23 ms·

Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager

516 points by sebg 6y ago

flowerlad 6y ago
These are not the toughest problems. Here's a tough one: managers that compete with their employees for credit and rewards. Does the company reward managers based on the total output of the team they manage, or do they reward managers on their contribution to the success? If the former, managers will try to hire the best, and help their employees do the best work. If the latter managers will not necessarily try to hire or retain the best, since they are competing for rewards.
- brundolf 6y ago
  That may be an additional interesting problem, but why shoot down the OP? I think the things it goes over are entirely legitimate and important lessons-learned.
  - serverholic 6y ago
    This is hackernews. Instead of thoughtful comments on the article, people prefer to make up an argument and then bitch about that so they feel smart.
    - duxup 6y ago
      I think it is more people hear a topic that is wide ranging and sort of riff off of it and discuss related and not so related things. I think it is pretty normal even if a bit off the mark at times.
- dasil003 6y ago
  That's not a hard problem, that's an easy problem for leadership to solve (you explained the solution in half a sentence), or an impossible problem for a line manager to solve.
  - finikytou 6y ago
    Who do you think leadership listens to? the employees they never talk to or the line managers they have weekly discussions with? it happened to me recently. working for a manager that literally took all the credit for all of my visible work, taking 0 responsibility when the team was failing on projects while he is the one who assigned juniors on complex projects without any oversight. He obviously blamed his own team members to upper management rather than taking responsibility too. He recently got promoted while I am being asked to attend trainings to get better at my job in order to be promoted (While at the same time being qualified as a top achiever in my yearly review...) Don't forget that no one will ever be on your side in a company. You don't meet leadership. Your line manager does. HR is not on your side never. So yes. The only way out is to kneel down and accept it. be nice to the guy who takes credit and if you do it well enough you might be the next he will promote. except if he brought his friend to the company and this friend is competing with you....
- anotheryou 6y ago
  Or you have good high-ups that are just glad if you do a good job and they don't have to intervene. Problems I struggle with sometimes: - Finding time for product management (including research) (PO is my actual job title). - Difficult personalities (relatively I think I'm very good at handling these, but trying to change someone instead of just mitigating harm is hard). - Keeping non-full-stack devs busy. E.g.: The most urgent topic is some DB migration and I need back-end people for it. I could have front-end work on the next user facing feature in the meantime, but they are blocked by back-end delivering the data. (well front-end can mock the back-end in my example, but you get the idea). - Balancing how well prepared or defined tasks have to be. There are so many factors: Getting a good outcome / staying agile / having the devs think along (no micro-management) / not overburdening the dev / and maybe most importantly: not knowing who will take the task because devs are on such different levels.
- ska 6y ago
  What you are describing is an organization problem, and typically above the pay grade of an engg manager. So interesting, yes, but a different category.
duxup 6y ago
>Mistake 3: Communicating something one time is enough I joined a company once where a particularly skilled engineer had become a manager. She was very good at her job and I'm fairly certain had something like 'perfect recollection'. We were in a meeting and she went on about how she was upset people were doing a troubleshooting process wrong despite having sent out a detailed email. Not wanting to do that thing wrong I searched my email, but couldn't find it. I asked about it and she told me "Oh it was before you joined us.". I had been with that team for two years... People tend to remember important things like it was yesterday, but don't always realize that other people can only absorb so many important things / don't always know how important it is... and email is kinda a terrible way to communicate it too. Let alone 2+ years earlier ;)
- harryf 6y ago
  There’s some cognitive bias in which we assume that when we regard some information as important, that anyone exposed to that information will fully absorb it. The reality is - while learning how to communicate well is hard, actually getting anyone to listen is many times harder. I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming. And since mobile phones and social media all this has got many times harder; attention spans are shorter and there’s a higher expectation that information should be somehow entertaining. These days communicating something simple like an important date to 10+ people inside a company requires multi level marketing; email, calendar invite, Slack, face to face time ... use it all and still one of the 10 will somehow miss the message.
  - savanaly 6y ago
    You can't tell people anything. [0] [0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
    - Johnwbh 6y ago
      Interesting essay. Reminds me of some of the issues that come up in teaching. Even when you think you have explained something at the simplest possible level you are often missing background assumptions that seem to obvious to you that you can't even conceive of not knowing them
jorblumesea 6y ago
This is pretty solid advice, but very much basic EM feedback. The really hard stuff are ideas such as... * How do you create a reality distortion field inside outside the team. Bad managers just list accomplishments, great managers tell a story. * How do you manage/remove toxic people, personalities and influences and create a solid team culture * How do you translate the relatively rigid corporate structure and objectives into flexibility and room to move for your team. Until you're VP level, you actually don't have much freedom in direction and a great manager will understand how to interpret and reinterpret this for the reports. * How do you balance the relationship between business, engineering and product. Can you walk the line between tech debt, code quality and delivering? Can you have those conversations business is never willing to have to convince them to allow eng to pay down tech debt? * How do you unblock and accelerate your team without being a micromanager. Do you regularly take a strategic view on pain points and blockers for your team?
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Great points! Not sure why you were down voted
alphadevx 6y ago
Wow that's a pretty easy going list. Just wait until you have to fire a bad hire that you made, have an entire team quit after a bad crunch, or have to lay off an entire team due to that exciting startup just you joined going bust.
- shortandsweet 6y ago
  Have you had that happen?
  - alphadevx 6y ago
    Yes and I could go on! Engineering management is brilliant and rewarding, but also very demanding. I have made plenty of mistakes over 20+ years, and learned the painful way. All of your problems are people problems, the tech parts are much easier to manage.
    - fma 6y ago
