a difficult skillset to master, and most people in the position don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. But let's take another step back. Most jobs have a difficult skillset to master, and most people don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. Most engineers suck at their jobs. They just don't have enough understanding to notice that they're bad at their jobs. It's not really unique to a specific kind of job.
It's worth noting for anyone who hasn't read the book that Van Atta had been one of Leo's engineering trainees who he recommended for a management training program because he thought he'd be dangerous as an engineer. The end result was Van Atta working as Leo's boss and in charge of a large space installation housing a large number of children and young adults (who for reasons I won't go into here were effectively not legally protected people) whose welfare he completely ignores in favor of the bottom line and his own career.
"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."
No need to go very far, most of us experience this every day. And suffer the consequences. Also, these people are often good survivors as well, masters in shifting the blame and pointing fingers when they cause trouble, never admitting their fault. Like the best politicians.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I'm pretty sure ColdWetDog meant to say Ziggurat. It's worth noting. however, that the Marvel character "The Juggernaut" is named for a term meaning an unstoppable force. That term is derived from the Hindu god Jagganath. One form of worship of Jagganath involves a giant rolling temple pulled through the streets on holidays. Such temple cars have been known to (or are at least said to) crush people underfoot and be fairly hard to stop once they've gotten moving. Anyway rolling religious displays aren't unique to Hinduism, they just happen to have some really big ones. Maybe the Sumerians had them too and that's what ColdWetDog was referring to. Probably just ziggurats though.
Also, most supervillains in ancient middle eastern comics only appeared once. Unless they fought the good guy to a standstill then became friends... Of course, now I'm trying to figure out if Gilgamesh counts as the supervillian or Enkidu on this one. Mythology has a lot of guys with superpowers, but they're traditionally heros even if they go on wild murder sprees every time they're in a bad mood, so it kind of breaks down. It is interesting that one of the oldest recorded stories in the world has the standard modern superhero greeting ritual (they meet and fight, then get along after).
This article is misleading because it assumes some facts that are wrong (from my point): "The best engineering managers are the best engineers". On the contrary, I think that the best engineers, usually, shouldn't go to be managers.. they should be 'architects'. Great managers have to be good (not the best) engineers , but great managers.
This sounds more like the Peter Principal effect, people are being promoted on their pas performance, rather than on what they will do. You're a good engineer, you'll make a good manager ...
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
It may be true that good engineers don't have to become managers because they get the benefits (usually financial) while being able to remain technical.
However, bad engineers don't make bad managers. The best boss I ever had worked his way up from programming. He was a completely hopeless programmer, but he recognised good talent and was a fantastic man manager. He sought out a quality team to work for him, and insulated us completely from the politics coming down from above. If anyone in the team cocked up, he'd never place blame in public, just discuss it one to one. He trusted the team, and we trusted him.
Management is just such a different skill set it can't really be compared.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
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.
Yeah. Now if you could just go ahead and make sure that your T.P.S. report has a cover sheet on it this week, that'd be greeeat.
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.
Yeah. Now if you could just go ahead and make sure that your T.P.S. report has a cover sheet on it this week, that'd be greeeat.
Efficiency consultant: All right, Bill. Let me ask you this. How much time each week would you say you deal with these TPS reports?
Lumbergh: Yeah...
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Finance "Engineering"? Seriously? I can see why you posted that Anon Coward. I wouldn't want that associated with myself- ever...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
That is typical view of any human, only my job matters and managing and coordinating things or even doing technical work outside of mine area is of lesser importance and thus also done by people of lesser skill and capability. That is engineers' version of the speck in your brother's eye.
You make an excellent point, but when all the people with power in an organization or worse an entire society are corrupt and lack any kind of ethics, what else can you do? Either you have to join them and be like them, or get out and do something else that doesn't involve them.
And have we really "set up a system", or is it simply that we humans are really much more horrible, evil creatures than we think we are, and this system is a natural product of our innate qualities?
I work on the east coast and I am (I admit) a manager, though I write code about half the time. I completely understand the class of people this guy is talking about. The power hungry incompetent douches exist. No doubt. But there ARE those of us who are not project managers, but dev staff managers whose job is
a. figuring out who should be on which project so that people learn from each other and good work gets done
b. making sure that when a programmer comes up with a really good process or tool it gets propagated to the rest of the teams.
c. making sure that people who need mentoring because they're on a problem outside their expertise get it even when they're too stubborn to ask for it
d. making sure that when programmers have expressed an estimate of the complexity of a problem, the over-eager PM who is probably NOT a software person doesn't over-reach and try to push some bullshit schedule.
e. defending my team against idiotic business requirements and pseudo-experts.
f. fighting for budget, headcount and training
g. really working at finding ways of making our distributed team collaborate more effectively.
Maybe in the rarified air of San Francisco there are so many fantastic programmers capable of concentrating on both the big picture and the small that all of these things get done magically and in a self organizing way by the 1st among equals in the dev staff. Maybe. But I believe in the service I give my team. I took a hit to stop writing code so much because it needed to be done at the time, we didn't want an outsider who was apt to be douchey and I'm good with the people involved. The extra money doesn't mean that much and god knows I hate the sense that every programmer who doesn't know me assumes I'm an idiot until they've worked with me. I wouldn't do what I'm doing if I didn't believe it actually made my team a better place.
So thanks, a LOT for making it harder for real dev managers to exist, by declaring we don't.
