Why this blog?

Why write? Why add one more blog to the immense collection of existing writers, thought leaders and agent provocateurs?

There’s a reason this blog is called Simpler Engineering Management: the craft of the Engineering Manager could be simpler than it is often positioned to be.

Engineering Managers, like any other middle management, generally have a tough go of it. Even in the before times when flattening organisations was less in vogue, they are more likely to be burned out or unhappy at work. There are fewer boundaries & definitions to the role, and those that are in place are less universal and clear-cut than one might initially expect. EMs are sandwiched between the engineers on one side and top-level management on the other, leading to a

This sometimes leads to a ‘curse’ of “it depends”. I notice in online discussions(👋RLS) that often the first and second answers to the question are: it depends, though they use longer sentences. This can be a reasonable response to an incomplete question or situation: the solution to your challenge depends on factors you haven’t yet disclosed.

But in practice, it devolves into a default posture of “everything is extremely complex with many moving parts, and we cannot ever give simple answers to any kind of question”. There’s always some other corner case, some other unexplored possibility that precludes the default answers from working for you.

This is wrong.

Lots of situations are conventional and require little creativity in applying basic solutions: alignment on decisions, applications of Little’s law, firing underperformers, enforcing existing standards, the difference between incidental and inherent complexity, the methods of goal setting (hint: don’t over-index on SMART), and the three levels of impossible. In this blog, we’ll cover all those situations and many more.

Even if — probably not, but I’ll indulge your fantasies for a moment — even if your particular situation is a unique problem to be tackled, chances are it can be handled with conventional solutions once properly decomposed into its constituent parts.

No grand designs, no world-shattering theory-building about the nature of humans in groups. Conventional tricks, solutions and approaches that worked for me and others, and that can help you too in the craft of being an Engineering Manager once you know them. That’s the contribution this blog will offer, should you want it.

Therefore, all blog posts here come with an implicit warning: caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. This worked for me; it might work for you, too. But I’m not an advice columnist and I’m not your advice columnist. You’ll have to see for yourself.

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This blog is written by me, Jakob, about my ideas. I collect ideas through daily practice and from stories I hear from other trusted professionals. Not from AI agents hypothesising about the world. All posts on this blog start with the idea & outline created by humans. I don’t use AI to help me think.

I do use AIs to help in writing comprehensibly and improving my grammar and spelling: Grammarly is the tool of choice.