The Engineer’s Guide to Management

In which I totally justify corporate bureaucracy

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Engineers Deliver Products

Engineers spend all of their time solving problems and delivering solutions. Since the products of their efforts provide all of the revenue and profit for a technology company, it is natural to wonder, and most engineers do: what is it that managers do?

Rather than directly answer this question, I will use a metaphor, which is an effective means of making people think that you’ve answered a question while talking about something else entirely.

The Metaphor

A completely realistic illustration of product development, where the problem is depicted by the fire (representing the customer and the problem that needs solving), the raw materials are represented by the water (coming from a deep “well”, potentially another metaphor), the necessary tools are shown by a bucket, and the engineer developing and delivering the product is show by a green circle, because it was easy to draw.

Technology products are like fires, at least for the selfish purposes of my metaphor. Somewhere, there is a fire. Somewhere else, there is a source of water. In the middle is a clever engineer who realizes that, with a bucket, water can be carried from the source to the fire to put it out.

In a similar way, products are problems looking for answers, and engineers (a.k.a, “green circles”) are the people that can fix those problems by developing and delivering products that solve them.

In this rather more complicated diagram, we see two (2) engineers, both depicted by green circles, because they’re both engineers.

Of course, in the real world, problems are not as easy to solve and may require more than just that one engineer. For example, the water source may be a bit further from the fire, and the company may need to dedicate one engineer (the green circle on the “left”) to work with the raw materials (the “water”) and another (the green circle on the “right”) to deliver the product to the customer (who is “on fire”).

In fact, the problem is typically far more complex, with most development resources located very far away from the product delivery end, requiring the engineers to be very far from each other:

Typically, product development and delivery involves processes that are separated from each other by great distances, often more than a cube-farm away. This complex situation is represented in the diagram by the large amount of “white space” between the engineers. You will have to imagine cubes or offices between them because it’s just a metaphor and I don’t know how to draw anything that complex.

This situation wastes significant time and resources, with engineers running the bucket back and forth. For anyone that has observed engineers running in the office (thankfully an uncommon sight), it’s obvious that this is a situation to be avoided at all costs. For one thing, spending engineering time on moving around is not efficient. For another thing, they’re not moving nearly fast enough, and they’re probably gonna kill someone.

Managers Deliver Information

What is needed here is a layer of management, so that the engineers can focus on product development, and the managers can focus on their single greatest skill; transferring information.

Potential solution to the egregious problem of having engineers running around in the office, putting the product, themselves, and everyone in their vicinity in grave danger. Here we see the introduction of management (depicted by a gray circle, to match the color of their suit and their dismal outlook on life).

But a single manager still is not enough, because that manager will waste time running back and forth with the bucket that they would far rather use sitting in meetings or getting coffee. So more management is hired to make this whole process more efficient:

More management is usually the best decision to any problem in a corporation. Here, we see a large number of first-level managers hired to effectively ferry the bucket between the engineers.

Now we have created a “bucket brigade” structure, in which the management team efficiently ferries that bucket back and forth without anyone having to move very much and without taking managers away from important status-update sync meetings.

Of course, with this many managers passing information back and forth, there’s no guarantee that the right thing will happen in the middle of that chain. What’s to prevent a manager in the middle stepping out to the bathroom, or getting another cup of coffee, or playing another game of golf? When that happens, the bucket will sit idle at that manager’s desk, introducing what is called a “bubble in the pipe,” (a saying of unknown origin, presumably referring to having a soap bubble in a tobacco pipe, which doesn’t sound very nice), which adds latency as well as negative performance reviews.

Clearly, another layer of management is needed to keep an eye on the first one. And it can’t be on just one side, or there will not be enough oversight to prevent managers from wandering off in the other direction. So we sandwich those first level managers between layers of second level managers, just to make sure:

Second-level managers guarantee that the first-level managers stay on task and deliver the information where it’s supposed to go.

In this new structure, nobody is watching to make sure that the new second level managers are doing their job effectively, so we need another layer of management, and on we go up the stack until we have an appropriate level of infrastructure to ensure that everyone is doing their job.

Appropriate levels of management are added to ensure that all levels below them are executing their jobs effectively

Once the company has sufficient levels of management in place, it’s common practice to survey the amount of available office space and fill in those spots with further management, just in case. It takes a large organization to ship products, and an even larger one to keep a large organization functioning.

An effective bureaucracy has no more space for any more managers. Back in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph were probably denied a room inside because the inn was operating as an effective bureaucracy, with managers filling all empty space.

Finally, at the top of the chain, we have a level of executive management, to oversee all business operations and hang out with friends that are executives at other companies. Note the gauntlet that the executive line forms across the management layer. This carefully constructed formation (referred to as the “Red Rover, Red Rover” pattern) ensures that managers continue managing while executives can only enter the ranks from outside (usually from the golf course).

Above all of the layers of management, a company has “executives”, denoted by circles colored black, like their BMWs and their souls. This layer provides focuses on oversight of the top level of management and their golf handicap.

Above the entire organization, we have the CEO. This august role (named after the ultimate ruler, August Caesar, but also because the CEO is typically on vacation for all of August) involves a myriad of important operational skills and chores, including hiring executives and crafting executive bonus packages.

The CEO sites at the top of everything, overseeing their career, their image, and their portfolio.

So What Happened to the Bucket?

The bucket

Remember the bucket brigade metaphor that we meticulously crafted at the beginning of this article? Well, it’s still working. Quietly and efficiently, that bucket continues to make its way across this now-huge corporate entity, solving the customer’s problem the same as it always did. The engineers on the periphery are diligently solving problems by developing and delivering the products that meet the customer’s needs. And in between them is a massive and obviously efficient bureaucracy that ensures that those products continue to make their way between the engineers that are actually working on them.

But Wait, Isn’t There More to It?

A clever student of business bureaucracy can see that the model laid out above is too lean and efficient for the real world. That’s because it simply covers the management aspects of a typical tech company. In a future article, I hope to cover more of the peripheral functions of a company that help make it a leading edge competitor in today’s high tech corporate world.

Until then, get back to work — your managers are waiting anxiously for you to tell them something that they can tell someone else. Because that’s how it works.

by Chet Haase (Manager)

If you liked this, you could re-read it. Or you could move on with your life and try part 2: The Engineer’s Guide to Companies. Your choice.

p.s. Sometimes I write serious articles. Sometimes I don’t. In fact, usually I don’t. This article is clearly in the latter category. Don’t take this piece seriously. And definitely don’t think that anything I’ve said here has anything to do with any company that I happen to work for now, ever worked for previously, or will ever work for in the future. Because it doesn’t. It’s just comedy.