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Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

“Engineering mindset” is a thing. You don’t actually have to be an engineer to manage an engineering team, but you have to understand what engineering is and engineering culture, as well as grasping the basic fundamental concepts of the field. None of that is particularly hard, but there are a remarkable number of people who have never actually built anything that wasn’t a completely structured and pre-planned/pre proven product. If you’ve never had to figure out a “novel” solution to anything in your entire career, you are going to have a bad time managing engineers.

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It works both ways though. Engineers can become enamored with making something novel, when what the customer actually wants is something else or already exists. Or maybe what the budget or market allows won't let the engineers make the best possible product so they're going to need to make something a bit less novel. A (good) manager will negotiate these issues.

That seems to go counter to the widely held idea of "innovate or die". If your company just wants to clone the market leader, what value are you to the customer? Management often wants "safe" so no fingers can be pointed at them. I consider that a failure in leadership.

There are different types of companies, and even within companies there are different levels of innovation needed depending on context. Take a current darling like Anthropic. Even though their main product is innovative, a lot of the nuts and bolts are source code adjacent tooling that is as old as the hills.

Really depends on whether its worth the effort to innovate on that thing?

Is your company's core product a billing system? Then it pays to innovate on billing systems and differentiate from competitors.

Do you just need a billing system so you can collect money and move on with innovating where it actually matters? then buy and don't make.

wasting time on doing novel things that don't differentiate your business only puts you behind your competitors.

"Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future" by Dan Wang takes the converse - what happens if the managers are engineers, and extrapolates it to national scale, with both miracle outcomes and catastrophes.

> Engineering mindset” is a thing. You don’t actually have to be an engineer to manage an engineering team, but you have to understand what engineering is and engineering culture, as well as grasping the basic fundamental concepts of the field

I wish this was more common but every time I had a manager without an engineering background or one who was a weak engineer, the ride was not smooth to put it kindly.

At a minimum managers need to understand the basics of software: code debts, release cycles, team workflows, infra basics, security, etc.

They don't need to be software engineers but they should have an overview of the industry.

How is the "engineering mindset" different from that of any other role requiring problem solving?

My experience has been that those who are too precious about the only role they've ever had (an "engineer") are difficult to manage precisely because of their inflexibility and lack of curiosity. It's ironic isn't it?

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