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What does a Director of Engineering do?
- lasermike026 6y agoFoster teamwork and communication. Fix or help fix problems as they happen. Engage teams to plan and deliver. Deliver on organizational responsibilities, objectives, and goals. Listen then speak.
- bojo 6y agoGood insights. Small nitpick, I have no idea what the terms "EOS" and "L10 meetings" mean.
- sunnyP 6y agoEOS = Entrepreneurial Operating System https://www.eosworldwide.com/what-is-eos https://www.eosworldwide.com/what-is-eos L10 = Level 10 Meeting https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/what-the-heck-is-a-level-10-meeting https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/what-the-heck-is-a-level-1...
- bojo 6y agoThanks!
- ttymck 6y agoUnless I'm missing something, the "WHAT THE HECK IS A LEVEL 10 MEETING?" post doesn't actually answer "what the heck is a level 10 meeting?".
- barbecue_sauce 6y agoIt looks like managerial consulting claptrap. Don't trust a methodology with an ® next to its name and an accompanying book series.
- shalotelli 6y agohaha! once you get through the nonsense the concepts are actually really useful
- folkhack 6y ago> once you get through the nonsense I'm not going to trudge through clear marketing/sales copy to get down to a few common-sense nuggets of information. Stuff like this is clearly a sales pitch for books/courses/etc vs. any sort of real-world education around management and entrepreneurship. Typically when it gets implemented in an org it's just a cargo cult "Simon Says" game that'll get ya fired if you don't drink the koolaid.
- shalotelli 6y agoSo for me to elevate myself into focusing on whats next I have to make sure whats going on now is being taken care of. I see absolutely no value in micro management and if I don't trust my team then I've set them up wrong. BUT I still want to have a pulse check on how they're doing and what I can be doing to help them because I'm still driven by my mission to create a great engineering culture. The L10 meeting is basically a weekly 90 minute session where we go over our metrics that matter (a scorecard that we use to track system health, successful outcomes etc), set and recap any todo's that we've set for the last 7 days (and I emphasize that these are the absolutely essential things we have to get done to keep things running, not extra things on top of existing work) and then time to remove any major blockers by discussing and solving them. Overall, we need to take ourselves out of working in the business (not talking about bugs etc - we have a separate session for that) and work ON the business (infrastructure, identifying current gaps and weaknesses on our team, resourcing etc). It really helps maintain transparency all the way down and also keeps my people empowered to do what they need to do. At the end of the day, I hire smart people to solve the hard problems, not to tell them what to do.
- Spooky23 6y agoYou cannot even attend a Level 10 meeting without being 10x. With Level 10 technology, and 10 10x people, you're looking at a minimum of 1000x productivity. With Level 10, you basically elevate your team and meld them into Chuck Norris.
- codazoda 6y agoYour not alone. I didn't read far enough into the non-answer to find the answer.
- irrational 6y agoThe first rule of Level 10 meeting is you do not talk about Level 10 meeting.
- chrisweekly 6y agoHaha, I had a consulting client where a VP exec kept referring to "L10 meetings" (which were for the leadership group only), and the devs thought it was an attempted abbrev like "i18n" for "internationalization", or "a11y" for "accessibility".
- kbaker 6y agoYeah, L10n actually does stand for localization. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...)
- jonny383 6y agoIn other words, "buzzword" masturbation that contributes literally nothing to the definitions.
- shalotelli 6y agoEOS is the framework my company uses to keep every department rowing in the same direction. It's been an interesting experience, especially for me with a background in engineering in learning to put my business management hat on and having to focus a lot more on non technical initiatives. You can find out more about it here if you're interested https://www.eosworldwide.com/ https://www.eosworldwide.com/ One of my favorites quotes in the book "The 5 dysfunctions of a team" is > A friend of mine, the founder of a company that grew to a billion dollars in annual revenue, best expressed the power of teamwork when he once told me, “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
- bojo 6y agoInteresting, thanks for clarifying. I run a small 8 person software team in a software-is-secondary business, so articles like yours are helpful for me as I discover new terms and approaches to leadership.
- shalotelli 6y agoDefinitely check out the EOS framework and also OKRs. Those are the 2 that we've tried out so far - we found OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to be a bit too aspirational for us but EOS so far has given us a toolkit to lead and navigate going from a start up to a funded high growth company. They're applicable regardless of business model and industry.
- bobbytherobot 6y agoJumping on here as this is a widespread issue in tech writing. "The first time you use an initialism or acronym in your document, the words should be written out with the short form placed in parentheses immediately after."
