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Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

It is hard for software engineers to see the value added of a good manager. Often a manager will have deep knowledge of the software being built, current priorities, and will know (from their team) where 'thar be dragons' in the code.

When I was an engineering manager at a large corporation, most of my time was spent in meetings about status, resources, future projects, finances, cyclical HR things, escalations with other teams, etc. Then the other half of the role is gathering information from the team about how things are going (PM's would be the task master) and finding out where there were problems either with technology (rare) or other teams (often).

These things cannot be scripted away - they all involve talking with other humans.

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Agree with you on the value of good manager, however concern is around bad or inexperienced managers which are out there by plenty. Typically the manager becomes a dumping ground for things which should be done by Business/IT Analyst, Product manager, Project Manager and Technical Operations/Support Manager. Once these are addressed properly then what you have got is essentially a Sr Engineer/Tech lead who is entrenched in the code and also knows who is best for the right task with in the team. Some of the other things like larger roadmap and talking to HR can be done by director or Senior managers, so yes I do see some need for managers, my whole point is that there is no need for Junior or Mid level managers for most cases.

Also creating a per team manager role creates more politics and overall bad working environment for good Engineers. I would not have argued this 10 yrs back, but considering the advancements in tools, processes and changes in work culture and attitudes, don't you think its viable to have a great degree of tooling for atleast the first level managers?

Ideally one would hire self sufficient engineers that don’t cause drama which causes political battles.

A small organization doesn’t need much management, but the larger corporate environment has middle management - managers of managers. This layer is really only there because of numbers. If you have 7 managers with 8 engineers each, one director isn’t going to be able to make big picture decisions for 7 teams, let alone get thru HR reviews for 56 people, salary planning, etc.

What about mediocre and bad engineers? If there are a few and there is a system, they will find a way to meet basic criteria in the tool/system. You’ve heard jokes about teams that measure lines of code, and suddenly people are pumping out lines of code.

When you get a group of 20 or more people together they are going to disagree and some will outright dislike each other. These are the roots of political battles in an org, which beyond small teams, can’t be avoided.

Yes, Sr. Management & Directors add values. Most first level managers are not effective in resolving disputes between Engineers, but rather just take sides with say one of their top coder, although the opinion of that engineer on say an architecture approach may be not be the right way to go..think you get the idea ? There may be many such scenarios or just lack of maturity or decades of management experience that makes such managers ineffective at resolving conflicts, and hence my point is that they are not required to manage Sr. Engineers with 10-15 yrs experience.

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