An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

As I’ve become more experienced, my appreciation for management, and engineering management in particular, has grown, and I’ve come to view the field as a series of elegant, rewarding, and important puzzles.

Organizational design gets the right people in the right places, empowers them to make decisions, and then holds them accountable for their results.

Managers supporting more than eight or nine engineers typically act as coaches and safety nets for problems. They are too busy to actively invest in their team or their team’s area of responsibility.

Most folks find being on-call for components that they’re unfamiliar with to be disproportionately stressful.

The rare moment when you choose to reorganize the team6 is painful, but concludes quickly. What’s much harder is keeping the faith when you’ve played your cards and need to find space for your plans to come to fruition. Staying the course is particularly fraught when it comes to growing an organization, because some teams always need more than you choose to provide.

A team is innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs.