"Good engineering management" is a fad

I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs become political animals over time.

My suspicion about why this is the case is rooted in the responsibilities engineering shares with product and design at the management level. In an environment where very little unilateral decision making can be made by an EM, it is difficult to know if an outcome is because the EM is doing well or because of the people around them. I could be wrong, but once you look high enough in the org chart to no longer see trios, this problem recedes.

The author really got me thinking about the timeless aspects of the role underlying fads. I have certainly noticed shifts in management practice at companies over my career, but I choose to believe the underlying philosophy is timeless, like the relationship between day to day software engineering and computer science.

I worry about the future of the EM discipline. Every decade or so, it seems like there is a push to eliminate the function altogether, and no one can agree on the skillset. And yet like junior engineers, this should be the function that grows future leadership. I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it.

One of the most important things about great performers in any discipline is to be adaptive. This also applies to engineering managers. I think the article is correct that it identifies that fads shifted. Great people were able to both adapt to new expectations while all the while adapting their approach to individual situations and people. If you are a one-trick pony sometimes your trick is in line with fads and expectations and you will do well. Sometimes it’s not in line and you will struggle. If you are adaptive you will do well in a changing landscape.

If you're talking about the relationship of engineering management with senior management, the most important "core skill," though I wouldn't really call it a skill, is alignment. Thing is, you won't get alignment without being closely aligned with product management, and if product management is weak, acting just as a features accountant, you're screwed no matter how good an engineering manager you are. You have no support to disagree with or shape senior management inputs. Everything else is nice and correct but not determinative the way that alignment will be.

>Then think about our current era, that started in late 2022(...) We’ve flattened Engineering organizations where many roles that previously focused on coordination are now expected to be hands-on keyboard, working deep in the details

Is this everyone's experience nowadays? Personally I haven't experienced such a big shift at all.

Our C-suite is irrationally pushing AI-everything and eng culture is suffering a bit from not fully figuring out how to integrate new tooling safely, but nothing as fundamental as the mentioned changes are taking place so far.

The question of leadership is much larger, more general, and more timeless than the last 15 years. I invite those curious about it to look into the American Army.

> Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.

taken from -

-- https://www.eiu.edu/armyrotc/docs/adp6_22.pdf

There is no absolute description of good leadership. But there is a relative one. It's about the degree of alignment with goals at the moment, at team level, and org level and being able to convince people about the achieved alignment.

Knowing what these goals are, is just as difficult or even harder, than achieving those goals. Most of these goals are not the ones that are written in big font.

I think there is this troika of "Leadership", "Management" and "Followship". You don't have to be an engineering manager to be a leader, and just because you are a leader doesn't mean you have any "followers". As someone who's been a team lead, a tech lead, an EM, and a C-level, I feel the goal is to hit that balance between those three. You want to embody a leader by actually being technically great, visionary, empathetic, and leading by example; but you also want to manage people and expectations; and ultimately you want people to follow you - to basically say "I love working for/with this person". Finding this triangulation is essentially what makes you timeless and relevant no matter the fad.

I think my takeaway from this is there is no objective standard for good engineering management - whatever counts for good has to be contextualized within the culture and habits of the organization.

It isn't good leadership/management that is a fad. What is a fad is what that looks like to the C-suite and how that is measured. There is no substitute for ability no matter how many management courses or frameworks you know. What is constant is the higher-ups ignoring this and going for the latest management philosophy.

I also hear that middle management is being cut from all companies. Some kind of management is necessary though, no? Otherwise people will get misaligned an all that. I'm not sure what is the point of the article. I guess a good manager doesn't need a bullet list to be able to function so why this person is writing a new one?

Every skill eventually boils down to empathy, alignment is just being empathic

The job of EM is to be accountable for a team (or teams) which deliver(s) software. A software engineer’s job is to develop software.