by Richard Taylor : 2020-06-04
I was a computer scientist for 15 years, then a software engineer for 14 years, then about 2 years ago transitioned into managing software engineers.
Management is hard. But doable. It is not an engineering problem, it is a people problem.
I saw a story on "hacker news" where a manager proudly declared:
A big part of what I do as an engineering manager is stopping truly brilliant people from executing on plans that begin with the words "I can just do this myself in a weekend."
Mentally I added that to the long list of things that bad managers have said to me over the years. I wanted to write an article immediately to explain why it was bad. I wrote a quick draft.
One day I might finish it. Until then, this is a placeholder.