Non-Engineers Managing Engineers
One of the toughest thing for non-engineering startup founders to do is to manage engineers. I have seen many companies manage engineers poorly.
Many former AccelerEyes employees lament their new jobs and the way they are managed in their new firms. At AccelerEyes, engineers are the rainmakers. They are respected. Their input informs everything we do and how we sell.
Here are terrible mistakes non-engineers make in managing engineers:
- Putting ultimatums on engineers without attention to the reality of their physical constraints, such as, “This needs to get done by XYZ date. I don’t care how you do it; just do it.”
- Celebrating other business functions (e.g. sales or marketing) as the vital business functions and treating engineering as backroom minions.
- Ignoring engineers and not pushing them to excellence through informed management.
- Buying fake excuses.
- Ignoring real constraints.
Terrible management of engineers results in high engineering churn. What a detriment to a product’s goodness when there is high churn in those who are developing the software.
Engineers are versatile and very capable. Our engineers excel at marketing, sales, and many other business functions. An engineer can do marketing or sales or any other business function. Non-engineers cannot move into engineering.
What are your thoughts on managing engineers? How do you avoid the terrible mistakes others make?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
HR lady
Hi John, I would love to discuss this with you further! Perhaps share some insight.
Michael Munroe
Will I get in trouble if I don’t disagree with you?
I’m trying to shut my eyes to the non-engineers burning down the whole (mega)corporation around me.
When email is sent out to 200+ process development engineers to show up on the floor on a day and a time to ‘look busy because senior vp so-and-so is touring” that means that senior VP so-and-so is so stunningly underinformed about his own factory that he can’t tell normal operation from the entire engineering department “showing up” and “looking busy”. How is it possible that he understands little things like the culture, or has enough vision for the future to get through a single day and doesn’t know his own factory? How dumb is he that he is so ignorant of his own company and processes and the stunning failures of character of his insubordinates that he can’t tell when they are gaming him behind his back but in front of all the employees?
At a point like that the entire upper management loses so much respect in my eyes that things they endorse like HR look like the worlds biggest joke.
Stack ranking isn’t about merit, it is about power. It is about the place to negotiate, not about understanding an actual system. Lets look at it from the perspective of wall-street companies. Lets treat each of them like a person and see how the stack rank turns out. Each says “I am the best and the other guy is the worst”. The nature of the question is such that it chokes off all the actual information. When there is a ranking the order doesn’t convey the whole information – is number 200 actually just 0.1% more valuable than number 201, or is number 200 with 3000% more value? If I am worth 200x the value of my bosses boss, are they going to report it? Never. Their agenda is at odds with the purpose of the metric. What is the result of the measurement process capability analysis for the stack rank? Its purpose isn’t about characterizing value. It is and only is about maintaining power in an existing organization. It is the organization power version of a pyramid scheme.
Have you read the Valve employee handbook?
http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Great comment. What a sad situation indeed when a VP doesn’t understand enough to know when what they are watching is fake.
Our employee handbook is based directly on the Value handbook, because it’s so great!