[TUHS] how (not) to manage engineers (was: End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference))

[Douglas McIlroy]

Enough, already.

Doug

On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 10:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 08:47:54AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > My so called "authoritarian style" is nothing more than I was the
> > > leader, I had to pick one style.
> >
> > Right.  To hear you tell it, you preoccupied yourself with matters of
> > style and let others worry about the harder problems of architecture and
> > interfacing.  Maybe that was the right choice given your skill set and
> > those of your staff.
>
> My code is open source, if you read it and understand it, you'd see that
> you couldn't be more wrong.
>
> I'll let my code and accomplishments speak for themselves, I'm retired,
> Brandon.  I'm no longer in the business of trying to change minds, thank
> god.
>
> I'm reminded of the look of horror on the face of one of my fishing buddies,
> when another buddy asked him if he didn't want to keep his finger in the
> game, mentor some people, sit on some boards, etc.  He replied with something
> like "I managed people for decades, the last thing I want from retirement
> is more of that".  Indeed.  Amen.