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Manage like an engineer

150 pointsby wallflowerover 2 years ago

14 comments

jkingsberyover 2 years ago
&gt; Need to prepare a deck for a business review? Open an issue. Want to refresh our career ladders? Open an issue. Planning an offsite? You guessed it, open an issue.<p>As an engineer (not a manager!) who does a lot of non-engineering tasks: this kind of misses the point. Don&#x27;t get me wrong - if creating a GitHub issue helps you keep track of things, great.<p>But GitHub (and most other engineering tracking tools) are meant for relatively clearly defined tasks, and the input on those tasks come only from engineers. But a lot of times we deal with amorphous, poorly defined tasks that involve non-engineers. &quot;Put it in GitHub&quot; is solving the easy part of the problem. The hard part is identifying who are all your stakeholders, getting them onboard, and turning that task that is ill-defined into something well-defined.
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indymikeover 2 years ago
I think the author is talking about things like OKRs and other management documents.<p>Managers have Google Docs, Notion, SharePoint and all kinds of other tools that do change tracking and management of these kinds of things. Long before Git was created, these solutions existed (track changes). Git does a horrible job with zipped up bags of binary, xml, json, and the show changes in most corporate document management systems are really better&#x2F;easier for written word.
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winphone1974over 2 years ago
This doesn&#x27;t make any sense to me, a manager with a technical background. I do use these tools... For their intended purpose. The implication here is there are no functions in management without a software development analog?
jsejcksnover 2 years ago
Ben’s continuous mantra of observability has resonated strongly with me. I have learned so much more from researching and reflecting on the indexed artifacts of others’ public discourse than from any ephemeral meeting.
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twawaaayover 2 years ago
&gt; Asynchronous first<p>Umm... as an engineer I know the ins and outs of async.<p>The fact is that synchronous is so much more efficient when it is practical.<p>You can exchange mails with the other person for 3 weeks to get details of something nailed or get the meeting room with a whiteboard for 2 hours and get out with the complete solution without wasting time typing all those emails.<p>Asynchronous is for when you can&#x27;t get that other person&#x2F;persons in the room and expect to get the thing done in reasonable time.<p>There is a reason why you don&#x27;t do standups asynchronously.
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blowskiover 2 years ago
This is all the “administrivia” of management, and the tools you choose won’t make much difference.
ElijahLynnover 2 years ago
FWIW, the OP of the article is:<p>&gt; Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security and Engineering at GitHub.
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kerpotghover 2 years ago
Async is the most inefficient bullshit ever. Something that takes 30 seconds to say takes 5 mins to write and another 10 mins to parse and that’s if there are no further questions.
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imwillofficialover 2 years ago
This is the worst management idea I’ve ever heard. Ever.<p>There is a reason PM tools exist. It’s because they bring value.<p>Sure you could manage a project in VIM…<p>But no. It’s dumb.
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DannyBeeover 2 years ago
A couple things<p>All of the things mentioned here in the &quot;How&quot; focus on a fairly small subset of the overall things in the &quot;What&quot;, and IMHO, the platitudes expressed in the &quot;What&quot; are nice, but sort of miss the forest for the trees in a number of ways (and without being too mean - have been better expressed before). People are barely mentioned, but are actually the central thing you are trying to help be able to achieve their goals.<p>Anyway, let&#x27;s ignore the &quot;What&quot; for a second<p>The &quot;How&quot; is reasonable for managers of smaller teams, where large amounts of time are spent in the planning, tracking, etc.<p>With the caveat that even there, while it can be a large time sink, teams don&#x27;t succeed or fail mainly because of the tooling you use, or how effective a task master you are. Certainly teams need effective, low overhead processes to do planning&#x2F;tracking&#x2F;etc. But beyond that, it mostly matters what the humans want out of their managers, and nothing in that &quot;How&quot; covers any of that. The people in the team aren&#x27;t likely to say&quot;well, now that we use markdown, i feel so much better about my job, life and career!&quot; How does their manager treat them? How does the manager support and grow them? How does the manager make sure they are doing valuable work, and it is seen as valued? etc That is what people are looking for, for the most part. You would be much better off with a super-empathetic manager who could make people feel valued and help them succeed, but totally sucked at process, than the opposite.<p>Process can be delegated and contributed to by others, it does not have to be the manager. Empathy, empowerment, etc, is ... harder to delegate.<p>On top of that, as you grow, the piece the &quot;How&quot; covers becomes less and les. If you have a 300 person org, basically nothing in the &quot;How&quot; would be applicable.<p>As you grow as a manager, and end up with larger and larger organizations, most of your time does not go to those things, nor would it make sense to. More and more of it is spent on identifying talent, growing and mentoring people who have skill sets that complement yours (and delegating to them), and building and driving the right set of cultural values in an organization. Things like that. Most people would likely consider their VP watching over their project board as micro-management of the nth degree (to the degree it helps people feel like their work is visible and cared about by leadership, there are better ways)<p>There is always some amount of work on process&#x2F;planning&#x2F;etc, some amount of work on aligning people&#x2F;resolving escalations&#x2F;whatever, but honestly, a good goal is to try to make yourself obsolete through growing and helping the organization become capable of driving the outcomes it needs, without you being there (and all the things it involves to get to that point).<p>None of this means you shouldn&#x27;t be trying to find ways to be open, transparent, and clear about the things you do.<p>But the &quot;How&quot; here is only going to take you a small part of the way if your career is manager.<p>There, if you are starting out and trying to learn to be a good manager, there are overall more coherent and complete approaches that may be more helpful.<p>A good recent book on this is &quot;Engineering management for the rest of us&quot;
lavventuraover 2 years ago
Why not using Org mode files instead of Markdown files?
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chiggsyover 2 years ago
So... there are no tools used for managing people that are not used for managing software?<p>Well, that is remarkably fortunate.
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midiguyover 2 years ago
I prefer engineering like a manager
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marvin_3050over 2 years ago
Sounds like Jira to me
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