Is engineering management bullshit?

Re:Is engineering management bullshit? by stackbutterflow on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @11:57AM (#32752341)

But in fuzzy disciplines like management you're allowed not to do well. Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code. Thus when bad managers demand that you do x by end of the day/week/month they put an insane amount of pressure on you because there's only one way out. You have to crack the code, you must figure the problem out.

Therefore technical people develop a special sort of humility, reminded everyday of their errors by the law of physics, that bad managers who fail forward never do.

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Re:Is engineering management bullshit? by edmundsauto on Saturday September 10, 2022 @12:30PM (#32792083)

> Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code

I mean, structural engineers are fighting physics. Software engineers, generally, are fighting information theory. FWLIW, I spent 15 years as a (quite successful) programmer with a lot of bullshittery going on about what code works. Have you never shipped buggy code and played it down b/c of time constraints or you were just tired or not motivated or realized this bit doesn't actually need to be perfect?

That's actually why I switched to being a people manager - I was a mediocre programmer that people thought was exceptional because I was good at the b.s. I find people management much more difficult to do well, and much more rewarding when growing junior eng into senior eng compared to shipping a bit of code.

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