"Good engineering management" is a fad

Adaptivity and Context-Dependent “Good Management”

• Many argue there is no universal standard for good engineering management; what counts as “good” depends on the company’s culture, goals, and macro environment (hiring boom vs layoff era, AI tooling, etc.).
• Good managers are seen as adaptive generalists who rebalance between product, process, people, and programming depending on where the bottleneck is.
• Several note that EM roles vary wildly across companies; in some places EMs are hands-on coders, in others they are pure people/coordination roles, and in some startups the function is being eliminated entirely.

Happiness, Value, and “Worthy” Goals

• One thread debates whether “the real deliverable is a happy team” or whether happiness only matters insofar as it produces business value.
• Some say if value requires making people miserable, the value definition is wrong; others counter that many necessary jobs are unpleasant and can’t be made “fun,” only less awful.
• There’s pushback that many tech jobs are themselves in service of unworthy or trivial goals, making misery harder to justify.
• Misalignment between team happiness and company value is framed as a higher-level leadership failure, not an EM-level issue.

Businesses: Profit vs Broader Purpose

• Heated back-and-forth over whether businesses exist solely to make money and treat employees as disposable “grist,” or whether many businesses (e.g., small shops, co-ops) legitimately prioritize community, balance, and non-maximal profit.
• Some emphasize contracts, layoffs, and shareholder priorities; others argue that cultures differ and there is a middle ground between “maximize profit” and “join a commune.”

Fads, Rhetoric, and Evaluation of EMs

• Several agree with the article that what counts as “good leadership” is heavily driven by shifting business realities and institutional rhetoric, not stable morality.
• Concern that faddish process metrics cause performative management, politics, and disdain for EMs, especially when senior leaders can’t attribute outcomes cleanly to EM performance.
• One view: the fad is non-technical management; enduring leadership requires real domain expertise.

Timeless Skills: Alignment, Empathy, Leadership

• Recurring themes: alignment with goals (especially with product), empathy plus willingness to be disliked, and technical credibility.
• Distinctions are drawn between leadership, management, and “followership”; effective leaders balance all three.

Reception of the Article and Author

• Some praise the piece as brilliant, clarifying, and reflective of real shifts (e.g., post-ZIRP flattening, AI hype).
• Others dismiss it as consulting-style taxonomy or HR training fodder, and some question the author’s credibility due to their role in the Digg v4 launch.