Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist"

they exist but do not have titles? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 10:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by Austerity+Empowers · 2014-02-13 10:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

The engineers are leading projects, but no one is managing the resources.
I'm saying what I have seen to be true, but I can't imagine why anyone would go in to management to begin with in spite of some of the importance of the above statement. The biggest issue is taking responsibility for my boss (and so on up the chain). Bottom line: wall street can go fuck themselves, I won't represent that their shit doesn't stink, that it's a good idea, or even necessary. But once you have product and customers, they want to be large and in charge of the inevitable collapse they will bring, and they need that structure of managers to inflict their will.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by ackthpt · 2014-02-13 11:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by James-NSC · 2014-02-13 11:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by ackthpt · 2014-02-13 11:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by Maxo-Texas · 2014-02-13 13:18 · Score: 4, Informative

True, in 1970, they were paid about 50x the average salary. That's highly paid!
Of course today, they are paid 350 to 535 times the average salary. That's obscene!

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She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by LDAPMAN · 2014-02-13 13:57 · Score: 4, Informative

Actually, I've seen many situations where the top person (or people) on a team make more than the manager. It's actually pretty common in tech.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by AlphaWolf_HK · 2014-02-13 14:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.)

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Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by JoeMerchant · 2014-02-13 14:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

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? by radarskiy · 2014-02-13 14:02 · Score: 2

"They are out there but since they do not have titles they do not exist."
No. Since they get away without having to do the dirty work of management, they are not managers.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 14:34 · Score: 2, Insightful

and thus we have a new variant of the "those that can't do, teach" adage that is at the heart of the education problem in the US - we don't value teachers. see:
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/11/275368362/pay-cuts-end-of-tenure-put-north-carolina-teachers-on-edge
and our own /.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/02/13/1640215/shark-tank-competition-used-to-select-education-tech
for exemplars.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by CrankyFool · 2014-02-13 15:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 15:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

Wow, I am infrastructure manger, I moved up from a senior engineer about a year ago. My situation is EXACTLY like yours. I have the same meetings and I have a few engineers that make a lot more than me. Maybe one difference. There was a gap in some core technologies when I moved up (VMware and SAN mainly) so I still do a lot of hands on with but that I am slowly getting away from that because we have been short handed but we have some new guys starting soon. My guys make the suggestions, they make most of the plans, they support their own areas, they determine when they can work from home and when to come into the office, how many days they need if they have to travel to a remote office etc. Basically, they are all supervisors. I help with planning, scheduling, and the interaction with other groups and often play devils advocate.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by kzadot · 2014-02-13 16:08 · Score: 2

Managers don't need to know the details of what the engineers are doing, we have engineers for that. Especially for managers that are closer to the market or the customer, or other parts of the business.
It is fairly legitimate that those who can't "do" in the sense of the actual engineering work, are found in management roles. That is ok though. You could spin it around and say that those who can't manage end up "doing", which is fine too. Both types of role are required to successfully generate market value.
Anyway, it isn't usually engineers who are promoted to management roles, but product people such as business analysts in the software world, or experts in the actual domain like bankers or insurance experts. If we consider a company that makes say medical devices, it is more likely that doctors or people with a medical background will become the managers rather than the engineers who work on the products.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by funwithBSD · 2014-02-13 17:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

This is why IBM has two lines of advancement: Technical, and Line Management.
Line Management does HR, resource management, business goals, budget, etc.
Technical line does technical work and leadership. Project Managers are not management of personnel, but of projects.
That at least, they get right.

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Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by jhol13 · 2014-02-13 17:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

In essense, good managers work for the engineers, bad managers work for upper management.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by gweihir · 2014-02-13 20:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

Matches my experience. Good managers in particular know when the hell to shut up and get out of the way of the engineers.
Of course, one critical skill of a good engineering manager is to recognize bad engineers. In particular in the software field, the majority is bad and a sizable fraction is very bad.

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Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by VernonNemitz · 2014-02-13 21:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

Perhaps the solution is to re-think the need to manage any engineer good enough to qualify as a leader. And I'll disagree with an earlier post about "managing the resources", because that task falls under "logistics", and any good engineer understands logistics.