      I have an opportunity to apply (and be very competitive) for manager positions that just opened up and this is the part that scares me the most. I could (and likely will) be managing a team of 9 college hires with 1 senior dev. Not a great ratio but that's about what it is from the new teams that were created. I can stay technical in my role as an individual contributor and be content. IMHO I'd be more valuable to the company in a leadership role...but also at the same time not sure if I want to have to deal with it for a 10% raise.
      - alphadevx 6y ago
        I'd always recommend you try it! The really brilliant part about engineering leadership is mentoring, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing one of your teams succeed, or growing your own leaders and watching them thrive autonomously. If it does not suit you in the end, your technical skills will still be there as a fallback option. Wish you well.
        6y ago
mancerayder 6y ago
Me: trying to stay hands-on and technical on all topics, which first of all was impossible, and second which distracted me away from the key managerial duties of keeping communication channels flowing, projects on track, people unblocked, strategy devised, and so forth. I don't know if anyone has alternative tips. I know people who do all their hands-on stuff as managers on the weekends with private projects so they can learn new tech (like k8s).
- avel 6y ago
  I believe you cannot stay hands on and technical on _everything_. You might have some specialties you are good at from before becoming a manager, and have constructive input there. The rest, you delegate to other, usually senior members of the team. They will be better suited to do architectural decisions and code reviews than you. In the end your senior developers will end up better developers and better in technical stuff than you. And that is fine.
- Niksko 6y ago
  IMO this is part of your job, and not something to be done on weekends. I had a manager that would set time aside on Friday afternoons to write some code or play with new tech, worked well for him.
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    It's incredibly hard to find time where a) you're not in meetings and b) you're not interrupted or needing to reply to communication through email or Slack. The feeling of urgency of those things, connected to a reputation for being on top of things, makes it extremely hard to book a 4 hour uninterrupted window to work on something.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  Take (Jira) tickets and do them just as any other direct report. That's what I do.
  - winrid 6y ago
ubersync 6y ago
> Years ago, I managed a woman who was bright, talented, capable, and an all around pleasure. She was sort of new to the industry and could come across as timid, so I did my best to be a poop umbrella for her, fighting battles behind the scenes to set her up for success. She was on a steady track to land a senior role. This is not the first time I have seen a woman doing favoritism for another woman. The sad thing is even men are expected to "help" and "protect" women. This reverse-sexism in tech industry is rarely talked about because men usually don't make as much noise as women when they feel discriminated against, because men are expected to "man up". And, even when men talk or try to complain the HR (usually filled with woman) rarely takes notice of any such complaints from men.
- shortandsweet 6y ago
  Ohhhh boy you're in for it now. I'd suggest a quick edit on why you feel it is favoristism.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  When we get to equality in representation and pay across genders in the tech industry then maybe your argument might have some merit. Until then…
  - shortandsweet 6y ago
    And we'll cancel and silence everyone's opinions and feelings until that happens?
  - ubersync 6y ago
    Wage gap has been proven to be a myth. What exists is a "earning gap". Men earn more because they put in longer hours, on average. The only industry that has a demonstrably huge wage gap is modeling (and porn), where female models make orders of magnitude more money than male models. Regarding representation, no one is forcing women out of tech industry. There are fewer women in tech, because fewer women choose to study STEM in college. Also, why don't women ask for "equal representation" in other industries which are male-dominated like garbage collectors, sewage workers etc.
ram_rar 6y ago
> She was on a steady track to land a senior role. Even after I decided to leave the company, I let the next manager know this person is track for a senior position in the next few months. Its very naive to think, that the manager replacing you will see eye to eye with you. I have seen countless occasions, where the engineer in the team who is ontrack for promotion doesnt get it, because the management above has changed. While being in IC role, I never relied on the company to promote me. Its better to jump ships than reestablish the relationship with new manager. It takes same amount of work anyway. At least jumping ship will give you much higher compensation.
- Denzel 6y ago
  You and the article author are both right! From the author: > For example, I didn’t teach her how to advocate for herself or how to navigate the system. In fact, it takes less energy to advocate for a promotion with a new manager than to jump ship. Ideally, you have a multi-year track record to lean upon at your current company. You'd have no such track record at a new company. To the author's point, if you put together a persuasive promotion packet, resting upon your accomplishments and past "exceeding expectation" reviews, and make it a priority to repeat how important this is to your new manager, then often you'll get the promotion. If after some time, you don't? Jump ship. :)
  - tomca32 6y ago
    I disagree. When you jump ship you don’t need to build track record to get a promotion but instead join at a higher level right away. I’m a staff engineer at my current company. In my whole career I never once got a promotion.
    - Denzel 6y ago
      Congratulations, that's great! There are certainly different paths towards achieving the same goal. I'm sorry you weren't able to get any promotions to work out.
    - gregkerzhner 6y ago
shortandsweet 6y ago
I really think we can all learn a ton by sharing our mistakes. I wanted to implement this in the office but nobody would share. I have no problem sharing now I've messed up but I'm also weird in a lot of social respects.
- hu3 6y ago
  If you do sprints, schedule a 15 minutes meeting at the end of the sprint called Sprint Review. That's when everyone is able to say what went good and what went bad. It's a good time to have everyone's voice heard. We write it all down in succinct phrases and compare to previous sprint review.
amirkdv 6y ago
> Mistake 1: Thinking people give feedback the way they want to receive it Yes, deciding how to deliver feedback could be a nuanced, delicate challenge. But a non-obvious related problem I've found is whether to deliver it at all. The mistake there being that people want or can benefit from the feedback you think you would've wanted, were you in their position.
- ska 6y ago
  > related problem I've found is whether to deliver it at all. This is definitely a problem when you are peers, but as an engineering manager one of the things you are often responsible for is making sure that individuals development is both progressing and tracking well to group/company needs. So a certain amount of feedback is often unavoidable.
