> what I might be able to keep an eye out for during onboarding/transfer that would help me tell overstuffed kitchens apart from optimally-calibrated engineering caves from a distance
The biggest thing I've been able to correlate are command styles: imperative vs declarative.
I.e. is management used to telling engineering how to do the work? Or communicating a desired end result and letting engineering figure it out?
I think fundamentally this is correlated with bloat vs lean because the kind of organizations that hire headcount thoughtlessly inevitably attempt to manage the chaos by pulling back more control into the PM role. Which consequently leads to imperative command styles: my boss tells me what to do, I tell you, you do it.
The quintessential quote from a call at a bad job was a manager saying "We definitely don't want to deliver anything they didn't ask for." This after having to cobble together 3/4 of the spec during the project, because so much functionality was missed.
Or in interview question form posed to the interviewer: "Describe how you're told what to build for a new project." and "Describe the process if you identify a new feature during implementation and want to pitch it for inclusion."
Of course. Wow, I never thought about management like that before. But particularly in software development it makes so much sense for people to jump toward this sort of mindset.
There really is an art to scaling problems to humans so the individual work (across management and engineering) falls within the sweet spot of cognitive saturation. TIL yet another dimension that can go sideways.
The biggest thing I've been able to correlate are command styles: imperative vs declarative.
I.e. is management used to telling engineering how to do the work? Or communicating a desired end result and letting engineering figure it out?
I think fundamentally this is correlated with bloat vs lean because the kind of organizations that hire headcount thoughtlessly inevitably attempt to manage the chaos by pulling back more control into the PM role. Which consequently leads to imperative command styles: my boss tells me what to do, I tell you, you do it.
The quintessential quote from a call at a bad job was a manager saying "We definitely don't want to deliver anything they didn't ask for." This after having to cobble together 3/4 of the spec during the project, because so much functionality was missed.
Or in interview question form posed to the interviewer: "Describe how you're told what to build for a new project." and "Describe the process if you identify a new feature during implementation and want to pitch it for inclusion."