So, concluding from the above, companies should hire good engineers and not hire managers.
Re:they exist but do not have titles? by mgscheue · 2014-02-14 00:44 · Score: 2

Teaching is wonderful in many ways but do be prepared for the bullshit that's the academic world, too.
Re: they exist but do not have titles? by malloci · 2014-02-14 02:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by docwatson223 · 2014-02-13 10:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by jgotts · 2014-02-13 11:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 11:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

Three traits define a "good" manager.
1) They observe and know what each member of their team is working on without being intrusive by setting clear and achievable goals,
2) They discover what their team needs to meet these goals and gets them the resources to accomplish them without needing to be asked,
3) They contribute their efforts when and where it is beneficial, and the rest of the time stay out of the way.
Re:It's personality by jedidiah · 2014-02-13 15:17 · Score: 2

The problem with that is that you miss key parts of the curriculum because it never occured to you to study those things. This anti-intellectual attitude that drives you to ingore the "irrelevant academic crap" will cause the "self educated" to miss key parts of the discipline.
Your self-help vocational program is probably not nearly broad or deep enough.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:It's personality by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 16:11 · Score: 2, Interesting

No, those aren't the best engineers
False equivalency, Best Engineer is not the same as Best Engineering Manager. Being good at solving engineering problems is not the same as being able to lead or manage people;

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.
Sometimes. And sometimes they fail to make the jump to break bad habits formed, convinced their way is best.

These people can explain engineering to a child,

Nope. Maybe some can, but being good at engineering doesn't mean you can teach it, or are good with children

admit when they make mistakes,

I'll give you this, I've seen too many very smart engineers fail this, this might be the break between very good and great

and you can discuss with them any subject whatsoever.

No. Being well read has nothing to do with being a great engineer

These people find what they need using Google, because they are great general problem solvers.
Yeah, if your problem can be solved using Google, its not much of a problem.
Re:It's personality by kzadot · 2014-02-13 16:13 · Score: 4, Insightful

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:It's personality by Zenin · 2014-02-13 19:49 · Score: 2

From my own purely anecdotal experience, being a high school drop out who has become a highly qualified senior level software engineer who easily commands compensation to match, I'd say that's pretty much correct.
To pour more salt in the wound, in my 20ish years of software development experience I've found that those with actual Computer Science degrees rarely are any good at actually developing software, no matter how much experience they have. The best engineers have all come from some other discipline; sociology, biology, music or such. The only binding factor I've found is that nearly every good engineer plays (or did play extensively in the past) a musical instrument. Only maybe 1 in 10 didn't get deeply into music at some point and about half still actively play.
Those that are strong mathematicians also tend to be horrid software developers (despite, on average, being much smarter than most good software developers). I chock that up to strong math correlating with weak personal skills as well as a tendency to prefer code look like a formula and not a document (variable names like "a" and "b", instead of employees and groups for example). And also the reality that 99% of software that needs writing isn't about slick algorithms, rather it's about modeling arbitrary business rules as a flow chart of if/then/else gates.

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My /. uid is better then your /. uid

I know one by n1ywb · 2014-02-13 10:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

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*.

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-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com

Re:I know one by Trepidity · 2014-02-13 11:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Re:I know one by khasim · 2014-02-13 12:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:I know one by sacbhale · 2014-02-13 12:13 · Score: 3, Informative

I have seen this in three multiple previous jobs.
The manager was awesome and everyone on the team loved him. The product the team produced became a hit and all the career managers in the organization wanted that on their list of successes. They played political games (re-org) and stole the project from under the good manager. The team withered away and all the best people left under the new leadership. The product carried on the previous momentum for a while and then joined a whole list of other mediocre products the company produced.
Re:I know one by Daniel+Hoffmann · 2014-02-14 02:58 · Score: 2

To me it looks like your team just needed a Issue tracker rather than a manager.

Uh huh by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 10:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

Re:Uh huh by hemanman · 2014-02-13 11:10 · Score: 4, Interesting

Correct, I know what you mean, having the same credentials myself.
However, having both is what enables you to enable your team to work pure magic in projects, a shame it is invisible to all but the ones that take the credit for it, when you yourself is looking the other way being stuck with some technical detail.
Being technical, which requires quite a bit of IQ, also comes with a high sense of right and wrong, that makes you somewhat backstabbing impaired, and every time you get screwed over you loose a little bit of willpower to try again.
That's why you don't see any good engineering managers, they just gave up at some point along the road.
-H

Re:Dilbert by ThePhilips · 2014-02-13 10:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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All hope abandon ye who enter here.

hierarchical org fail by bzipitidoo · 2014-02-13 10:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"

Re:hierarchical org fail by phantomfive · 2014-02-13 11:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

That's what the sales teams think, except they want the ability to fire engineers. Every group thinks they are the most important, including managers.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

I looked up where this dude works. by jcr · 2014-02-13 11:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

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."