- tchalla 6y ago
  > But a non-obvious related problem I've found is whether to deliver it at all. The mistake there being that people want or can benefit from the feedback you think you would've wanted, were you in their position. Too often, I see feedback being used for individual convenience. Typically, feedback should be linked to team/organisational goals. If you can not frame the feedback towards team/organisational objectives, it might be the case that feedback is not necessary at all. In the end, HOW you deliver feedback matters. Personally, I have three important characteristics for a feedback. Point 1 : "Be Specific". I can not stress this enough. Please point out specific observable behaviour. Point 2 : Frame feedback in terms of team/organisational goals. Every team has a purpose within the organisation. It's a team game and every team member should know the feedback in context of the team game. Individual feedback, team context. Point 3 : Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. You can not change the past but you can influence the future. For example, "Hey John! When you do X, it helps the team achieve Y. Please continue doing so!" or "Hey John! When you do Z, it impacts the team to achieve its objective. What can you do differently?".
mancerayder 6y ago
>Mistake 3: Communicating something one time is enough I feel better reading this as I am known to repeat myself! It communicates what matters, separate from the reminder aspect of the act.
- chasd00 6y ago
  When explaining something technical I do it twice but from different angles. Then i like to have the listener explain it to someone else on the call (I work remote). The surest way to make sure someone understands what you’re trying to communicate is to ask them to communicate it to someone else.
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    Not on the same call that you explained it to the first person, I imagine?
    - chasd00 6y ago
      Even in the same call. You’d be surprised how often people say “I got it” and then stumble when you ask them to explain what they just “got”.
llamataboot 6y ago
Mistakes I've seen eng mgrs make: - not acknowledging obvious elephants in the room - not building enough trust early on with their reports that when a problem comes up, the information they get is biased as they are seen as part of leadership/management and not the team - applying pressure in the wrong direction (ie; if the team is moving slow because of stress or fear, making things more stressful will not speed things up) - trying too hard to be friends with all their reports, rather than figuring out the appropriate boundaries on a person to person basis - relaying anonymous information around in an effort to "protect people" and thus making themselves the go-between between all members on a team rather than encouraging people to work things out themselves - for ICs that then became mgrs, staying way too focused on the in the weeds details and not on the bigger picture or people details, up to an including still spending too much time coding or trying to do PR reviews that carry too much weight -- I would actually go so far as to say that the best "IC turned managers" I've had have been about at par with the most mediocre "good people mgrs that didn't come through coding for that role", and the people in that role that excelled at it (a motley crew of former stage managers, teachers, guidance counselors, project managers, etc)
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  > not building enough trust early on with their reports that when a problem comes up, the information they get is biased as they are seen as part of leadership/management and not the team Could you elaborate on ways to build trust early on? I'm curious and intrigued. Do you have any ideas / systems that you follow to build trust with different kinds of people?
- mizzao 6y ago
  > I would actually go so far as to say that the best "IC turned managers" I've had have been about at par with the most mediocre "good people mgrs that didn't come through coding for that role", and the people in that role that excelled at it (a motley crew of former stage managers, teachers, guidance counselors, project managers, etc) Just to make sure this parsed correctly: non-technical, but good at people, engineering managers >> ICs that became technical engineering managers?
fersho311 6y ago
How do I even become an engineering manager? I’ve been coding for > 10 years... Seems like I’m the go to guy to always fix things and I seem to be stuck as a tech lead (I spend most of my time reviewing code and doing architecture design and then code when I absolutely have to)
- sethammons 6y ago
  Have you applied? I, just last week, moved from a dev role to a manager role. I had previously talked with my manager at our one on ones about being interested in this path. They pointed out some new positions being hired and so I applied.
- castlecrasher2 6y ago
  >How do I even become an engineering manager? I was made one because my director said during a team meeting that we needed more senior staff to get work moving forward and I disagreed, saying if we made our processes better we could deliver faster. I had a conversation with him after saying if he gave me a team I would get him what we needed, and that's how I started.
mcavoybn 6y ago
The part about "doing everything" for someone hit home at first, but it took a turn when you mentioned leaving that position. Sometimes I've had managers come in and just take over a project because a client/investor wanted it yesterday, which I think is a bad approach. Sometimes it's necessary, but it should be mitigated by proper project management practices. So it seems like a really strange assumption on your part that the new manager or the person "on track to be a senior dev" would behave in the way you expected. What exactly should a manager do different in that scenario? Close their "poop umbrella" and potentially let the person you're mentoring fail? Furthermore, is shielding an employee with a "poop umbrella" tantamount to "doing everything" for them? I feel like putting your employees on track to a promotion and shielding them from organizational concerns that might distract them is a fundamental aspect of being a manager, if the next manager comes in and doesn't do that, then that's on them... edit: fixed typo
chasd00 6y ago
The biggest mistake I made when I became a manager was thinking it was easy. It’s like being a therapist with a deadline on wellness and productivity.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
That's a great read! She was spot on, as far as I'm concerned. But I have her beat. I made a lot more mistakes; some, quite embarrassing. Nevertheless, people seemed to like having me as a manager, so I guess I got a few things right.
- dschuetz 6y ago