- shalotelli 6y agoThanks for this tip. Writing in this form definitely doesn't come naturally to me so it's great to be learning not just about the topic but also on how to better my communication.
- bobbytherobot 6y agoIt will also help with SEO
- karatestomp 6y agoThere's a whole tag to handle it in HTML. Don't have to reserve it for only the first instance.
- JanisL 6y agoHuh neat, I didn't realize there was a HTML tag (<abbr>) till just now, thanks! EDIT: Just spent the last 45 minutes adding it in on my sites in various spots, hopefully this helps the readers.
- tibbon 6y agoRocks. I also don't know what rocks are. Well, except things in the dirt.
- shalotelli 6y agoI used to be told that I should be setting additional goals aside from my day to day work. “What more are you going to contribute this quarter?” That definitely didn’t make sense to me. What does make sense is using the SMART framework to define things I’ve identified as absolutely crutial and most likely the things I’m going to be doing anyway. The benefit is by verbalizing them somewhere I can start digging into if what I’m planning to do cures a symptom or the problem itself. It also allows me and my peers to track it and help keep me motivated and on track. Finally it holds me accountable so that I continue to provide value. The end result is that my contributions and value to the team are public and I’m able to feel a bit less of an imposter.
- nathanaldensr 6y agoThe answer varies wildly based on the size of the company. At smaller companies, they tend to oversee hiring, technical work, and act as managers, but don't necessarily have budgetary authority. At larger companies, they tend to have more authority and involvement in larger strategic efforts; they tend to be "managers of managers."
- shalotelli 6y agoTotally agree. My experience has been interesting because I've grown with the company in this position so I've seen both sides of it. I'm now getting to the point where I'm elevating myself out of the day-to-day "now" and focusing on future strategy and whats "next"
- seattle_spring 6y agoAbsolutely this. There's a huge difference between a real Director of Engineering at a FANG-size company versus a "Director of Engineering" who is just some kid who decided to call their side-project a startup and give themself a hugely inflated title.
- dkarl 6y agoThere are also FAANG-sized corporations that give director titles to individual contributors because it's the only way to get them into a salary band where they can be paid a competitive rate.
- ska 6y agoIt's not as simple as company size, it's responsibility and authority. Necessarily the nature of the job changes a bit if you are a the head of an organizational unit of 600, or 60, or 6. But it changes fundamentally if you have ultimate budget authority, hiring/firing, etc. Agree there are a lot of somewhat ridiculous titles in early stage startups (ever seen a 5 person company with 3 "C" levels?) but even when you are small (but growing) there is a role distinction between exec and non-exec roles, and there is a difference worth drawing between director-in-name and director-in-fact positions. If you are truly acting as a director of engineering, I'd expect you have broad authority to act; you don't ultimately decide your budget or technical goals (but you should be involved in determining both) but within those constraints you have most of the decision making responsibility for how & who.
- encoderer 6y agoGreat write up on a vaguely understood job. I would add, at a larger company, the director also takes on a lot of the burden of organizational navigation/representation.
- stuff4ben 6y agoI really enjoyed this post, thanks for the writeup! Wondering if I can shoehorn some of these concepts (EOS, L10) into my dev team which is a part of a large enterprise?
- shalotelli 6y agoIt fits really well into agile because they deal with different aspects. For me it's just a way to empower my team and keep them unblocked to do what they need to do. It starts with trust and goes from there. If you know your team, you trust them and they're the right people in the right seats you know you're heading in the right direction. We've created a culture where they manage me (meaning they tell me what they need from me not the other way around) and they're accountable to each other not to me (if the DBA needs time off, he makes sure his team mates have what they need - it doesn't effect me except for tracking outputs and if I'm setting them up with what they need then this is already handled anyway). If you use some of these concepts properly success will become a side effect of having an efficient and happy team.
- bobbytherobot 6y agoI don't see "retention" of talent in here but "recruiting" is. Is your team rapidly growing, or do you have high turnover? Recuriting is a costly activity compared to retention.
- shalotelli 6y agoReally good observation. I think retention has become a side effect of happiness, culture and efficiency. We've had low turnover so it really didn't cross my mind because I'm not actively trying to convince people to stay. My takeaway here though is to not take people for granted. Although we have regular 1-1s, sometimes people don't talk about the little things that chip away at them and become big unless they're explicitly asked.
