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Not only should managers not distract their reports, I view a primary responsibility of any engineering manager as proactively shielding their reports from as m
by abvdasker 4y ago
Not only should managers not distract their reports, I view a primary responsibility of any engineering manager as proactively shielding their reports from as many unnecessary meetings — particularly with external teams — as possible so that engineers can focus on what they're paid to do: building stuff. The best managers I've ever had spent a significant amount of their time just interfacing with product managers and designers to cut down on bullshit that distracts engineers from doing their jobs.
- icedchai 4y agoThis only works if the EM is both somewhat technical and actually communicates well with their reports. "Shielding" and leaving out key, important details will eventually result in pissing off your reports even more than useless meetings.
- serial_dev 4y agoIt's a hard balance. One of my managers had the goal of "shielding" the engineers, which in practice meant that everything went through him (at each step losing nuance), we never knew why something was important (we didn't know what we wanted to solve and why it was valuable for the company), why something was the most important task at a time (why not work on something else), we didn't know who to ask about it (felt like learned helplessness), we didn't know how deadlines came to be (where they just made up or was there a really good reason).