An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

if you don’t fall into the trap of believing

that being busy is being productive, you’ll find a way to get the workload under control.

For engineering managers, challenges emerge unexpected from a hundred small decisions, with few rules and no promises.

Damnit!!

For engineering managers, challenges emerge unexpected from a hundred small decisions, with few rules and no promises.

Damnit!!

Management is an ethical profession, and

our decisions matter, especially the hard ones.

consistency is a precondition of fairness.

Indeed.

environments that tolerate frequent exceptions are not only susceptible to bias but are also inefficient.

So damn true!

“Work the policy, not the exceptions.”

Righto!!

Ensure that remote engineers remain an essential, well-supported cohort of the company.

This is very impotant ,notabouttoday'ssituation but always should be the case.

consistency requires no little bravery.

That's a miscolnception. It required so much of effort every single time to represent it.

Policy success is directly dependent on how we handle requests for exception.

O yeah........big time

Organizations spending significant time on exceptions are experiencing exception debt. The escape is to stop working the exceptions, and instead work the policy.

True.

escalations will only be used as inputs for updated policy, not handled in a one-off fashion.

Sane way

The next time you’re about to dive into fixing a complicated one-off situation, consider taking a step back and documenting the problem but not trying to solve it.

Root cause of the problem to be fixed.

that’s both an opportunity and an obligation for managers, and saying no in that room with my manager and CTO was,

That need some balls,alas! most of them missing it

I believe that management, at its core, is an ethical profession.

Pondering....but probably true.

“With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.”

Kinda rule of thumb.

As a leader, you can’t run from problems; engage ’em head-on.

Yup, get the bull by the horn.

be thoughtful about carrying your values with you from one context into another. Leadership is matching appropriate action to your current context, and it’s pretty uncommon that any two situations will flourish from the same behaviors.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Indeed!

“freedom” is neither inherently good nor inherently just, and descends into the murky gray that already embroils everything else in our lives. Each positive freedom we enforce strips away a negative freedom, and each negative freedom we guarantee eliminates a corresponding positive freedom. This sad state of affairs is often referred to as the Paradox of Positive Liberty.11

Hmmm

Projects fail all the time, people screw up all the time. Usually it’s by failing to acknowledge missteps that we exacerbate them.

Yup , indeed