We all appreciate your eye rolling world weary lack of belief.
True, but if your company's product is, for example, software - and that software company is being run by someone with a legal, financial, hardware, operations, or non-software engineering background, the problem is much more difficult. And that's what I'm seeing. First the engineers need to be able to think in terms of business objectives (one of the best courses I ever had was a grad course in "engineering economics"). But second, the management community (starting with the business schools) need to figure out how to train CxOs that actually -understand the business they're in-.
For the last 30+ years, I've been in the large scale systems business. Most, but not all of that has been on projects for the US DoD. I've been appalled by the number of senior executives, military/government, large industry, small industry, who fundamentally don't understand software-intensive systems. As my earlier post said, their software experience is encapsulated in some small-scale programming task, rather than in large scale software engineering. On the one hand, they expect software to perform miracles because "it's software, you can change it," while on the other hand they refuse to invest in software. For the former, the best quote is from a former co-worker, "The software engineer is the system engineer of last resort."
I'm reminded of a system I once reviewed where they had a 'software problem'. But it turned out they had a -networking problem-. They were trying to move large volumes of images over a 10BaseT ethernet connection, and wondered why they weren't getting system throughput. Their ethernet was usually well over 50% loaded and couldn't handle the data. But they expected the software to 'fix' this.
Writing software and selling software require mutually exclusive skills
Casteism
I disagree on both counts, Medallia has been profitable for quite some time and it's growing really fast, so hardly a waste of VC capital.
On the engineering side, we do build new things, some are really challenging. For example we have a very cool real-time OLAP engine (we can render reports with a median time of 183ms, on datasets with a hundred million records and thousands of columns), our text analytics team does build it's own models (we have researchers on payroll), our sentiment analysis models for some industries are better than anything else out there, the testing infrastructure is wonderful, and there are things I cannot discuss :)
Working here I've met some of the brightest people in the world (I stand by that). In all, it's a great place to work as an engineer.
Medallia has been profitable for quite some time and it's growing really fast, so hardly a waste of VC capital.
A company is profitable when it's earned more than was spent to get it off the ground. Have you reached that point?
our sentiment analysis models for some industries are better than anything else out there
"Sentiment analysis"? Ok, I'll take your word for it that you're making slicker snake oil than the next guy, but you're still not convincing me that you're doing anything that would attract first-rate engineering management.
Working here I've met some of the brightest people in the world (I stand by that)
Sounds like you need to get out more.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Boy, you seem grumpy today.
No, actually I'm somewhat amused.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My son went to another kind of Engineering School, Olin College of Engineering in Needham MA near Boston. They work hard to recruit people (students) that personality, ambition, people skills, as well as great geeks in their own right. Some other schools like Harvey Mudd and others are taking a similar tact.
This gives me hope the next generation of Engineers will have at least SOME individuals to be managers available that are both good engineers, people, people, and have management skills.
The Peter Principle is at work in industry everywhere. (The basic competence is 'people rise to their level of incompetence').
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I thought he was talking about really big airships.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Some folks decide that management suits them better than engineering and move in that direction without actually giving up their interest in the nuts and bolts of the business.
Good managers are pretty rare in my experience, if you define "Good" as knowing the basics of the technical jobs of people they supposedly tell what to do...
Harder to find yet are managers that delegate appropriately to the lowest practical level, supervise unobtrusively, and see their primary task as making sure that talent is recognized, materials are obtained on time, and hard work rewarded
Funny thing... but THOSE managers just seem to get jobs done on time, have fewer errors, and keep corporate knowledge levels up by retaining the "good ones"
Good Engineers don't usually convert to good managers, but that doesn't mean that there aren't "Good Engineering Managers" that break the "Pointy Haired Boss" stereotype.
I'm not sure what path I would have taken on my own, but I was an engineer who ran into some major hand problems and couldn't code all day any longer, forcing me into a management direction. I'd like to think I'm a decent one, and according to the article that might still be possible ;)
I've been in IT for a long time. If i wanted to be a "boss" I could have been one a long time ago. I have tried my hand at technical management more than once because I was asked to do it...not because I had a deep desire to manage others. My takeaway from it was basically that if you're going to be in management you don't want to be on the bottom rung of management.
A lot of it is, as the article says, "taking out the trash". Meetings, reports, deadlines. You have to directly supervise people that you used to work with. For me, it was difficult to give out orders. I'd rather just do the code myself than tell someone else to do it. In short, it wasn't a lot of fun. To me, coding is fun.
The other aspect, which turned out to be interesting, was that it gave me an insight into how other managers are chosen. Many of them seemed to have common traits. Far more extroverts than introverts. Long on self confidence, short on any real skills. A lot of them seemed to be the ones that are good at playing the corporate games. It seemed to me that the only interesting things happening in management were happening at the very top. The strategy, planning and business direction were being decided by a very few people at the very top of the organization. The rest of them were mired in some sort of middle management purgatory.
What I discovered is that the real power lies in having a job where you have freedom to do the things you want to do. Many engineering jobs offer just this, particularly in consulting. Sure, you still have to answer to deadlines and such but you get to focus on things that you enjoy without having to attend a lot of meetings or having to kiss the bosses ass. I might not be making as much money as some of the top brass but I'm having fun doing what I'm doing and I'm making a very good living at the same time. To me, it's a life well lived.