[andkon]

As an engineering manager, I read and agree with this guy's critique. Coding is creative, uncertain, and vulnerable work, and if engineering managers are responsible for whatever leads to results (as he reads Drucker as saying, and which I agree is really our job), then yeah, everything he describes as hampering us in doing that job (tools like OKRs, the need to quantify results, etc. etc.) are all indeed real issues!

And if you look at how engineering management happens, at really any org big enough to have even one manager of engineers, I think you'll see this stuff really is a problem. But it's a problem because, well, organizations need to find some way to scale accountability over all of their members, which, when it faces the really tricky vulnerable and weird work of engineering, runs into these problems because of how incommensurate that work is with the tools it has to understand how it's going at scale.

When EMing is a bullshit job, it's because the engineering manager is so constrained by the bureaucratic needs of the organization that she cannot actually do the work that matters between the lines. Like when you've gotta manage up so much that you cannot find the room to support an engineer grappling with a novel and uncertain task? Well, the engineer suffers, rightfully blaming engineering management -- we were responsible for supporting them, and failed to do so.

As EMs, we have to ask ourselves what we wanna do. Do we wanna fit with what the org asks of us, or do we wanna do what we're responsible for: delivering results by supporting engineers as they do the scary, vulnerable work they do? When those things diverge, I think good managers discover ways to keep the people above them happy, while delivering on their responsibilities to their team. But they often do it despite, not because of, the organization they're serving.

I'd like to say it's as easy as just always focusing on results, as when they are delivered, the rest of the org will see that you know what's up! But no. If you just do that as an EM, you'll be fired, or passed over for promotions, or have your team cut from underneath you, or be told you're a better engineer than manager and demoted. Ultimately, your job is to do both: to deliver what the people above you say they need, and to help those who report to you.

The coda to this is that the people above you are also human, and also probably realize what they're asking of you is bullshit (if you're lucky). So if you're capable of dealing as humanely and vulnerably with those above you as much as your direct reports, you'll also win them over, and you'll win the cover from them to be able to do what matters with your team.