Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems | Hacker News Reader

Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems

jeffammons.com

118 pointsjammons43 comments

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

I hope your stake in ownership was commensurate to your emotional stake!

I'm not sure what sort of engineer jeffammons2 is but this article has no examples in it, just a load of assertions.

However, the bonsai in the picture are the real deal. Those are absolutely priceless. That fir tree wants to create needles that are about three to six inches long. It has been pinched religiously for decades. The moss and lichens on the stone are phenomenal and the stone itself was probably licked for years (I am only partially joking). It looks sea worn and looks like it has some wormholes. The sand has been manipulated with tweezers and probably with a microscope involved. The creator of that thing is getting on a bit now and their eyesight is probably like mine.

Note the "weighting" of the main elements - the way the tree and main rock leans very carefully to the right and the weight of the left and right main portions of both.

That tree and setting is worth studying and striving towards.

I only recently learned that bonsai trees are just regular trees. That tree pictured could be transplanted and would grow to be a normal full sized tree, amazing.

They are just regular trees, meticulously crippled over years and years.

Do you have any experience with bonsai? A couple of years ago my wife and I had to have a much loved 50' tall walnut (Juglans - yes Jupiter's knobend) felled in our garden. During its life it had some sort of swing attached and some other nasties. In the end it looks like it got damp on the roots and a bit bored. Honey fungus everywhere.

I do have snags with cruelty and bonsai is not cruel.

If you think bonsai is abusive, then please describe it.

I didn’t say it was “cruel” or “abusive”. These terms only make sense within an ethical framework, which I consider subjective.

I said bonsai are crippled regular trees. You prune it to an extreme degree to stunt its growth and bend it with wires to contort it into an aesthetically pleasing look. That’s just an objective fact.

So why did you say "crippled" rather than "pruned" in the first place?

"Crippled" is an adjective that attempts to describe a loss of functionality and it is massively overloaded these days. I won't go further there.

How on earth is wiring and pruning of a small plant causing a loss of functionality? I brutally prune roses and fuschias and many other plants too. They respond by growing enthusiastically and being healthy and vigorous. My bonsai do too.

We can skirt around a debate of minor points of language but you did deploy a pejorative term: "cripple" with possible malice 8)

I'd love to hear about your thoughts on these horrors: https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/types/trees/training-espalier

Yes they are regular trees. I have an uncle who used to own a nursery (selling plants and trees) that decreed bonsai to be "cruel". I love him and my aunt in equal measure but should point out that they deployed rootstock for their trees (just saying!)

I am toying with getting back into bonsai. I'm now 53 and might have enough patience to do quite well. I planted a few trees a few decades ago that I might find useful as some raw material. Who knows?

If you fancy a dabble you can get a very easy good first result. Don't buy a "bonsai" from a garden centre - please don't. The materials are very cheap but you do have to invest with time.

It's probably from the bonsai museum in Saitama, Japan. I saw this year's Critérium de Saitama cycling race during Tour de France and they showed this museum at the beginning of the video.

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.

Tell me you’ve never worked at a large company without telling me you’ve never worked at a large company

This feels like a circular - but also not fully correct - claim to me. Leadership issues and organization issues can feed on each other in a vicious cycle, but they can also exist separately.

The CEO may not know how to effectively organize an [engineering,marketing,sales,whatever] team. That doesn't mean any company with a team that's adrift due to poor organization suffers from leadership dysfunction at the CEO level. Yes, it's the CEO's responsibility to fix that, but in many cases they don't have the direct ability to fix outside of hiring and delegating to the right people.

Organizational problems are also fractal: a data org of 100 people may not be working in the best way with an infrastructure org of 50 people. But within the data org things might also be bogged down because a team of 5 people is not working well with another team of 10 people. And within that, two people on that team of 10 may be in totally the wrong role for their skillets and preferences.

(And conversely, sometimes you have well-organized, smooth-running teams let down by capricious management.)

And most ironically, if your company is doing a reorg every 6 to 12 months... your organizational issues probably aren't getting fixed any time soon. Organizational issues that affect execution and delivery are too complex to be fixed by moving some lines around on a singular hierarchical org chart.

> They are easy to fix when the right-minded people are in charge and impossible to fix when they're not.

Sorry, no. I don't know your story but it feels unlikely you have real experience with this. Even with right-minded people there can be many, many reasons and dynamics that an organizational problem is difficult to solve.

