Managing Humans: More Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

© Michael Lopp 2021

M. LoppManaging Humanshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7116-2_20

20. An Engineering Mindset

On the topic of whether you should still code

Michael Lopp¹  

(1)

Los Gatos, CA, USA

 

There’s a very short list of new manager “must-dos” in the Rands Management Rule Book. The brevity of this list comes from the fact that a must is an absolute and when it comes to people, there are very few absolutes. A clever way to manage one person is a disaster when applied to another. This makes the first item on the management must-do list:

Stay flexible.

Believing you’ve seen it all is a bad idea. Staying flexible is the only stance to adopt when constant change is the only constant.

Paradoxically, the second item on the list is surprisingly inflexible ...