Management Habits Burning Out Your Best Engineers
techleaderslaunchpad.com
techleaderslaunchpad.com
In my case, the burnout stems more from organizational dysfunction. Our company is highly political—senior leadership mostly comes from non-technical backgrounds, and they manage by fostering competition between teams rather than creating clear functional boundaries. Success is measured by who delivers first, who secures more resources, and who can strengthen their position, leading to constant turf wars.
My manager, despite holding a PhD in computer science, is not technically hands-on. He has a strong ego and is deeply invested in winning these internal power struggles. He also places a lot of importance on maintaining a polished image, both for himself and for the team.
As a result, much of our time is spent building flashy demos instead of focusing on meaningful technical work. We're often tasked with superficial or peripheral projects meant to impress, rather than solve real problems. Internally, the "product" is essentially a collection of immature, duct-taped solutions that don't hold up, and many of our demos eventually get discarded. There’s little emphasis on building something robust or valuable—just on making things look good. I’ve learned very little in this role; the work feels more like labor than growth.
For example: "Building Fragile Engineering Systems"
I wish, I would work in companies who encourage long term maintainability of the platform we are building, but competitors don't wait and building good/stable products are not fast (even if you hire the best, even if you work smart, it just takes time to build, whether you add tests or not, remove features, it just takes time)
Also, consider the fact that building stable products sometimes opposite of making impact, your company treats impact as something which helps the baseline sooner, until you get outcompeted.
20 years ago I read that the nobody uses more than 5% of the features of Word - but every user has a different set of features making up that 5% and so a competitor couldn't release with 5% of the features and get more than a handful of customers. Sure you could maybe get one customer by finding a feature Word doesn't have and making your 5% features what that one customer needs, but you cannot charge a reasonable price if you only have one customer.
Of course you are correct that company reward impact. Which isn't all bad, if you decided to compete with Word your company would need to be willing to invest in 20 years of losses before you have a product that has a chance. This is probably not a good investment unless you already have a lot of sunk costs because you have been a competitor for decades.
I would rather value fast iteration and allowing engineers create mess, learn from it and apply learnings to rewrite (again with quick iteration), instead of focusing on reliable/stable product from get go and making it work for 99% of users
Investments take time to pay off, but if you make a good investment you get a reliable/stable product. Fast iteration and creating a mess is fine when your company is new, but once your real products are proved to be useful you need to transition to something sustainable. Spending money rewriting your web site is money that you could use for some thing else. Computers and the web are tools - don't spend too much money on them - this often means investing in good tools.
What you knew 2 years ago is completely different than what you know now. And the tools existed 2 years ago is different what you have now (e.g. Google might have built new internal service which will simplify 50% of your service, would you migrate?), hence when you just started building you haven't accommodated for a bunch of upcoming things. With the knowledge you have now, tools you have now and what you see is coming, you are going to rebuild the software again.
I could see startups blowing through VC money doing this.
I'm not sure it has to do with skill. That would imply the average worker has agency to apply their skills. The dynamic is more: leadership doesn't understand any of technical details and is happy to defer blame on engineers. But engineers are often expressly forbidden from proactively solving problems. So any employee with half a brain can read the writing on the wall - projects will fail due to incompetence (literally no way to stop it) so we might as well prepare to clean up the inevitable mess.
The result: a brittle system that requires heroics just to keep it operating. Once the heroics are rewarded, and proactive problem solving is eliminated, the cycle is locked in place. Cleaning up messes that you yourself begrudgingly create is the new job description.
What is the average tenure in your company? In most tech companies I know, its 2-4 years (add changing teams into that)
A lot of times you are maintaining existing system. Even then you can't blame other engineers, because information/context/constraints they had at that time could be totally different than what you have now.
If business is burning in 2 months, I am willing to create 100K lines of spaghetti code to save it. Afterwards, we can discuss how to rewrite/refactor
Where I work 20 years or so. Many people who switch in never leave, and a lot of kids who started as an intern are now retiring. Some people do of course find new jobs, but it isn't common (and having worked for a lot of other companies previously I'm not looking - we are not perfect but better than many other options). Maybe part of tech's problem is most can't figure out how to keep good people. They throw money, ping pong tables, and the like around. A good stable paycheck where you are expected to work 40 hours a week and go home is worth a lot to many people even if they could make more elsewhere.
> Rewarding only crisis response discourages preventive work and sends the wrong signal about what the organization truly values.
- Craft is when you try to achieve perfection by investing your time.
- Business is when you try to optimize return on investment.
When you have 2 opposing ideas (in some ways), its very difficult to come up with good principles.
That's exactly what I am saying, your mental problem is yours (saying this as a person who got burned out hard in the past), business doesn't care about your state, it cares about your output, ROI and maximize profits.
Reason I brought capitalism is because in socialism laws might care about your mental health, not in capitalism.