  Would you like to share some?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I would love to. You may need to wait a bit, though. I am up to my ass in alligators, right now... Here's a quick short list. These are mistakes I made only once, or eventually stopped making. Some are mistakes that came about as overcompensation for previous mistakes: 1) Believing HR's lies. 2) Transmitting HR's lies to my employees, unfiltered. 3) Getting HR involved in stuff that they only make worse (a function of #1). 4) Not believing anything HR says at all. 5) Not transmitting HR's policies and/or requests to my employees. 6) Not getting HR involved, when they should have been involved. 7) Making off-color jokes. OK when a grunt; NOT OK when a manager. 8) Getting too nosy about employees' personal lives. 9) Not getting nosy enough about employees personal lives. 10) Projecting my personal values and motivations onto employees. 11) Projecting my personal values and motivations onto other managers, or my managers. 12) Trusting too much. 13) Not trusting enough. 14) Refusing to delegate. 15) Overdelegating. Putting too much responsibility on the shoulders of people that shouldn't have to deal with it. 16) Putting the burden of progress reporting into basic team policy. It needed to be my job to know progress; not my team's to tell me. This is what scanning commit comments and build results is good for. 17) Not respecting different cultures within the team. I did fine with cultures outside the team, but each of my team members had their own personal culture, and I needed to get familiar with (and respectful of) each team members' personal culture. 18) Putting my team's needs before corporate needs. The #1 job of a manager is to make sure the corporation's needs are met; regardless of whatever else is going on. 19) Putting my needs ahead of my team's needs. I learned that I needed to make sure the team, and its costituents, were healthy, and had its needs met, BEFORE my own. 20) Being afraid to say no. 21) Being afraid to say yes. 22) Avoiding taking personal responsibility for the team's performance. 23) Throwing my employees under the bus, in order to save my own butt. 24) Letting employees get away with crap, until it became an emergency. 25) Thinking that my job was all technical. In reality, the tech was only a tiny part of it. As you can see, "hard and fast rules" are not particularly helpful. It really is a human exercise.
anjuan 6y ago
This is such a great article, and I'm glad Sarah wrote it. Any organization would be lucky to have her as an engineering leader.
xivzgrev 6y ago
I’m a relatively new manager and this really stuck out for me “Try to think through what skills someone needs to succeed without you. Teach those things incrementally.” I quickly saw my team wasn’t performing at my level (duh otherwise they would be at my level), and have had a hard time trusting them. I have slowly gave them more responsibilities but I like how this makes it very explicit / planned out.
- Osiris 6y ago
  Delegation is extremely important for multiple reasons. 1. I need to have team members I can trust to take things off my plate when things get busy. 2. I want to help my team members grow their technical skills and they can only do that when given difficult tasks that push them outside their comfort zone. I keep reminding myself that if I took a specific task, I may be able to get it done faster, but when I add up all the tasks that I delegated, there's no way I could get that all done faster than spreading it out. I find my role is mostly about keeping team members unblocked and productive.
- gherkinnn 6y ago
  > I quickly saw my team wasn’t performing at my level At first I thought the same. But I then came to realise that people work differently, are motivated by different factors, are blocked by something not visible to me, etc. And once all those factors where accounted for, I saw that the delegated tasks were done better than could have hoped to do. Sometimes absolutely so, sometimes given time constraints. Incredibly rewarding.
korginator 6y ago
One of the most difficult things I had to learn to do as an engineering manager was to be able to confront attitude problems and take action as quickly as possible. Performance problems can be fixed. Attitude problems are much harder to solve. You will face this situation multiple times in your career as engineering manager. I'm not very aggressive or confrontational by nature, so having that conversation with the engineer in question is absolutely not something I looked forward to. This obviously led to an unfair amount of work for the others in the team, a feeling of unfair treatment, resentment and a hit to morale and performance. Two situations were so extreme that we've had to lay off the engineer(s) in question, which is one of the hardest things to do as a manager. I can tell you that in both instances the teams fared much better afterwards.
- abybaddi009 6y ago
  Can you please elaborate on the attitude issue and how you handled it?
  - korginator 6y ago
    Two instances, in two different companies that I can share. In one case the developer was hostile to working with anyone else. This was a project that involved close co-operation with teams across three countries, so his attitude was a no-go. In another case, the engineer was constantly slacking off, dumping his work on the other devs in the team. In both cases I'd have several 1:1's with the engineers, and first try and understand what was going on. I usually trust people, and when something like this turns up, there are often other serious problems, for example at home with family or with the developer's health. We settle these issues quickly through flexi-time, reduced workloads, sabbaticals, coaching, changing their scope of work, etc, and things turn around very nicely. However the engineers I wrote about above didn't fall into this category. In both cases I had extensive 1:1's with them, to help both of us understand what was going on. In this process I'd get insights into the nature of each person, and that helped define the right approach to resolve the problems. I then set clear expectations that we would review each week. We unfortunately got no progress for both the devs after 4 weeks, and at this point I had to involve HR and turn this into a probation. Both flunked and were asked to leave the companies. There's no set formula here. If faced with this situation today, I'd handle it slightly differently and more quickly.
dschuetz 6y ago
Most management mistakes are made through bad, or improper, or ineffective communication.
ju_sh 6y ago
Not sure why it required the strong caveat of "I’m white and a woman in tech"
- fenderbluesjr 6y ago
  Indeed. Apparently these things are important to state upfront yet leaves out what country she operates in and which industry. It was enough for me to stop reading. I recently joined a US company and it was a shock to me to hear how often my colleagues will drag in irrelevant social issues into the discussion of day to day business. These colleagues appear to be so in their own bubble that they just assume everyone is on the same page as them.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
Tell us about a time when you made a decision that led to costly consequences and if you could go back and change approaches, you would.
skeeter2020 6y ago
>> Asking folks directly in a one-on-one meeting if they have feedback for me as a manager, and following up with an anonymous survey An anon survey with a sample population of one? I don't get this...
- jmchuster 6y ago
  Probably more of the value is just in letting someone formulate their thoughts and write something up, instead of iterating live in conversation. Most probably need both avenues of communication available. The anonymous aspect probably makes more sense when you have more reports, but there's probably an aspect of "i can basically guess who this is, but i'm going to try to take this at face value as generic feedback to improve, instead of trying to contextualize and maybe explain it away using someone's current situation".
- bleah1000 6y ago
  I think they probably mean that they get feedback from each person, then formulate an anonymous survey that goes out to the group.

