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Comment by exactchange | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion:

In Silicon Valley, people managers can easily be a waste of time and money, and can cause unnecessary drama on your team. Think about the kind of so-called developer who would rather manage people than write code.

We still need founders, executives, directors, advisors, etc. don't get me wrong. But has anyone ever come across an engineering manager worth their salt? Why did we start deploying people managers en masse to engineering teams? I miss the holy trinity setup: Dev, designer, PM. It worked well IMO.

Our industry is shooting itself in the foot with Engineering Managers. The ones I've come across are self-obsessed, as evidenced in these cringeworthy READMEs and this article that was written.

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Your message really needs context otherwise it's just a random rant.

BTW no-one is deploying managers out of thin air. At least not in startups. What I can often see instead is that someone in the higher-ups needs OKRs, and he also wants to know your performance (and also others' on the team) so that he can decide who deserves a salary raise, and he would like to read a summary report about the highest priority project's progress during last week. Plus he would like someone to represent the team's technical standpoint next week when meeting a prospective client, plus he needs someone who goes around the team and asks what bothers them and what would the team like to see changed in their work environment, plus he also needs someone who hires new team members, plus he would also like to organize the mentoring of the junior members and would like to see someone be involved in the product roadmap discussions from the engineering side to make strategic decisions, plus he wants to build a new team and he wants to understand who would be the best candidate to participate in it, etc. The list goes on and on.

So who will do all these things? Most devs absolutely hate doing these things because it's not technical enough for their fastidious taste. Designers and PMs OTOH have no technical knowledge to make strategic engineering decisions on higher level than the individual level (and not even on the individual level many times).

Without (competent) engineering leadership.

- Whos going to push back and sales and marketing for harassing you directly or taking direct blame for failures?

- Who will represent the engineering team in leadship meetings to make sure policies/decisions are made with their needs in mind?

- Who's going to fight for your raises and promotions?

- Who's going to make sure that there is budget for what engineering needs to do and keeps a proper record to keep finance happy?

Please thing about it... any company that grows to 30-50 people (even startups) need to have management and processes that eventually lead to (even unintentional) politics. The other departments will have leaders/managers defending/supporting them... its foolish to not understand or respect competent leaders.

Here are the other sides of that coin, to balance out your utopian vision of management:

- Who has the unchecked authority to blame others for their mistakes?

- Who will take direct credit for the work of others?

- Who's going to write a bad performance review of someone they don't like that much?

It goes both ways!

Easy to answer >Who has the unchecked authority to blame others for their mistakes?

No one, its done by committee and/or senior leadership, the team/department with no seat at the table is always at a disadvantage.

>Who will take direct credit for the work of others?

A managers job is to distribute credit and shield blame/failure. This may sound generic but its true... a managers true strength/power/greatness or what ever other BS comes from the strength of their reports. Its extremely short sited to not pass on credit and grow those under you.

>Who's going to write a bad performance review of someone they don't like that much?

A good manager tries to be very objective and doesn't bring personal opinion into reviewing performance. I have had people who I did not like personally who i brought though multiple jobs... good managers respect effective people not people they can get a drink with after work.

The examples that you've given are political (represent, push back, take blame, fight), except for the example of keeping records (which is management).

Managements role, technical leadership role and politician role are different roles. The required skill sets and experience are different. The outcome of grabbing a wrong role is usually poor. Not confusing politician, technical leader and manager roles is probably a good idea to improve outcomes. As checking for required experience, to take the role.

Management is full of politics... sorry but its true. A true leader must have all the skills needed to properly benefit and support the team.

You look at my examples as negatives... its the wrong way to look at it... thoes other managers of other departments? Are the bad people? No... but they have a job and responsibility to represent their departments and do from their point of view whats best for their team and the company.

I feel like there is a segment of workers in engineering has this weird self damaging hatred for leaders/managers other departments do not have... then thoes same people get pissed when they dont have a leader and their department is glossed over because no one represents them when/where some of the most important decisions are made.

Notice, there was nothing said about roles being bad. There was nothing said about impossibility of combining multiple roles.

I'm curious what a non-political people manager role would look like. IME, people managers are almost solely political: they mediate conflict and make strategic long term decisions based on conflicting priorities.

There are probably examples (I can think of mentorship), but that would not be common.

On "strategic long term decisions", I think this needs clarification. There are many areas in which such decisions can be made.

To give an example, think of a flying airplane. Would you give a power to make "strategic long term decisions" regarding the flight to someone who bothered to go to flight school, ground school and had been certified as a pilot? Or to someone who hadn't done it, but is an excellent politician, people's manager and could mediate conflict well?

To give another example, if a conflict between passengers and crew had happened onboard of a flying airplane. Would you prefer a pilot (say, with no political or mediation skills) to stop flying the airplane and engage into the conflict? Or would you prefer a professional people's manager and mediator to step in?

