Readit NewsI do. It’s often done by people that become tyrants over their little fiefdom.
If a bunch of crap code gets shipped, it isn't always because the engineers are bad. Often it's because they were given a bad deadline. Same with EMs.
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.
I do think you have to be pretty targeted with your predictions, though. Consumer product design seems to be evolving differently from B2B and at a different pace. Growth curves are different for each.
And, sure, that was valid. However, eventually everyone started figuring out how to get a unique look out of Bootstrap while still enjoying the benefits. All our modern frontend component frameworks can trace their lineage back to Bootstrap.
We'll see something similar with vibe UIs. Just a matter of time.
Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.
Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.
Experience, on the whole, really does get you further than cleverness, but good luck telling that to the inexperienced.
The very existence of openAI and Anthropic are proof of it happening.
Imagine you were an investor and you know what you know now (creativity can’t be predicted). How would you then invest in companies? Your answer might converge on existing VC strategies.
What if teams were integrated groups of engineers, designers, and product people, managed by polymaths with at least some skill in all of these areas. In this case, do you think it would be easier to evaluate the team’s (and thus the manager’s) performance and then higher levels of management would care less about processes and management philosophy?
I tend to believe in this model because when I've seen it in action, bad GMs are quickly identified and replaced for the betterment of the project.
It can be challenging to implement for a few reasons.
- It is difficult for a GM to performance manage across all disciplines. This model works best when you aren't interested in talent development.
- It's bad for functional consistency. GMs are focused on their own outcomes and can make the "ship your org chart" problem worse. It requires strong functional gatekeepers as a second-order discipline.