6 ms·

What should my expectation be for EMs as an IC? I’ve spent time in management and time in The Valley, but not in management in The Valley. It generally appears

by dfee 5y ago

What should my expectation be for EMs as an IC? I’ve spent time in management and time in The Valley, but not in management in The Valley. It generally appears they take care of “other stuff” but are generally expensive proxies (in time, cost, clarity… “truth”) with a sprinkling of HR nonsense like personnel management, hiring and firing.

mathattack 5y ago
I used to undersell them HR processes as nonsense. Then a realized that a company’s true values show in hiring, firing and promotion decisions.
- ixaxaar 5y ago
  Products change but what should remain constant are the people and the process that delivers them.
sombremesa 5y ago
While I agree with you in principle that engineering management is actually pretty far down the ladder in terms of real value to a business (the top and bottom layers of the org structure are usually far more important in what the company will end up doing than the middle), there does need to exist such an abstraction (in sufficiently large companies) for a plethora of reasons, many of them quite obvious. However, that's not why I chose to reply to your comment. > HR nonsense like personnel management, hiring and firing. Hiring and firing is right up there in terms of factors that decide the fate of a company. It absolutely cannot be considered 'nonsense', at least if you want the company to be around for a while.
milofeynman 5y ago
My personal view on myself as an EM is protecting my engineers from distractions (other teams, people, meetings, etc) while getting them the growth the need and the growth they want. I also help prioritize stuff working with PM so there is no confusion or wasted time thinking about what they're working on next.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bojo 5y ago
As an EM I handle the two dozen bullshit things that come up each day that none of my ICs care to deal with (usually rightfully so). Who wants to spend time: writing new job descriptions, interviewing, handling administrative duties, setting expectations with the executive team, working out cross-functional team logistics, making sure people aren't overworked, making sure company and personal career goals align, creating opportunities for training, deflecting insane requests, onboarding new members, purchasing equipment for people, let alone doing technical things like participating in architecture discussions, doing code reviews, pair programming, and as a rare treat maybe actually fix a bug? My teams tell me I do right by them, and I hope that is true. If I ever went back to being an IC though I'd be thrilled to have a manager willing to shield me from all of this busy-yet-necessary work. As a former engineer I understand the value of being able to keep your head down distraction free.
- dfee 5y ago
  Wow. Ok, great reply. Advice to you: don’t just market up the chain, also market back down. Obviously this is general advice, and not specifically to you, but if I don’t see my EM adding value, then it’s little different than then not seeing me move tickets. Again, thanks for the thoughtful response.
  - bojo 5y ago
    My manager readme (thanks to Oren!) explains some granular stuff about my thoughts even more: https://managerreadme.com/readme/mojobojo https://managerreadme.com/readme/mojobojo As someone who has struggled with little information about what it even means to be a proper EM in our industry it bugs me to be stereotyped so hard. Yeah, there are absolutely terrible managers and they deserve to be called out, but some of us really try to put effort in and create genuinely valuable relationships in both directions.
salawat 5y ago
I happen to be an expert (read: flailing desperately to do this work right) at the moment, and I thought a lot like you a year plus ago. Oh God... How that view has changed. As a manager, if you're actually trying to make your team's lives easier, it's bloody hard work. I started out as the first IC and sort of had my role take shape from there. I know where the skeletons are, and spend a great deal of time making sure my people know about them before falling victim to them. I'm often troubleshooting cross-team problems, and either localizing the nebulous stuff to a particular team, or getting the best teams to work together to resolve the issue in the same room, talking, and understanding each other. I'm sanity checking requirements, auditing everyone's meetings, to make sure important things propagate beyond team's silos. I'm constantly switching between an understanding of work about 3 weeks minimum ahead of everyone else, and now, trying to figure out if divergences from what's planned is just statistical noise or something to worry about. Then there is the HR side. Everyone has their own bucket of stuff, and it's my job to help make sure they have the tools they need to overcome it. Sometimes this means looking up weird jurisdictional things, rewriting a job description, shuffling around work, book or resource recommendations, or sometimes long after hours calls or the occasional emergency interference running. There's also making the hard calls on whether someone's forseeable future is going to be upset or not. I'm not jaded enough to just not care anymore, so I always try to make sure if a hard call has to be made, I can make sure everyone involved leaves with something in the sense of a possible new direction. That's not part of my JD but something I just feel like should be done and I'll continue to do until a really unlucky streak of bad hires beats it out of me I guess. I hope by that time I won't need to do this anymore. The way I see it, I'm sacrificing my ability to shut up and engineer the stuff I like (software) to make sure my teams can concentrate on just doing what they are best at, and I'm context switching too much to do reliably anymore. The fact is, all these "odd-jobs" have to get done to ensure the organization runs and someone has to do it... Might as well be the one who knows the org best until I've got others trained up and confident enough to do the same. Re: Expensive proxies I try to act as the anti-proxy. When I see bad communication, I try to get people circled around in the same room looking at the same things. My goal is not to say X has it all wrong to Y, and Z, but getting X, Y, and Z all saying the same thing about the same thing. Sometimes you have to unlearn organizational habits to come to terms with what's actually going on. My higher ups may share your sentiment of that making me an "expensive proxy" but after the second or third projectt that has to get redone, eh, the grumbling quiets down. Haven't been fired yet! So there's that!
cornel_io 5y ago
Hiring, firing, and making sure that people who are good are happy to stay around are three of the most important things that happen at a company. Teams that are bad at any one of them will fail miserably in the long run. The toughest is probably the third, making good people want to stay around, especially when you're a middle manager who has limited power to do anything meaningful like give raises or promotions or pick projects to work on. The most powerful tool is to form good personal relationships with reports without blurring the line between manager and peer (common rookie manager mistake). Beyond that it's mostly about delivering near constant small feedback (positive and negative, mostly positive unless someone needs to be fired), shit-shielding from stuff that drains productivity, and giving opportunities to grow and learn whenever possible.
- sharken 5y ago
  On the topic of making good people want to stay around, i would add that having smarter people than myself in the team is a huge factor. I'm still not sure that achieving this by hiring consultants is a good idea, but it is better than nothing. And it happens that consultants become employees, so i take comfort in that.

