Over the past year, I have been thinking about software engineering management and leadership. I’ve come to the conclusion that engineering management is quite different than engineering leadership: different people seem to usually be better at one or the other.

It’s Hard to Find a Good Engineering Group

I’ve been on a wide variety of engineering teams during the last fourteen years. Each manager has their own style and approaches problems in different ways. Having a flexible manager is really important because every engineering team is different and the people in the group may change fairly often, resulting in a totally new dynamic created by the new team members.

This led me to think about major problems with most engineering groups that I have encountered: there seems to be no focus on engineering leadership or crafting a group environment that can withstand upheaval or disruption.

A New Perspective

I figured that I would try to identify the root problems that exist in most engineering groups and conceive of a way to potentially fix (or at least mitigate) them. I came up with a list of topics that I believe are important to creating a strong, healthy engineering group that can develop itself into a significant and positive force:

1. Create a lasting culture.
2. Focus on craftsmanship and excellence.
3. Enable mentoring and continuous education.
4. Foster engineering leadership and ethics.

I believe that it is possible to create a healthy engineering group that people are excited to join by following the ideas above. I plan on discussing each of these in more detail in future posts.

But for now, I have a story to share.

The Inspiration

I am an avid student of history. Several months ago, I was reading some books about the ancient Phoenician culture. If you are not familiar with the Phoenicians, I highly recommend learning about them. They are one of the most amazing ancient cultures that ever existed. The root of many of the things that we take for granted today can be traced back to the Phoenician people¹.

As I wound my way through passages of text and ideas, I learned how the Phoenician culture survived many wars, cultural assimilation, political uprisings, shifts in religion, conquerors, and more. Meanwhile, at the same time they managed to continuously improve the standard of living for their entire society, maintain their own unique culture despite the many chaotic environments, specialize in multiple industries, become the best sailors, merchants and traders in the world, and invent a common business writing system that became the basis for all phonetic alphabets: all without maintaining an army! I decided to read more and try and learn how they could have done it.

The results are my ideas on how to use some of the ideas that the Phoenicians seemed to use in order to inspire the next-generation engineering groups in a constantly changing technology world.

Many of the Carthaginian institutions are excellent. The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that, although containing an element of democracy, it has been lasting; the Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a tyrant.

Footnotes