516 points by sebg 6y ago

These are not the toughest problems. Here's a tough one: managers that compete with their employees for credit and rewards. Does the company reward managers based on the total output of the team they manage, or do they reward managers on their contribution to the success? If the former, managers will try to hire the best, and help their employees do the best work. If the latter managers will not necessarily try to hire or retain the best, since they are competing for rewards.

brundolf 6y ago
That may be an additional interesting problem, but why shoot down the OP? I think the things it goes over are entirely legitimate and important lessons-learned.
- serverholic 6y ago
  This is hackernews. Instead of thoughtful comments on the article, people prefer to make up an argument and then bitch about that so they feel smart.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I think it is more people hear a topic that is wide ranging and sort of riff off of it and discuss related and not so related things. I think it is pretty normal even if a bit off the mark at times.
dasil003 6y ago
That's not a hard problem, that's an easy problem for leadership to solve (you explained the solution in half a sentence), or an impossible problem for a line manager to solve.
- finikytou 6y ago
  Who do you think leadership listens to? the employees they never talk to or the line managers they have weekly discussions with? it happened to me recently. working for a manager that literally took all the credit for all of my visible work, taking 0 responsibility when the team was failing on projects while he is the one who assigned juniors on complex projects without any oversight. He obviously blamed his own team members to upper management rather than taking responsibility too. He recently got promoted while I am being asked to attend trainings to get better at my job in order to be promoted (While at the same time being qualified as a top achiever in my yearly review...) Don't forget that no one will ever be on your side in a company. You don't meet leadership. Your line manager does. HR is not on your side never. So yes. The only way out is to kneel down and accept it. be nice to the guy who takes credit and if you do it well enough you might be the next he will promote. except if he brought his friend to the company and this friend is competing with you....
anotheryou 6y ago
Or you have good high-ups that are just glad if you do a good job and they don't have to intervene. Problems I struggle with sometimes: - Finding time for product management (including research) (PO is my actual job title). - Difficult personalities (relatively I think I'm very good at handling these, but trying to change someone instead of just mitigating harm is hard). - Keeping non-full-stack devs busy. E.g.: The most urgent topic is some DB migration and I need back-end people for it. I could have front-end work on the next user facing feature in the meantime, but they are blocked by back-end delivering the data. (well front-end can mock the back-end in my example, but you get the idea). - Balancing how well prepared or defined tasks have to be. There are so many factors: Getting a good outcome / staying agile / having the devs think along (no micro-management) / not overburdening the dev / and maybe most importantly: not knowing who will take the task because devs are on such different levels.
ska 6y ago
What you are describing is an organization problem, and typically above the pay grade of an engg manager. So interesting, yes, but a different category.

duxup 6y ago

>Mistake 3: Communicating something one time is enough I joined a company once where a particularly skilled engineer had become a manager. She was very good at her job and I'm fairly certain had something like 'perfect recollection'. We were in a meeting and she went on about how she was upset people were doing a troubleshooting process wrong despite having sent out a detailed email. Not wanting to do that thing wrong I searched my email, but couldn't find it. I asked about it and she told me "Oh it was before you joined us.". I had been with that team for two years... People tend to remember important things like it was yesterday, but don't always realize that other people can only absorb so many important things / don't always know how important it is... and email is kinda a terrible way to communicate it too. Let alone 2+ years earlier ;)

harryf 6y ago
There’s some cognitive bias in which we assume that when we regard some information as important, that anyone exposed to that information will fully absorb it. The reality is - while learning how to communicate well is hard, actually getting anyone to listen is many times harder. I used to joke that in any meeting with more than 4 people, at any given time at least 1 person is day dreaming. And since mobile phones and social media all this has got many times harder; attention spans are shorter and there’s a higher expectation that information should be somehow entertaining. These days communicating something simple like an important date to 10+ people inside a company requires multi level marketing; email, calendar invite, Slack, face to face time ... use it all and still one of the 10 will somehow miss the message.
- savanaly 6y ago
  You can't tell people anything. [0] [0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
  - Johnwbh 6y ago
    Interesting essay. Reminds me of some of the issues that come up in teaching. Even when you think you have explained something at the simplest possible level you are often missing background assumptions that seem to obvious to you that you can't even conceive of not knowing them

jorblumesea 6y ago

This is pretty solid advice, but very much basic EM feedback. The really hard stuff are ideas such as... * How do you create a reality distortion field inside outside the team. Bad managers just list accomplishments, great managers tell a story. * How do you manage/remove toxic people, personalities and influences and create a solid team culture * How do you translate the relatively rigid corporate structure and objectives into flexibility and room to move for your team. Until you're VP level, you actually don't have much freedom in direction and a great manager will understand how to interpret and reinterpret this for the reports. * How do you balance the relationship between business, engineering and product. Can you walk the line between tech debt, code quality and delivering? Can you have those conversations business is never willing to have to convince them to allow eng to pay down tech debt? * How do you unblock and accelerate your team without being a micromanager. Do you regularly take a strategic view on pain points and blockers for your team?

quickthrower2 6y ago
Great points! Not sure why you were down voted

alphadevx 6y ago

Wow that's a pretty easy going list. Just wait until you have to fire a bad hire that you made, have an entire team quit after a bad crunch, or have to lay off an entire team due to that exciting startup just you joined going bust.

