Will Larson’s excellent article, "Good engineering management" is a fad, articulates something many engineering managers and leaders have been sensing and feeling over the last few years but most haven’t quite been able to diagnose and articulate. Engineering Management has shifted and what counts as “good leadership” shifts with it and is cyclical. Mostly, it’s not driven by deep philosophical shifts or moral insights, as much as by business realities.

Leadership as a moving target

Will describes the distinct eras he’s observed throughout his career, each with its own definition of what good engineering leadership and management looks like.

There’s eras of engineering management that coincide with different focuses and what is valued. Prior eras’ good leaders are often bad leaders in the following era.

Engineering management is not an academic construct. It is a gap-filling role to solve company problems.

What was lauded and celebrated yesterday as best practice can be dismissed tomorrow. That may sound bleak, but it does offer an opportunity for those who can best adapt. As he points out, engineering management isn’t an academic discipline with fixed rules, it’s a gap-filling role that evolves as companies evolve to the economic realities they're operating within.

In part, I think this is why Principal Engineers are so highly valued and in demand, perhaps contrasting to demand for Engineering Managers.

Highly senior IC's can solve problems across a wide range of scales, levels of ambiguity, and bridging organisational gaps without needing the formal authority of management. Historically, great senior IC's have amplified impact through others. What’s changed recently is the productivity lift from AI tooling and the shift toward smaller, more senior-leaning teams. The outcome is that individuals with strong technical judgment, clarity, and systems thinking can deliver leverage that used to require entire teams.

The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.

A sobering and harsh read. My takeaway is: don’t anchor your identity, playbook or your skill development to any one era’s definition of good leadership and management. As has hopefully been pointed out by now, being adaptable to the realities you operate within is the key.

What skills do endure?

Will outlines a set of core and growth skills that consistently matter, even as the industry shifts focus.

Core skills:

• Execution: delivering outcomes reliably
• Team: hiring, developing, and enabling others
• Ownership: stepping into gaps and caring about outcomes end-to-end
• Alignment: ensuring clarity and coherence across teams

Growth skills:

• Taste: developing good judgment on what “good” looks like
• Clarity: simplifying complexity, communicating the essence
• Navigating Ambiguity: operating effectively when the path is unclear
• Working Across Timescales: balancing immediate needs with long-term direction

And crucially:

To keep being a good manager, we have to develop across all eight of these skills, focusing a little bit more on what you’re bad at and a little bit on what the company really needs today.

This is a great list of skills that really captures not just the essence of engineering management, but any senior engineering position. A dynamic, skill based model of management and leadership over a static and dogmatic view approach.

The Value and the Challenge

The value in a shifting landscape is that leaders with breadth and adaptability can have outsized impact. The challenge is avoiding the trap of believing that yesterday's, today’s or tomorrow's version of leadership is the correct or permanent one. The industry will continue to shift economically, technologically and culturally. What makes you effective now may not make you effective next year.

Developing a balanced set of core and growth skills, cultivating adaptability, and focusing on system-level impact gives you the strongest foundation to stay effective and well-positioned as a leader - When the next era inevitably arrives.