A Type System for Management

In my book Rusty Engineering Management I meander to a point I make explicitly here: There is a type system for engineering management and all you need to understand it is Rust’s borrow-checker.

See, Rust makes ownership explicit. Where Rust has immutability, Rusty Engineering Management has accountability. It’s a higher-order generalization of immutability. Immutability dictates ways in which you may not act. Accountability admits all actions, but brings consequence for actions take.

Imagine the typical assignment and breakdown of work in your management organization. Ownership and accountability establish a duality of delegation. The owner is the one who ultimately gets to accept the work. The accountable party must break it down to the point of individual keystrokes; however, we’re computer scientists, so we’ll recursively break down the work and delegate delegable sub-problems. Parallel algorithms are an under-studied field. Once you begin to partition the problem you must introduce parallel tracks of ownership. For you own the breakdown, and those to whom you delegate own their breakdown.

What does it mean to be accountable? Well, some would say you get fired. I would say that it means being literally able-to-account, account-able, “account able” for your actions to those above you. The process is inductive until society at large has its say. Proponents of freedom will advocate for inductive or recursive processes one way or the other depending on their ideology.

Once you have the ownership/accountability duality, responsibility is the natural consequence of owning a decision that may cause someone else to be held to account.

The punchline:

For the meandering version, consider purchasing my book.

NOTE: You may ask why I am giving away the punchline for my book? Well, because I still hope people who are interested in the full thesis will buy it. If you’re interested in a free sample of my writing, checkout this blog (some is AI written, but most is not) and Engineering Schizophrenia. Only one of my books contains AI contributions and the book is explicitly about exploring AI contributions; the rest remains genuine.