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Engineering Management – The Missing Manual (Dave Rensin)
Engineering leaders must build models, prioritize transparency, and manage uncertainty to create a culture of decision-making and growth, rather than control and anxiety.
- Our brains are wired to build models, and that’s not going to change.
- Models don’t need to be perfect, just predictive and cheap to do inference.
- All models are wrong, including the ones in your brain.
- We need to be transparent about decision-making and reasoning behind them.
- Humans need agency, and central control is not a good way to achieve it.
- Uncertainty about the future is what causes anxiety.
- We need to articulate principles and objectives to remove anxiety.
- We should teach people how we will make decisions, not what decisions to make.
- Leadership is about creating certainty and removing anxiety.
- Good leaders are those who can build models, reason abstractly, and make decisions.
- We should focus on uncertainty about the future, not control.
- Certification should not be the goal, but rather creating value.
- Humans are not computers, and our decisions are not always rational.
- Our brains use glucose and cortisol, which increase with anxiety.
- Anxiety causes stress, and stress affects our ability to think rationally.
- Leadership is about creating an environment where people can build models and make decisions.
- People want to be good leaders, not just successful.
- A model that’s not cheap to do inference is not a good model.
- Leadership should be about creating a culture where people can learn and grow.
- The brain is a large and complex system, and we should not assume we understand it fully.