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At startups, senior engineers only need light supervision. Their time should be spent listening to customers, directors, and other stakeholders to check if the
by git-pull 9y ago
At startups, senior engineers only need light supervision.
Their time should be spent listening to customers, directors, and other stakeholders to check if they're sorely missing things. They should keep lines of communication open and be proactive.
One thing we don't see often enough is the "Principle Software Engineer" role in startups.
At most startups, it's an open office floor plan. The data analysts, sales person, and marketer would come up to me with a request for something that was actually detrimental to their doing their job, but it wasn't getting focused on in our sprints.
At Boostable (W14), I was handling all server / e-commerce / front-end issues, plus setting up systems for marketing and sales needs that wouldn't have otherwise been done. And it brought substantial value to the company, for low hanging fruit a manager would have kept kicking the can down the road.
The issue is, these proactive things were never recognized or appreciated the way I think they should have been. Heh. It's as if it the work being unofficial made it less valued, when the way I saw it, it was shared success.
If a programmer is impactful and setting the best practices for the team, they can report directly to VP/CTO. Less supervision. Mentor fellow employees.
- zpatel 9y agoGreat insights on the multi-faceted responsibilities of a Sr. Engineers especially at early stage startups. So my query was whether tool(s) can help permeate some of this culture in a large company and thus reduce or eliminate the manager who would otherwise have been unproductive not only from the perspective of marketing or for the company, but potentially also have demotivated the Sr.Engineers or just in case he/she was not a good manager ?
- git-pull 9y agoI don't know if I view managers as having to do with marketing, we would try out project managers. This was after my time at the company, but they're sort of like manager's, except performing more of an organizational task, rather than potentially hiring/firing. They'd play more of a mediator between engineers and other teammates in the group dynamics. Tools: at Boostable we had Aha (https://www.aha.io/ https://www.aha.io/). And we would have the founder Alex split the tickets up. Aha would disseminate the tickets into Pivotal Tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/ https://www.pivotaltracker.com/). Aha played a really big role in top-down delegation of tasks and equating them to business objectives. That software is pretty cool and I recommend checking it out, because I think in some cases it can make manager's redundant. After that, it was autonomous. I created a lot of issues by myself directly in Pivotal (which probably lends to them not being recognized officially, since Aha was where the business impact was overviewed)
- zpatel 9y agocool, thanks for sharing your experience. Definitely a unified tool that would map Product Roadmap -> Deliverables (Implementation Tasks) -> QA verifications in a trusted manner could reduce dependency on dev mgrs, PMs and inturn give more ownership to Sr. Engineers..