Good intentions - even from the most senior leadership - can be slow to manifest in real change based on market forces, client forces, cultural dynamics, norms (especially the unspoken ways things "just get done") and capability (e.g., making the wrong decision on a change management strategy which sets the whole change effort back years). There are a near infinite number of contextual considerations, and they are not all rendered null because the executive committee wants to do the right thing. Unexpected second-order effects may be likely given what is being changed, bringing great risk on its own.

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.

In my current situation it feels like much of management doesn't know anything about managing people :(

Its ironic that many companies with interesting work (startups mostly) will have inexperienced managers, mostly of the engineer-turned-manager kind

It's at the bigger or more dinosaur companies that you'll have a better chance of reporting to someone with some actual managerial experience

Any business is an interconnected system of systems - and Roughly speaking 50 years ago, a "manager" would design / improve those systems, optimise them and get the workers to operate inside the system - via design, training, incentives or shouting.

The (capable) managers were rewarded

As Software eats the world, more and more workers in the systems are CPUs and GPUs. And the coders are the new managers.

More and more of what a business is and does, especially day to day BAU, is done in software - for some industries like finance and comms (FNG) almost exclusively in software.

And that means that if you have an organisation "above" the coders, you are asking how do we organise the managers of the managers?

At some point you have to ask, why do we have them there? History has shown time and again some central bureaucracy trying to co-orindate and control ends up inefficient and detrimental - and I think traditional management structures have simply been rendered unnecessary

Maybe the answer to engineering the organisation is ... dont

History shows the exact opposite. What higher level managers, directors and executives do is politics (the practice of allocation of resources).

But politics (ie negotiations for resources between peers) that occur between whom? With work moving "down" a layer to servers and by implication the non-allocative management of resources down a layer to the coders, there are waaaay too many managers and the allocation of resources (ie allocation of those who are now managers) is a totally different discussion - one should be giving AWS budgets to coders and saying run this division.

Now that sounds a lot like microservices / and or two pizza teams.

And the allocation of resources is much more a financier problem - in short there exists a layer of "managers" who don't manage the actual work being done, and have hierarchical control over something that is a financial non hierarchical problem.

in short managers who don't code are dinosaurs

Edit: to try and build a very simplified model of management

- allocate (scarce) resources to desirable projects [financier]

- organise resources to ensure success of project (engineer / planner)

- improve quality of resources (training, maintenance)

- something something read more Drucker

Once the work sits in software (ie search engine) then it's just coders and servers except when you want to create a new business function. And that is to all intents a VC / financier role.

I mean look at how Drucker refers to managers (bestriding the business world) to how google does (8 rules for "coaching" coders)

Google recognises the chnage I think

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.

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.

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?

Sorry if I messed that up when posting it

No need to apologize for removing clickbait.

Thanks, yeah, I was trying to make it clear what the post was about for anyone clicking.

Yeah no worries. It’s never clear to me what edits are “in bounds” and I’ve seen a lot of other people call out things that hadn’t been posted as written.

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.

Don’t ever take on organizational problems. You are working at a company. The company is a sociopath. You have to act accordingly.

And if that sociopath is offering you money to take on those organizational problems, what's the according act in that case?

Put the money in a nice pile and see if it stacks higher than the organizational shit you'll be dealing with. It's a maths problem.

"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.

This person gets it. If everyone is in it solely for themselves, that's sociopathic. Companies function better when lubricated with some compassion.

Act in accordance with your organizational culture and values. If everyone's out for themselves and you act selflessly, you _will_ get hurt.

Mental health issues are for life. It's not worth the risk.

Where do you think values and cultures come from, if they aren't set and reinforced by managers? Yes, there are degrees to this - a frontline manager at FAANG has a lot less power to shape than a VP at a 100 person company. But you have the power to shape, to some extent. And you are the person people on your team will look to for cues.

Which means it's a question how big the gap is. If you can cover it with team-local culture, by all means, straddle it. But trust me, if you completely abandon your values, your mental health won't do well either.

I'd suggest that a severe/unfixable values mismatch should trigger a job search on your part, because acting out values that contradict yours rarely ends well for your health.

A company is not a single entity. Your experience can be very different depending on your team, manager and department.

The experience only differs because of how much or little you are sheltered from reality of the inter-organization politics.

"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.

Was this written by ChatGPT? Very generic.

Hah! Nope, 100% wet-neuron generated work here.

OK, what sort of engineer are you?

I manage now, but application software engineering historically.

This accusation is thrown about a lot. I suspect we're on the cusp of a refinement into actual:

  "did you use ChatGPT to write this"

distinct from

  "this is so bad it must have been ChatGPT"

distinct from

  "this is so good you must have used ChatGPT"

BTW I didn't use ChatGPT to write this.

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