shortandsweet 6y ago
Have you had that happen?
- alphadevx 6y ago
  Yes and I could go on! Engineering management is brilliant and rewarding, but also very demanding. I have made plenty of mistakes over 20+ years, and learned the painful way. All of your problems are people problems, the tech parts are much easier to manage.
  - fma 6y ago
    I have an opportunity to apply (and be very competitive) for manager positions that just opened up and this is the part that scares me the most. I could (and likely will) be managing a team of 9 college hires with 1 senior dev. Not a great ratio but that's about what it is from the new teams that were created. I can stay technical in my role as an individual contributor and be content. IMHO I'd be more valuable to the company in a leadership role...but also at the same time not sure if I want to have to deal with it for a 10% raise.
    - alphadevx 6y ago
      I'd always recommend you try it! The really brilliant part about engineering leadership is mentoring, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing one of your teams succeed, or growing your own leaders and watching them thrive autonomously. If it does not suit you in the end, your technical skills will still be there as a fallback option. Wish you well.
      - 6y ago

mancerayder 6y ago

Me: trying to stay hands-on and technical on all topics, which first of all was impossible, and second which distracted me away from the key managerial duties of keeping communication channels flowing, projects on track, people unblocked, strategy devised, and so forth. I don't know if anyone has alternative tips. I know people who do all their hands-on stuff as managers on the weekends with private projects so they can learn new tech (like k8s).

avel 6y ago
I believe you cannot stay hands on and technical on _everything_. You might have some specialties you are good at from before becoming a manager, and have constructive input there. The rest, you delegate to other, usually senior members of the team. They will be better suited to do architectural decisions and code reviews than you. In the end your senior developers will end up better developers and better in technical stuff than you. And that is fine.
Niksko 6y ago
IMO this is part of your job, and not something to be done on weekends. I had a manager that would set time aside on Friday afternoons to write some code or play with new tech, worked well for him.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  It's incredibly hard to find time where a) you're not in meetings and b) you're not interrupted or needing to reply to communication through email or Slack. The feeling of urgency of those things, connected to a reputation for being on top of things, makes it extremely hard to book a 4 hour uninterrupted window to work on something.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
Take (Jira) tickets and do them just as any other direct report. That's what I do.
- winrid 6y ago

ubersync 6y ago

> Years ago, I managed a woman who was bright, talented, capable, and an all around pleasure. She was sort of new to the industry and could come across as timid, so I did my best to be a poop umbrella for her, fighting battles behind the scenes to set her up for success. She was on a steady track to land a senior role. This is not the first time I have seen a woman doing favoritism for another woman. The sad thing is even men are expected to "help" and "protect" women. This reverse-sexism in tech industry is rarely talked about because men usually don't make as much noise as women when they feel discriminated against, because men are expected to "man up". And, even when men talk or try to complain the HR (usually filled with woman) rarely takes notice of any such complaints from men.

shortandsweet 6y ago
Ohhhh boy you're in for it now. I'd suggest a quick edit on why you feel it is favoristism.
robin_reala 6y ago
When we get to equality in representation and pay across genders in the tech industry then maybe your argument might have some merit. Until then…
- shortandsweet 6y ago
  And we'll cancel and silence everyone's opinions and feelings until that happens?
- ubersync 6y ago
  Wage gap has been proven to be a myth. What exists is a "earning gap". Men earn more because they put in longer hours, on average. The only industry that has a demonstrably huge wage gap is modeling (and porn), where female models make orders of magnitude more money than male models. Regarding representation, no one is forcing women out of tech industry. There are fewer women in tech, because fewer women choose to study STEM in college. Also, why don't women ask for "equal representation" in other industries which are male-dominated like garbage collectors, sewage workers etc.

ram_rar 6y ago

> She was on a steady track to land a senior role. Even after I decided to leave the company, I let the next manager know this person is track for a senior position in the next few months. Its very naive to think, that the manager replacing you will see eye to eye with you. I have seen countless occasions, where the engineer in the team who is ontrack for promotion doesnt get it, because the management above has changed. While being in IC role, I never relied on the company to promote me. Its better to jump ships than reestablish the relationship with new manager. It takes same amount of work anyway. At least jumping ship will give you much higher compensation.

Denzel 6y ago
You and the article author are both right! From the author: > For example, I didn’t teach her how to advocate for herself or how to navigate the system. In fact, it takes less energy to advocate for a promotion with a new manager than to jump ship. Ideally, you have a multi-year track record to lean upon at your current company. You'd have no such track record at a new company. To the author's point, if you put together a persuasive promotion packet, resting upon your accomplishments and past "exceeding expectation" reviews, and make it a priority to repeat how important this is to your new manager, then often you'll get the promotion. If after some time, you don't? Jump ship. :)
- tomca32 6y ago
  I disagree. When you jump ship you don’t need to build track record to get a promotion but instead join at a higher level right away. I’m a staff engineer at my current company. In my whole career I never once got a promotion.
  - Denzel 6y ago
    Congratulations, that's great! There are certainly different paths towards achieving the same goal. I'm sorry you weren't able to get any promotions to work out.
  - gregkerzhner 6y ago

shortandsweet 6y ago

I really think we can all learn a ton by sharing our mistakes. I wanted to implement this in the office but nobody would share. I have no problem sharing now I've messed up but I'm also weird in a lot of social respects.

hu3 6y ago
If you do sprints, schedule a 15 minutes meeting at the end of the sprint called Sprint Review. That's when everyone is able to say what went good and what went bad. It's a good time to have everyone's voice heard. We write it all down in succinct phrases and compare to previous sprint review.

amirkdv 6y ago

> Mistake 1: Thinking people give feedback the way they want to receive it Yes, deciding how to deliver feedback could be a nuanced, delicate challenge. But a non-obvious related problem I've found is whether to deliver it at all. The mistake there being that people want or can benefit from the feedback you think you would've wanted, were you in their position.