Re:Dilbert by ColdWetDog · 2014-02-13 11:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!

I see his point by rilister · 2014-02-13 11:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore

Re:Isn't this the Peter Principle by phantomfive · 2014-02-13 11:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

What is hilarious is, his employer by hsmith · 2014-02-13 11:15 · Score: 3, Funny

The first thing on their website is:

currently hiring: Director of Engineering

Sounds like a great place to work with blowhard like him there.

My view by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 11:16 · Score: 2, Insightful

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)

They exist. I work for one right now. by Sarusa · 2014-02-13 11:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Kind of right... by RocketScientist · 2014-02-13 11:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Kind of right... by dbIII · 2014-02-13 13:35 · Score: 4, Funny

Sexual harassment training
That's the problem with you Americans, you need training for everything. Australian managers on the other hand do plenty of sexual harassment without needing any sort of training.

Re:not exactly by Grishnakh · 2014-02-13 11:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

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:Dilbert by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-13 11:23 · Score: 5, Funny

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."

Re:Give the technical leads assistants. by n1ywb · 2014-02-13 11:24 · Score: 2

I've worked as an engineer in a partnership with a project management guy and I've found it to be highly effective.

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-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com

Re:Give the technical leads assistants. by Carewolf · 2014-02-13 11:39 · Score: 2

Yes. I was about to say the same thing. An engineering team does not need a manager, they need a secretary. Someone to organize, journalize and report. The best managers I have met act like the teams secretary or assistant, but many seems to get their role in the team confused, and it seems a waste to pay them more than an average company secretary.

(Shrug) I've worked for at least two. by dpbsmith · 2014-02-13 11:44 · Score: 2

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!

They do exist and flourish by Virtucon · 2014-02-13 11:59 · Score: 2

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 worked for good engineering managers by david.emery · 2014-02-13 12:04 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Bullshit by BBF_BBF · 2014-02-13 12:11 · Score: 2

Spoken like a true Manager, and not a true Engineer.

Some Engineers actually LOVE doing Engineering things, and will forgo a "promotion" to a higher paying or more powerful job so they can stay technical. It's a quirk that, in my experience, Engineers tend to have more than say people who get Business degrees. For those types of Engineers, being able to direct a project in a way they technically prefer *is* the Power they're looking for.

It's just something that a non-techie just can't grasp because it's so much out of their own frame of reference.

That's why in the good old days of IBM and HP, they had a technical track that would allow the top Engineers/Scientists to get promoted, and paid well, WHILE staying involved with the technical aspects of projects, so as not to *lose* their technical skills by making them management types.

Re:Bullshit by organgtool · 2014-02-13 12:16 · Score: 2

Spoken like a true Manager, and not a true Engineer.

I happen to be one of the engineers who would rather continue with engineering than take a promotion to manager, but I'm not naive enough to think that every other good engineer would make the same decision as me.

Moving up? by Chelloveck · 2014-02-13 12:30 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

*All* the benefits? by Afty0r · 2014-02-13 12:52 · Score: 2

The best engineers get all the benefits of being leaders

*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...

Re:Why have a tree hierarchy? Why not a graph? by phantomfive · 2014-02-13 14:03 · Score: 3, Informative

That sort of thing is easy when the company is small. Once you have more than 20 or 30 developers, it starts getting hard. Fred Brooks also discussed that topic (at least, a very similar topic).

If you can find a way to make it scale, then let us know :)

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

Best mangers: People skills, detail attention by Theovon · 2014-02-13 14:45 · Score: 2

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.

Manager declares himself incompetent! by uncqual · 2014-02-13 14:58 · Score: 2

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.

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Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.

Re:Two thoughts on this from inside the bubble: by dlingman · 2014-02-13 15:28 · Score: 2

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"

Good engineer does not equal good manager by Geeky · 2014-02-13 21:31 · Score: 2

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.

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Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.

Re:not exactly by Grishnakh · 2014-02-14 04:10 · Score: 2

If upper management is so clueless that they need to be "sold", then it's really for the best that the company go under, or at least hire better executives. All this stuff simply isn't necessary. What is the company paying so much money to these executives for if they're not smart enough to discern the best ideas for themselves, and they need to be marketed to like any other dumb schmuck?

I hate being told I don't exist. by ScrappyTheObscure · 2014-02-14 04:39 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist"

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