Managing Up

https://www.wheresyoured.at/managing-up/

by dvaun • 2 years ago

40 18 2 years ago

Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don’t build software.

The management fetish is quite apparent.

If I understand it right, this is codified on IC ladders: E4s/E5s are doing the vast majority of actual software development, with E6+ contributing here and there but being a mix of PM/engineer/quality control. Staff eng's are often reminded if they're coding "too much" that they're probably Doing It Wrong and not maximizing impact and should have broken the task up into smaller chunks and distributed them among the team.

It's just gross: actually doing the work is made to seem a bit gauche because hierarchy needs something to distinguish itself otherwise.

Maybe I'm missing something here?

elevatedastalt4• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something here?

Some nuance. Most people _want_ to be promoted, due to some combination of a) they want to earn more money, b) they want the respect / power that comes with the higher title, c) they actually want to do the job that the higher role is doing.

However, a lot of people aren't necessarily cut out for / want to do the work that comes with higher levels.

If these people were happy to be L5 for the rest of their life and not want a promotion, companies would be happy to employ them at that and have them lead Software projects.

However, they ultimately want ever increasing salaries and more scope, and that's only possible by promoting them. Many people get promoted and realize most of them is now spent not coding and they are less happy, but they have, in a way, Peter Principled their way into their terminal level.

pavel_lishin5• 2 years ago

If these people were happy to be L5 for the rest of their life and not want a promotion, companies would be happy to employ them at that and have them lead Software projects.

I'm not sure if that's true; many companies have explicit "up or out" policies, and some don't codify it that way, but don't particularly want their employees to find their happy place and stay there.

mattgreenrocks3• 2 years ago

That's fair. The purpose of a system is what it does, after all, and it persists for a reason.

I still think it's a bit of a chimera, but hopefully it's vague enough that I can mold it into something sustainable for the long-term.

nine_zeros2• 2 years ago

Staff eng's are often reminded if they're coding "too much" that they're probably Doing It Wrong and not maximizing impact and should have broken the task up into smaller chunks and distributed them among the team.

The companies that have such codified structures of "what it means to perform at a level" don't understand engineering. They don't understand that people at levels could be asked to move across the spectrum of tasks and might need to do different things at different stages of projects for the company.

E.g. if the company needs to improve reliability in the next six months, and your staff/senior engineer has a quick fix, let them fix it quickly . Stop asking them to produce docs, Jira tickets, distribute it all across other engineers etc.

Perverse incentives are a management problem. Don't make engineers do "things at their level".

mattgreenrocks3• 2 years ago

Agree. Staff/principal level engs should be seen as people with broad responsibility who have unilateral authority to do what's necessary to keep things moving.

It's much bigger than simply decomposing tasks and pairing with juniors all day to get them unstuck.

ProjectArcturis• 2 years ago

Boy this is a long screed by someone who doesn't seem to understand that companies' main goal is to make money, not great products. Yes, we are in a period of enshittification, and yes this names a lot of the people and processes responsible. But if you don't understand that the owners and investors are extremely happy with how this has gone so far, you're just shouting at clouds.

superb_dev• 2 years ago

I think they know that company’s exist solely to make money and that shareholders love it. Why else would they write this article about how bad that is?

CRConrad• 2 years ago

This is the man running one of the most important tech platforms in the world

Sounds like what he really meant to write in that gerund was "ini", not "nni"...

Managing Up

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