Good Engineering Management - Is a Fad
From: https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/
Larson’s bird’s-eye view of leadership evolution provides a useful antidote to prevailing narratives. The ability to step back and recognise these cyclical patterns is valuable. Rather than chasing fashionable management doctrines, focusing on these common characteristics offers a more stable foundation. These eight skills serve as practical anchors while the industry continues its inevitable shifts.
Will Larson observes that engineering management has cycled through distinct eras, each demanding different behaviours from its leaders. What constitutes “good” management is not a timeless truth but a response to prevailing business conditions. This macro perspective reveals that while styles fluctuate, certain foundational skills persist.
Three Eras of Engineering Leadership
Larson identifies three periods with sharply different expectations:
| Era | Time Period | Business Context | Expected Manager Behaviour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yahoo | Late 2000s | Stable organisations, limited resources | Navigate bureaucracy, identify opportunities, minimal direct reports contact |
| Hypergrowth | 2010s | Zero-interest-rate policy[1], hiring as constraint | Attract and retain engineers, stop coding, focus on team motivation |
| Post-ZIRP | Late 2022+ | Higher interest rates, AI productivity promises | Flattened hierarchies, hands-on technical work, coordination roles reduced |
Each transition arrived with a morality tale. The 2010s framed empowering engineers as a fundamental good; the 2020s recast middle managers as bureaucratic drag. Larson argues these narratives obscure the true driver: shifting business realities.
The industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing.
If you accept any morality tale as absolute truth, you risk being misaligned when the cycle shifts again.
Eight Foundational Skills
Despite these swings, Larson proposes eight enduring skills that transfer across eras. He groups them into core and growth categories.
Core skills (essential for all management levels):
- Execution: Lead teams to deliver tangible and intangible work consistently. Examples include shipping projects, managing on-call rotations, and incident response.
- Team: Shape team and environment to balance organisational and individual needs. This covers hiring, coaching, performance management, and advocacy.
- Ownership: Navigate reality to make progress despite systemic difficulties. This means showing up when uncomfortable and being accountable.
- Alignment: Build shared understanding across leadership, stakeholders, and teams. This prevents surprises and ensures realistic planning.
Growth skills (determine career progression):
- Taste: Exercise discerning judgment about what “good” looks like technically, in business terms, and in process/strategy. This helps avoid high-risk rewrites and refine product concepts.
- Clarity: Ensure all parties understand your approach, reasoning, and how you overcome biggest problems.
- Navigating ambiguity: Move from messy, open-ended problems to viable approaches.
- Working across timescales: Balance short-term delivery with long-term sustainability without cutting corners.
The distinction between core and growth is not fixed. Execution, for example, was less central during hypergrowth but has regained prominence today.
Self-Assessing on These Skills
Larson includes a set of reflective questions in his article to help managers evaluate their proficiency across each of the eight skills. These questions probe areas such as team delivery friction, hiring and retention track record, problem ownership, stakeholder alignment, technical judgment, decision-making clarity, ability to unstick ambiguous problems, and trade-offs between short and long-term priorities. He also observes that executives often poach managers onto their most important problems that correspond to their strengths—if they never attempt to pull you in, you may not be considered particularly strong on that dimension.
Career Trade-offs
The “Manage your priorities and energy” chapter in The Engineering Executive’s Primer captures an important reality: the perfect allocation of work is not the mathematically ideal allocation that maximises impact. Instead, it’s the balance between that mathematical ideal and doing things that energise you enough to stay motivated over the long haul.
Recognising where you are in your career and making deliberate trade-offs is one of the highest value things you can do. Most importantly, it’s extremely hard to have a career at all if you don’t think about these dimensions and have a healthy amount of self-awareness to understand the tradeoffs that will allow you to stay engaged over half a lifetime.
Takeaways
- Management expectations change with business cycles, not moral imperatives
- Morality tales about leadership obscure economic drivers
- Develop a broad base across all eight skills to remain effective across eras
- Prioritise work that energises you to sustain a long-term career
- Recognise where you are in your career and make deliberate trade-offs
ZIRP refers to the zero-interest-rate policy environment that characterised much of the 2010s, where central banks kept interest rates near zero to stimulate economic growth. ↩︎
