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by Tyrek
2243 days ago
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The general line of argument here is that the managers have spent time and effort as part of their professional development in order to understand the business, whereas the engineers have dedicated their time towards a more technical focus. This is reflected in how they spend their days - the manager spends time in meetings, whereas the engineer is spending time coding (very broad generalization) Assuming that neither side is doing significant amounts of extracurricular work to bridge the gap, it therefore follows that management understands the business better, because that is explicitly the purpose of their job. In a best case scenario, it makes sense to provide engineers etc. with the context to understand the decisions. On the flip side, business decisions are often made upon a huge heap of context that is generally invisible to the engineer (unless they spend an equal amount of time in building up their business knowledge, spending time in meetings, etc. - but at that point, they're basically a manager?) It's not to say that engineers can't develop the background, etc. to make the decisions, but that it's not exactly part of the expected job functions, and not something that's explicitly looked for as part of the recruitment process. In a sense, this is a bit of a tautological issue. |
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What I'm saying is: what if we rethink specialization on this front? What if we expect it to be part of everyone's job to have deep understanding of and context on the business? Recognizing that there are significant efficiencies in specialization that we lose with this approach, maybe it still comes out ahead. Maybe the improvement in decision making outweighs the inefficiencies introduced by requiring everyone to be a businessperson.
Personally, I think this is a really great way to run a business, if you can get broad buy in for it. The best places I've worked have been those that most closely approached this structure.
But I will admit that this is biased by having a personality where I neither want to be "just" an engineer, nor give up engineering entirely in order to be a businessperson. I think lots of engineers don't want the business stuff to be part of their job, and I guess I can understand that, even if I lament it.
One interesting question is: if everyone is acting with the business ownership mindset more commonly expected of managers, what are managers supposed to be doing? My answer is that front-line supervisor managers are there to support their reports, help them get and understand the information needed to make the right decisions. At the higher level, managers are there to make decisions on tough cross-team and cross-organizational trade-offs. At the very top level, they are there to set and communicate the overarching strategy of the business, which everyone else should be using to inform their own day to day decisions. I think there is plenty of that kind of work to be done, without expecting managers to be making the day to day decisions.