- lliamander 6y ago> I used to think hard work leads to promotion. This is because I didn't understand why different positions exist outside of a title change. Now I see things a bit differently. If an individual on my team is working hard, I'm going to keep them where they are because they're getting the job done. Rather, I'm looking to elevate my 10x engineer - not the one that's the doing their job well but the one thats mentoring those around them to do their job well too. An excellent point. This misconception that hard work leads to promotion is widespread, and management doesn't often do enough to dispel it (if they are even aware of it themselves). I think an important step here is to identify the concrete behaviors and competencies needed to advance. In the words of Randall Koutnik: "What does it take to succeed at [your] company beyond 'hard work'?"[0]. [0]https://rkoutnik.com/articles/Questions-to-ask-your-interviewer.html https://rkoutnik.com/articles/Questions-to-ask-your-intervie...
- Traster 6y agoI'll tell you what amazes me: If you look at any reasonably large engineering organisation they will likely have guidance published from HR stating what the criteria are for different job roles, and they'll actually be pretty similar across different organisations. You might be a Senior Software Engineer at one place but called a Staff engineer at another place, but they're broadly comparable, and the seniority criteria show a very clear progression: the more senior you get the more influence you are showing across the organisation, whether that means managing larger projects, mentoring other staff, consulting with other teams on best known practices, or influencing other parts of the company inter-discplinary projects. Almost every large organisation will have a neat table telling you exactly what attributes you need to show. They all show that progression - more influence on the organisation as a whole. And yet every single review cycle there's always a portion of engineers who think they deserve a promotion because their personal work was high quality. It's like they haven't read the job spec of the job they're applying for. It's amazing.
- bluGill 6y agoWhat is more amazing is their managers who have figured out how to work the system are not telling people that. Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go so if they can't get there tell them why. I've wasted years working hard and trying to gain influence only to realize that the areas I was getting influence in didn't matter to anyone so I was condemned to get good jobs but no promotion. It has been hard to let go and find a path with real influence. Where I was going is one of those areas that only seen if not done. Lesson learned though : the guy who created the bad design requiring them to come in right before release and work a weekend is rewarded above the guy who wrote good code that works...
- birdyrooster 6y ago> Owneship Director of Engineering does not use spell check
- d3ad1ysp0rk 6y agoWhy the snark?
- dswalter 6y agoThere are many jobs where a lack of attention to detail (i.e. spelling) on your resume will get you tossed aside from consideration. It's not unreasonable to request a Director of Engineering be held to a similar standard on a public-facing document like this.
- birdyrooster 6y agoI used to think the same thing until all of these people downvoted us. Maybe we are wrong?
- jackcodes 6y agoBecause what would hackernews really be if not for constant superiority complex in the comment section
- birdyrooster 6y agoGuilty as charged
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rejschaap 6y agoNice write-up, but it feels like I'm missing some important parts of the picture. The company seems to have a lot of layers for its size. How big is the company and how is it organized? What does this person consider to be their team and their peers? How many direct and indirect reports do they have?
- reesef 6y agoGreat piece explaining a poorly understood role. What tool did you use to build and export an SVG mind map?
- shalotelli 6y agoIt’s a cool tool called markmap https://github.com/dundalek/markmap https://github.com/dundalek/markmap
- reesef 6y agoThanks!
- yibg 6y agoDoesn’t most of this also describes an engineering manager? What’s the distinguishing role of a director vs a manager?
- shostack 6y agoIn many orgs a director level role manages managers. And there is definitely a different skillset as it goes beyond management into leadership.
- yibg 6y agoRight, but the article doesn't really talk about that aspect of the role. So to me it seems to just describe the role of a manager and part of the role of a director.
- emmanueloga_ 6y ago> My personal mission is to create a world class engineering team that create world class products. This starts from the individuals How do people in positions like this manage to keep track of individuals when the numbers could be in the lower tens to hundreds? Perhaps is one of the traits that makes one a good director? It seems like something like [1] but for tracking office relationships could be a good idea. OTOH, it maybe that people that matter the most naturally flow to the top of the director line of sight, or that they are making a bigger effort for that to happen :-). 1: https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/
- atlgator 6y agoPosts like this are why I love HN.
- blanchoir 6y agoTitles, titles, titles... 90% of companies don't need 80% of the titles they use. We like to mimic the giants and the unicorns but the reality is those positions overlap so much in smaller / medium sized startups where one guy is doing the job of 2. We need to grow our organizations and the culture strategically and only when necessary. This will also save people a ton of money.
- john4532452 6y ago> "If I have strong executors but am lacking in people leaders, I bring in someone who has that focus" I don't understand how people who can not execute and lack technical expertise will be a better fit for engineering leadership than those with strong technical skills ?
- musicale 6y agoTL;DR: not much.