by dfee 5y ago

mathattack 5y ago

I used to undersell them HR processes as nonsense. Then a realized that a company’s true values show in hiring, firing and promotion decisions.

ixaxaar 5y ago
Products change but what should remain constant are the people and the process that delivers them.

sombremesa 5y ago

While I agree with you in principle that engineering management is actually pretty far down the ladder in terms of real value to a business (the top and bottom layers of the org structure are usually far more important in what the company will end up doing than the middle), there does need to exist such an abstraction (in sufficiently large companies) for a plethora of reasons, many of them quite obvious. However, that's not why I chose to reply to your comment. > HR nonsense like personnel management, hiring and firing. Hiring and firing is right up there in terms of factors that decide the fate of a company. It absolutely cannot be considered 'nonsense', at least if you want the company to be around for a while.

milofeynman 5y ago

My personal view on myself as an EM is protecting my engineers from distractions (other teams, people, meetings, etc) while getting them the growth the need and the growth they want. I also help prioritize stuff working with PM so there is no confusion or wasted time thinking about what they're working on next.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bojo 5y ago

As an EM I handle the two dozen bullshit things that come up each day that none of my ICs care to deal with (usually rightfully so). Who wants to spend time: writing new job descriptions, interviewing, handling administrative duties, setting expectations with the executive team, working out cross-functional team logistics, making sure people aren't overworked, making sure company and personal career goals align, creating opportunities for training, deflecting insane requests, onboarding new members, purchasing equipment for people, let alone doing technical things like participating in architecture discussions, doing code reviews, pair programming, and as a rare treat maybe actually fix a bug? My teams tell me I do right by them, and I hope that is true. If I ever went back to being an IC though I'd be thrilled to have a manager willing to shield me from all of this busy-yet-necessary work. As a former engineer I understand the value of being able to keep your head down distraction free.