ska 6y ago
> related problem I've found is whether to deliver it at all. This is definitely a problem when you are peers, but as an engineering manager one of the things you are often responsible for is making sure that individuals development is both progressing and tracking well to group/company needs. So a certain amount of feedback is often unavoidable.
tchalla 6y ago
> But a non-obvious related problem I've found is whether to deliver it at all. The mistake there being that people want or can benefit from the feedback you think you would've wanted, were you in their position. Too often, I see feedback being used for individual convenience. Typically, feedback should be linked to team/organisational goals. If you can not frame the feedback towards team/organisational objectives, it might be the case that feedback is not necessary at all. In the end, HOW you deliver feedback matters. Personally, I have three important characteristics for a feedback. Point 1 : "Be Specific". I can not stress this enough. Please point out specific observable behaviour. Point 2 : Frame feedback in terms of team/organisational goals. Every team has a purpose within the organisation. It's a team game and every team member should know the feedback in context of the team game. Individual feedback, team context. Point 3 : Cite the past but look for future changes in behaviour. You can not change the past but you can influence the future. For example, "Hey John! When you do X, it helps the team achieve Y. Please continue doing so!" or "Hey John! When you do Z, it impacts the team to achieve its objective. What can you do differently?".

mancerayder 6y ago

>Mistake 3: Communicating something one time is enough I feel better reading this as I am known to repeat myself! It communicates what matters, separate from the reminder aspect of the act.

chasd00 6y ago
When explaining something technical I do it twice but from different angles. Then i like to have the listener explain it to someone else on the call (I work remote). The surest way to make sure someone understands what you’re trying to communicate is to ask them to communicate it to someone else.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  Not on the same call that you explained it to the first person, I imagine?
  - chasd00 6y ago
    Even in the same call. You’d be surprised how often people say “I got it” and then stumble when you ask them to explain what they just “got”.

llamataboot 6y ago

Mistakes I've seen eng mgrs make: - not acknowledging obvious elephants in the room - not building enough trust early on with their reports that when a problem comes up, the information they get is biased as they are seen as part of leadership/management and not the team - applying pressure in the wrong direction (ie; if the team is moving slow because of stress or fear, making things more stressful will not speed things up) - trying too hard to be friends with all their reports, rather than figuring out the appropriate boundaries on a person to person basis - relaying anonymous information around in an effort to "protect people" and thus making themselves the go-between between all members on a team rather than encouraging people to work things out themselves - for ICs that then became mgrs, staying way too focused on the in the weeds details and not on the bigger picture or people details, up to an including still spending too much time coding or trying to do PR reviews that carry too much weight -- I would actually go so far as to say that the best "IC turned managers" I've had have been about at par with the most mediocre "good people mgrs that didn't come through coding for that role", and the people in that role that excelled at it (a motley crew of former stage managers, teachers, guidance counselors, project managers, etc)

kumarvvr 6y ago
> not building enough trust early on with their reports that when a problem comes up, the information they get is biased as they are seen as part of leadership/management and not the team Could you elaborate on ways to build trust early on? I'm curious and intrigued. Do you have any ideas / systems that you follow to build trust with different kinds of people?
mizzao 6y ago
> I would actually go so far as to say that the best "IC turned managers" I've had have been about at par with the most mediocre "good people mgrs that didn't come through coding for that role", and the people in that role that excelled at it (a motley crew of former stage managers, teachers, guidance counselors, project managers, etc) Just to make sure this parsed correctly: non-technical, but good at people, engineering managers >> ICs that became technical engineering managers?

fersho311 6y ago

How do I even become an engineering manager? I’ve been coding for > 10 years... Seems like I’m the go to guy to always fix things and I seem to be stuck as a tech lead (I spend most of my time reviewing code and doing architecture design and then code when I absolutely have to)

sethammons 6y ago
Have you applied? I, just last week, moved from a dev role to a manager role. I had previously talked with my manager at our one on ones about being interested in this path. They pointed out some new positions being hired and so I applied.
castlecrasher2 6y ago
>How do I even become an engineering manager? I was made one because my director said during a team meeting that we needed more senior staff to get work moving forward and I disagreed, saying if we made our processes better we could deliver faster. I had a conversation with him after saying if he gave me a team I would get him what we needed, and that's how I started.

mcavoybn 6y ago

The part about "doing everything" for someone hit home at first, but it took a turn when you mentioned leaving that position. Sometimes I've had managers come in and just take over a project because a client/investor wanted it yesterday, which I think is a bad approach. Sometimes it's necessary, but it should be mitigated by proper project management practices. So it seems like a really strange assumption on your part that the new manager or the person "on track to be a senior dev" would behave in the way you expected. What exactly should a manager do different in that scenario? Close their "poop umbrella" and potentially let the person you're mentoring fail? Furthermore, is shielding an employee with a "poop umbrella" tantamount to "doing everything" for them? I feel like putting your employees on track to a promotion and shielding them from organizational concerns that might distract them is a fundamental aspect of being a manager, if the next manager comes in and doesn't do that, then that's on them... edit: fixed typo

chasd00 6y ago

The biggest mistake I made when I became a manager was thinking it was easy. It’s like being a therapist with a deadline on wellness and productivity.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

That's a great read! She was spot on, as far as I'm concerned. But I have her beat. I made a lot more mistakes; some, quite embarrassing. Nevertheless, people seemed to like having me as a manager, so I guess I got a few things right.

