You hit on the most interesting aspect from this. I will explain what I noticed and I’m interested in how this viewpoint lands.

First, the author is doing 101 new leadership stuff. I’ve done it, I’ve seen it done, there’s a science to it. I can distill the whole blog post into when taking over leading something (as an experienced IC, as a new manager, as an army officer, it’s all the same), take the first 30-90 days to not change anything, and just seek to understand how and more relevantly why things work. There are a mess of organization benefits to this, it would take more than a comment to explain why. But in short, ya this is how it’s done.

Second, engs have worked for awful managers, can’t often understand or exactly place why but they know their manager sucks. I can argue capably in thread about how often this difficult to explain “sh*ty manager” sense boils down to the manager not doing like tactically good leadership. In the same way as engineering is a taught skill, so is leading teams. Issue is only a few places teach it intentionally. Top of mind for me is the military, and senior exec training. There’s an actual science to it, full stop. You either get taught it by orgs that treat it this way, or you pick it up from a mentor who learned it somehow. Note - the author learned it this second way. This is really common.

Third, to work for good managers, you actually want to work for good leaders. Leadership is a tactical skill, the same way efficient lines of C++ are. Leadership tactical means tactically shaping and steering people to achieve a goal greater than the sum of the team’s individual parts. This full stop requires what in a certain light is what you point out - it’s a bit manipulative feeling. It’s using leadership methods to make people work together in a way that is effective. A lot of this is good EQ and stuff like the author maps out.

So, who do engs like working for? Often it’s working for technically inclined good people who go to bat for their team with external parties, shield their team from stupid stuff, resource the team to complete its goals, praise in public criticize in private, give good but not overly micromanaging guidance on where to steer things, recognizes and rewards performance, holds unperforners to a standard, and so on and so on?

Some examples of who knows how to do this but for the wrong reasons are people engs don’t like working for - to stereotype: charismatic jocks out of MBA programs who can know nothing about tech but know corp politics and deploy this stuff tactically.

Who do engs hate working for often - technical hires promoted into management and they hate/are bad at their jobs bc management != tech chops, as my above covered.

So, what that leaves is a scenario where teams are led by the occasional person that inherently knows good leadership chops, or more often it’s pissed off engineers who hate working for someone manipulative or incompetent.

To raise the collective industry odds that tech teams work for skilled and competent leaders, that leaves as the solution spelling out tactical leadership - how to do it, what it looks like, how people fit into it, like this blog does.

Pick your poison - more of the same, or good people who just need clear guidance learning from resources like this on how to run teams people want to work on? HN certainly complains to no end about the dynamic caused by not approaching leadership as a skill vs some nebulous thing people somehow know how to do.