I thought I’d be annoyed reading this, as the blog seems to brazenly rip off name recognition from the significantly more popular and presumably preceding “Practical Engineering” channel/blog… and to some degree that feeling did cheapen the content.
But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.
The foundation of this approach is non-controversial: Don’t micromanage, be a good coach, don’t force work to go through the manager, and other simple truths.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.