dschuetz 6y ago
Would you like to share some?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I would love to. You may need to wait a bit, though. I am up to my ass in alligators, right now... Here's a quick short list. These are mistakes I made only once, or eventually stopped making. Some are mistakes that came about as overcompensation for previous mistakes: 1) Believing HR's lies. 2) Transmitting HR's lies to my employees, unfiltered. 3) Getting HR involved in stuff that they only make worse (a function of #1). 4) Not believing anything HR says at all. 5) Not transmitting HR's policies and/or requests to my employees. 6) Not getting HR involved, when they should have been involved. 7) Making off-color jokes. OK when a grunt; NOT OK when a manager. 8) Getting too nosy about employees' personal lives. 9) Not getting nosy enough about employees personal lives. 10) Projecting my personal values and motivations onto employees. 11) Projecting my personal values and motivations onto other managers, or my managers. 12) Trusting too much. 13) Not trusting enough. 14) Refusing to delegate. 15) Overdelegating. Putting too much responsibility on the shoulders of people that shouldn't have to deal with it. 16) Putting the burden of progress reporting into basic team policy. It needed to be my job to know progress; not my team's to tell me. This is what scanning commit comments and build results is good for. 17) Not respecting different cultures within the team. I did fine with cultures outside the team, but each of my team members had their own personal culture, and I needed to get familiar with (and respectful of) each team members' personal culture. 18) Putting my team's needs before corporate needs. The #1 job of a manager is to make sure the corporation's needs are met; regardless of whatever else is going on. 19) Putting my needs ahead of my team's needs. I learned that I needed to make sure the team, and its costituents, were healthy, and had its needs met, BEFORE my own. 20) Being afraid to say no. 21) Being afraid to say yes. 22) Avoiding taking personal responsibility for the team's performance. 23) Throwing my employees under the bus, in order to save my own butt. 24) Letting employees get away with crap, until it became an emergency. 25) Thinking that my job was all technical. In reality, the tech was only a tiny part of it. As you can see, "hard and fast rules" are not particularly helpful. It really is a human exercise.

anjuan 6y ago

This is such a great article, and I'm glad Sarah wrote it. Any organization would be lucky to have her as an engineering leader.

xivzgrev 6y ago

I’m a relatively new manager and this really stuck out for me “Try to think through what skills someone needs to succeed without you. Teach those things incrementally.” I quickly saw my team wasn’t performing at my level (duh otherwise they would be at my level), and have had a hard time trusting them. I have slowly gave them more responsibilities but I like how this makes it very explicit / planned out.

Osiris 6y ago
Delegation is extremely important for multiple reasons. 1. I need to have team members I can trust to take things off my plate when things get busy. 2. I want to help my team members grow their technical skills and they can only do that when given difficult tasks that push them outside their comfort zone. I keep reminding myself that if I took a specific task, I may be able to get it done faster, but when I add up all the tasks that I delegated, there's no way I could get that all done faster than spreading it out. I find my role is mostly about keeping team members unblocked and productive.
gherkinnn 6y ago
> I quickly saw my team wasn’t performing at my level At first I thought the same. But I then came to realise that people work differently, are motivated by different factors, are blocked by something not visible to me, etc. And once all those factors where accounted for, I saw that the delegated tasks were done better than could have hoped to do. Sometimes absolutely so, sometimes given time constraints. Incredibly rewarding.

korginator 6y ago

One of the most difficult things I had to learn to do as an engineering manager was to be able to confront attitude problems and take action as quickly as possible. Performance problems can be fixed. Attitude problems are much harder to solve. You will face this situation multiple times in your career as engineering manager. I'm not very aggressive or confrontational by nature, so having that conversation with the engineer in question is absolutely not something I looked forward to. This obviously led to an unfair amount of work for the others in the team, a feeling of unfair treatment, resentment and a hit to morale and performance. Two situations were so extreme that we've had to lay off the engineer(s) in question, which is one of the hardest things to do as a manager. I can tell you that in both instances the teams fared much better afterwards.

abybaddi009 6y ago
Can you please elaborate on the attitude issue and how you handled it?
- korginator 6y ago
  Two instances, in two different companies that I can share. In one case the developer was hostile to working with anyone else. This was a project that involved close co-operation with teams across three countries, so his attitude was a no-go. In another case, the engineer was constantly slacking off, dumping his work on the other devs in the team. In both cases I'd have several 1:1's with the engineers, and first try and understand what was going on. I usually trust people, and when something like this turns up, there are often other serious problems, for example at home with family or with the developer's health. We settle these issues quickly through flexi-time, reduced workloads, sabbaticals, coaching, changing their scope of work, etc, and things turn around very nicely. However the engineers I wrote about above didn't fall into this category. In both cases I had extensive 1:1's with them, to help both of us understand what was going on. In this process I'd get insights into the nature of each person, and that helped define the right approach to resolve the problems. I then set clear expectations that we would review each week. We unfortunately got no progress for both the devs after 4 weeks, and at this point I had to involve HR and turn this into a probation. Both flunked and were asked to leave the companies. There's no set formula here. If faced with this situation today, I'd handle it slightly differently and more quickly.

dschuetz 6y ago

Most management mistakes are made through bad, or improper, or ineffective communication.

ju_sh 6y ago

Not sure why it required the strong caveat of "I’m white and a woman in tech"

fenderbluesjr 6y ago
Indeed. Apparently these things are important to state upfront yet leaves out what country she operates in and which industry. It was enough for me to stop reading. I recently joined a US company and it was a shock to me to hear how often my colleagues will drag in irrelevant social issues into the discussion of day to day business. These colleagues appear to be so in their own bubble that they just assume everyone is on the same page as them.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

Tell us about a time when you made a decision that led to costly consequences and if you could go back and change approaches, you would.

skeeter2020 6y ago

>> Asking folks directly in a one-on-one meeting if they have feedback for me as a manager, and following up with an anonymous survey An anon survey with a sample population of one? I don't get this...

jmchuster 6y ago
Probably more of the value is just in letting someone formulate their thoughts and write something up, instead of iterating live in conversation. Most probably need both avenues of communication available. The anonymous aspect probably makes more sense when you have more reports, but there's probably an aspect of "i can basically guess who this is, but i'm going to try to take this at face value as generic feedback to improve, instead of trying to contextualize and maybe explain it away using someone's current situation".
bleah1000 6y ago
I think they probably mean that they get feedback from each person, then formulate an anonymous survey that goes out to the group.