At least where I work, everyone, including ICs is responsible for mentoring new and less senior co-workers.

> To give an example, think of a flying airplane. Would you give a power to make "strategic long term decisions" regarding the flight to someone who bothered to go to flight school, ground school and had been certified as a pilot? Or to someone who hadn't done it, but is an excellent politician, people's manager and could mediate conflict well?

I don't think this analogy works. The manager decides which routes to fly and ultimately who flies which ones. Presumably some routes are preferable, and there are competing priorities between routes. So the manager picks the routes to fly, addressing external conflict, and then alloctes people to routes, handling any internal conflict.

The manager isn't on the plane. The rest of your comment doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

You've asked for example of management that doesn't involve politics, I've given mentoring. It's apolitical. There's no reason a whole company couldn't work in that style. There are other styles and other cultures around, different from a style common to big corporations in the states. I'd guess in Japan corporate world you probably can find unique styles that are also apolitical. I'm not sure.

I think your analogy works. And it seems that we agree, it'd be stupid for a manager without pilot's training and expert knowledge to make or impact "strategic long term decisions" that impact the flight in a flying airplane. And we likely agree that interference of a manager (who is used to exercise power) will likely make negative impact on rational expert decisions of a pilot.

Regarding "strategic long term decisions" outside the airplane - we can just look at the recent example of Boeing debacle with 737 MAX. Again, a good question would be - would the situation be better, if the company board had people that had bothered to go to flight school, ground school and had been certified as pilots?

> You've asked for example of management that doesn't involve politics

No, I asked for an example of a management role that was apolitical. There are certainly responsibilities that managers have that aren't political, but someone claimed that people, political, and technical management were different. So I'm intrigued by the idea of a people manager who doesn't handle any political problems. My point is that by virtue of being in charge of people, political arguments become unavoidable.

As for your Boeing example, I fail to see what this has to do with managers having to address political issues in the company. It seems like you're having a conversation about how managers should have been ICs at one point which while an interesting discussion, is completely unrelated to anything I've said.

I've given example of a management style that seem to be apolitical - mentorship. I don't see why a whole company can't be built with such style. Political problems in that case would be implicitly handled by company culture. Another example could be a family run business, in which family relationships could dominate, rather than politics. I think there are maybe other examples.

Can you give an example of unavoidable political problem that people manager unavoidably has to handle?

> Can you give an example of unavoidable political problem that people manager unavoidably has to handle?

- Two of your reports want to work on the same project, perhaps because it will look good. There's only enough work for one of them

- The team fails to meet an objective. This needs to be addressed, somehow

> Political problems in that case would be implicitly handled by company culture

Someone(s) still need to make the decisions that align with the culture. Those people are making political decisions, they just have values that help guide the decisions.

I see. Well, when "reports are attempting to get projects because it would look good", that sounds like "manipulation for short-term personal gain". Not good.

I agree, this is a political problem. But it doesn't seem to be unavoidable. Perhaps, increase rewards for long-term gains for the company and remove rewards for short-term personal gains? It just wouldn't happen then?

Team failing to meet the objective. I don't see how this is a political problem.

> But it doesn't seem to be unavoidable.

You've just described a way of dealing with the issue when it arises: paying the person working on the less sexy project more. This may sometimes be a tool the manager can use, but it isn't always an option. So presume you don't have this tool, or the value of the project is larger than the value of the compensation you can provide.

> It just wouldn't happen then?

You're presuming that the company can perfectly reward people for work, and that every employee believes that they'll be rewarded optimally for work in the company's best interest. I've yet to encounter a company that can accurately reward employees for their performance, and because of that, I've yet to find a company where the employees believe that their performance will be perfectly fairly rated. If you can fix this problem, I'll buy your product.

I certainly have met engineering managers worth their salt.

The best place to observe the need for management is in teams like, 20 relatively inexperienced engineers, all reporting to a single manager. I have never seen a team like this that is operating at 100% of the engineers’ capabilities. People end up wasting time on disagreements, building things that end up not needed, jumping from emergency to emergency, not using best practices, all sorts of things.

If you find a good manager and split those people into two teams of 10 engineers, that change will make that team much more productive.

If you are good at bullshitting but not at tech stuff or at managing, then you want to expand the amount of bullshit in the company because this makes it much easier for you to survive.

When almost everyone bullshits, there is no danger for the bullshitter.

So quite a number of people have a big interest in keeping the talents out of the game, and to have as many layers of bureaucracy as possible as this makes it more difficult it is to point the finger at any one person.

The same happends in school classrooms. If you are quite a lot better than the other pupils in class, then you better keep your head down. Don't think you know better how to tackle the work ahead.

I think schools educate us into accepting only bad management.

Any role can be filled by someone bad at that role. There are -10x developers just as there are -10x managers.

What is the difference between a manager and an executive? A manager is an executive of a small part of a large org.

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