Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
I wrote 1000 words on this subject and prior spectacular failures of the &quot;no management&quot; style in Silicon Valley. I deleted it. No good can come of talking about it here.<p>Instead of an essay, I&#x27;ll use a modern writing format: the pithy list.<p>1. This article gravely underestimates the difficulty of engineering management. One must simultaneously handle HR functions, he roadmap of their team and other teams, and their reportee&#x27;s opportunities for growth and success. It&#x27;s a very complex juggling act that most people are thrown into with no training, because training for the technical aspects is so bad.<p>2. This article&#x27;s author forgets or is simply too lazy to look up previous examples of failure. Further, they&#x27;re ignoring other attempts to systematize an &quot;unmanaged&quot; environment and what challenges people face there. It&#x27;s unfortunate that they chose to pen such a long and effort-laden essay without doing sufficient research first.<p>3. The author of this article also seems to totally ignore the coordination and management functions required of microservice organizations. Presumably because as an engineer who specializes in delivering one single single-purpose executable on top of everyone else&#x27;s microservice architectures, they may not have a ton of experience with it. Who is doing this if not engineering managers? Product managers can have some mechanical sympathy, but it&#x27;s seldom their job to deeply roadmap out features.<p>4. This article ends suggesting that you don&#x27;t need engineering managers to deeply understand the larger technical roadmap for your company and translate it to your team, but might find room for process custodians like scrum masters fix this problem? What? What even? This isn&#x27;t even wrong. This is tantamount to suggesting the engineering itself doesn&#x27;t even matter! It contradicts at least half of what the prior argument said.