Principles of Engineering Management
I consumed a lot of blog posts like this before becoming a manager. It feels satisfying to read vague principles like this:<p>> Facilitate wellbeing<p>> Personal safety, dignity, and wellbeing of every team member are paramount. Team success is only success if team members feel good about it.<p>But then you become an actual manager and realize that these are largely just feel-good aphorisms that don't really help navigate the hard work of being a manager.<p>Don't get me wrong: I think "facilitate wellbeing" and similar tidbits are valid advice. Likewise, a manager who chooses to <i>not</i> facilitate wellbeing would clearly be in the wrong. But when you get into management you realize that the hard work isn't waking up and deciding to facilitate wellbeing. The hard work often involves making unpopular decisions, or telling someone "no" when their pet request wouldn't be in the best interests of the team, or defusing interpersonal conflict among two team members who have been feuding for months.<p>These feel-good blog posts seem rather vacuous after being in the trenches of management for several years. Again, not because the advice is <i>bad</i> or <i>wrong</i>, but because it's just a lot of text around the basics of being a decent human being. Learning how to do the hard things about management or how to make unpopular but necessary decisions is something that you won't learn from the average blog post or LinkedIn post, largely because these function more as personal branding pieces than actual advice.<p>In my experience, the best management advice comes from talking to the best managers you know personally. Online, the most practical management advice comes on smaller forums where people are either anonymous (and therefore less interested in personal brand building) or older and accomplished (and therefore not worried about blowback impacting their career). The type of feel-good blog posts or LinkedIn blurbs that people associate with their personal brand don't really add much value after you've read 5-10 articles saying the exact same aphorisms.