dfee 5y ago
Wow. Ok, great reply. Advice to you: don’t just market up the chain, also market back down. Obviously this is general advice, and not specifically to you, but if I don’t see my EM adding value, then it’s little different than then not seeing me move tickets. Again, thanks for the thoughtful response.
- bojo 5y ago
  My manager readme (thanks to Oren!) explains some granular stuff about my thoughts even more: https://managerreadme.com/readme/mojobojo https://managerreadme.com/readme/mojobojo As someone who has struggled with little information about what it even means to be a proper EM in our industry it bugs me to be stereotyped so hard. Yeah, there are absolutely terrible managers and they deserve to be called out, but some of us really try to put effort in and create genuinely valuable relationships in both directions.

salawat 5y ago

I happen to be an expert (read: flailing desperately to do this work right) at the moment, and I thought a lot like you a year plus ago. Oh God... How that view has changed. As a manager, if you're actually trying to make your team's lives easier, it's bloody hard work. I started out as the first IC and sort of had my role take shape from there. I know where the skeletons are, and spend a great deal of time making sure my people know about them before falling victim to them. I'm often troubleshooting cross-team problems, and either localizing the nebulous stuff to a particular team, or getting the best teams to work together to resolve the issue in the same room, talking, and understanding each other. I'm sanity checking requirements, auditing everyone's meetings, to make sure important things propagate beyond team's silos. I'm constantly switching between an understanding of work about 3 weeks minimum ahead of everyone else, and now, trying to figure out if divergences from what's planned is just statistical noise or something to worry about. Then there is the HR side. Everyone has their own bucket of stuff, and it's my job to help make sure they have the tools they need to overcome it. Sometimes this means looking up weird jurisdictional things, rewriting a job description, shuffling around work, book or resource recommendations, or sometimes long after hours calls or the occasional emergency interference running. There's also making the hard calls on whether someone's forseeable future is going to be upset or not. I'm not jaded enough to just not care anymore, so I always try to make sure if a hard call has to be made, I can make sure everyone involved leaves with something in the sense of a possible new direction. That's not part of my JD but something I just feel like should be done and I'll continue to do until a really unlucky streak of bad hires beats it out of me I guess. I hope by that time I won't need to do this anymore. The way I see it, I'm sacrificing my ability to shut up and engineer the stuff I like (software) to make sure my teams can concentrate on just doing what they are best at, and I'm context switching too much to do reliably anymore. The fact is, all these "odd-jobs" have to get done to ensure the organization runs and someone has to do it... Might as well be the one who knows the org best until I've got others trained up and confident enough to do the same. Re: Expensive proxies I try to act as the anti-proxy. When I see bad communication, I try to get people circled around in the same room looking at the same things. My goal is not to say X has it all wrong to Y, and Z, but getting X, Y, and Z all saying the same thing about the same thing. Sometimes you have to unlearn organizational habits to come to terms with what's actually going on. My higher ups may share your sentiment of that making me an "expensive proxy" but after the second or third projectt that has to get redone, eh, the grumbling quiets down. Haven't been fired yet! So there's that!

cornel_io 5y ago

Hiring, firing, and making sure that people who are good are happy to stay around are three of the most important things that happen at a company. Teams that are bad at any one of them will fail miserably in the long run. The toughest is probably the third, making good people want to stay around, especially when you're a middle manager who has limited power to do anything meaningful like give raises or promotions or pick projects to work on. The most powerful tool is to form good personal relationships with reports without blurring the line between manager and peer (common rookie manager mistake). Beyond that it's mostly about delivering near constant small feedback (positive and negative, mostly positive unless someone needs to be fired), shit-shielding from stuff that drains productivity, and giving opportunities to grow and learn whenever possible.

sharken 5y ago
On the topic of making good people want to stay around, i would add that having smarter people than myself in the team is a huge factor. I'm still not sure that achieving this by hiring consultants is a good idea, but it is better than nothing. And it happens that consultants become employees, so i take comfort in that.