[HN Gopher] Coaching engineering managers to take on organizatio... ___________________________________________________________________ Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems Author : jammons Score : 87 points Date : 2023-01-06 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (jeffammons.com) (TXT) w3m dump (jeffammons.com) | a_c wrote: | Guess what, organization problem is a manifestation of a | collective world view of the organization. And adding feature is | always easier than refactoring/merging responsibility. | | It is easy for a company building single page app to form an API, | an analytics team, an infra team, QA, slapping incremental | solution to solve their incremental problem. After having | specialised team, it is far harder to merge things into good old | Django with nginx where you can parse the log for analytics and | just serve fully rendered html. At this point people will start | saying their organization is different, we do it for "scale up" | sake. They are probably right and the WhatsApp/instagram path is | probably not for everyone. | | Organization is the human version of software architecture. Do it | too much, too early, too little understanding will all have long | term, non-immediate, non-numerically justifiable effect. People | love to talk about these. | glitchc wrote: | I have trouble with the premise. Organizational problems are not | the hardest problems a company faces, not by a long shot. Rather, | organizational problems are a manifestation of leadership | dysfunction, and by leadership I mean senior leadership (board of | directors, CEO and down). They are easy to fix when the right- | minded people are in charge and impossible to fix when they're | not. | | Unless engineering managers are promoted to the board, it's | unlikely they can make any change possible. Since the article | doesn't mention that, it's just marketing fluff. | jmole wrote: | Tell me you've never worked at a large company without telling | me you've never worked at a large company | subharmonicon wrote: | It looks like the actual title here is "Growing Leaders to Solve | the Hardest Problems", but the submission is different. | | I believe HN policy is to post actual titles if possible, is that | right @dang? | [deleted] | pvg wrote: | The title stuff is in the site guidelines | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | There's also a giant pile of additional title lore in the mod | comments. | | @dang doesn't do anything but there's emailing which does work. | jammons wrote: | Sorry if I messed that up when posting it | hgsgm wrote: | No need to apologize for removing clickbait. | jammons wrote: | Thanks, yeah, I was trying to make it clear what the post | was about for anyone clicking. | mansoon wrote: | Don't ever take on organizational problems. You are working at a | company. The company is a sociopath. You have to act accordingly. | groby_b wrote: | "The company" is nothing, except what leadership makes it. As a | manager, that includes you. If everybody chooses not to care | about org problems? Guess what, that's a manifestation of | sociopathic behavior. | | So, act accordingly. | reese_john wrote: | A company is not a single entity. Your experience can be very | different depending on your team, manager and department. | notyourwork wrote: | The experience only differs because of how much or little you | are sheltered from reality of the inter-organization | politics. | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | "Sheltered from the reality of inter-organization politics" | is a pretty wide bucket. I've been on teams that constantly | fight with each other to get resources and executive | attention, and I've been on teams that collaborate with | each other to make the best decisions taking into account | everyone's constraints and capabilities. In my experience | there's a huge qualitative difference that doesn't have | much to do with hiding or disguising anything. | mcrad wrote: | [dead] | shawnz wrote: | And if that sociopath is offering you money to take on those | organizational problems, what's the according act in that case? | bb88 wrote: | Your engineering manager may not know: | | * How to manage people. | | I realize this is snarky in tone but in 2023 this still rings | true for many people. | | Much of management doesn't know anything about engineering. Many | engineers don't know anything about managing people. | | The worse the management the worse the politics. | mym1990 wrote: | In my current situation it feels like much of management | doesn't know anything about managing people :( | t3estabc wrote: | [dead] | flerchin wrote: | Was this written by ChatGPT? Very generic. | jammons wrote: | Hah! Nope, 100% wet-neuron generated work here. | branperr wrote: | I don't think the class of problems talked about in here are | necessarily the biggest problems. Rather, it's politically | motivated decision-making. Not in the sense of _insert your pet | US politics issue_ , but rather about capturing influence within | the organization to make themselves status-y. For example, Google | managers over-inflating their team numbers to make their resume | look better. | esotericimpl wrote: | [dead] | marktangotango wrote: | A lot of organizations have this problem, not covered in the | article: | | > Anxiety, low abilities | | I was once a software engineering manager at a company in the | financial services realm. This was a low margin business that had | suffered a decade of layoffs when I joined. It was a morass of | low effort, punch the clock, do just enough to get by teams and | leaders. Making any sort of forward progress was nearly | impossible. I gave it my best shot though, and managed to find | like minded people throughout the organization. We had a good | couple of years and made some real progress. Then the next round | of layoffs saw some of these key people let go. | | It was very disappointing, but I too left after a time. After the | layoffs, 75% of my remaining team quit for better pay. My boss, a | director, gave me some support people who could spell "java" and | told me to train them up, because we weren't hiring (no one would | work for the company anyway, horrible reputation). Yep, that was | it for me, I resigned. | | All that to say, at some point it's a business problem. I hope | others in similar situations don't stress as much as I did. | | Edit: words | wahnfrieden wrote: | I hope your stake in ownership was commensurate to your | emotional stake! | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-06 23:00 UTC)