The worst habit of our industry
Why "Incremental Forgetting"
Great engineering managers don’t just ship—they build organizations capable of shipping. But that meta-skill is rarely named, let alone taught.
Our book Engineering Manager’s Compass focuses on the unspoken rules of the role: how to read organizational structures, how to turn messy metrics into real decisions, and how to build teams that deliver without you holding everything together.
A while back, Maxim Schepelin and I started talking about various topics in preparation of our book. During these conversations, we kept coming back to a common pattern that we had seen in the industry. We spent a while trying to name this pattern. We went through a few iterations:
Collective amnesia
The Memento effect
The déjà-vu trap
But none of them captured the essence of the problem. Then we took a step back and asked a simpler question: What are we actually trying to prevent? The answer was clear: We are trying to stop engineers and engineering managers from forgetting what they already know. Not because people are careless but because organizations forget.
That is when we stumbled upon this perfect quote from Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and writer who has been reflecting on the industry for decades:
Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.
It was perfect.
This is why, 51 years after The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr., we still hear the question “Would it go faster if we add a couple more engineers?” in software development.
It is also why, decades after Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, we still need to remind ourselves that fragmented calendars and constant context switching destroy engineering productivity.
It is why, after Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley and Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, teams still batch up changes, delay integration, and rediscover the pain of big-bang releases.
It is why, after Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book and Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, incident reviews still drift back toward finding who broke production instead of understanding what made the failure possible.
None of these lessons are new. They have been written down, taught, forgotten, and rediscovered for decades. For “Engineering Manager’s Compass,” we wanted to design against this pattern. Make learning compound.
That is why the name is “Incremental Forgetting.” Because once you can name the pattern, you can design against it.