[HN Gopher] Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
___________________________________________________________________
Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
Author : womitt
Score : 157 points
Date : 2021-02-17 11:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (codingsans.com)
| miccah wrote:
| Good leaders are people who teach others to grow, progress, and
| ultimately become their own leaders. Most managers aren't
| incentivized to grow their engineers because it would mean losing
| them. I find it hard to fully trust my manager because I know my
| best interests are only partially in their mind. They also need
| to care about the business and their own position, which usually
| carries more weight than how I want to grow my career.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Lou Holtz [0] has a very pithy mental model for how to evaluate
| leadership:
|
| Everyone asks three questions of people leading them:
|
| 1. Can I trust you?
|
| 2. Do you care about me?
|
| 3. Are you committed to excellence? (aka do you have high
| standards).
|
| Think about someone you admire. Odds are the answer to the above
| for them is "yes" to all three.
|
| Now think of someone you have had a lot of problems with. Odds
| are the answers to the above are "no".
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Holtz
| hyko wrote:
| This seems very close to the stereotype content model, which
| asserts that every interpersonal impression is formed along two
| dimensions: warmth and competence.
|
| Feeling someone cares fits the warmth dimension; commitment to
| excellence is a hallmark of competence. I would say the word
| _trust_ can encompass both.
|
| [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_content_model
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I've often played with these concepts in my head, completely
| oblivious that someone had coined them and developed them.
| Thank you for linking this!
| wsinks wrote:
| I love this! And had no idea about it. Really really stellar
| way of looking at it.
|
| And for a leader, you can scale these by caring about roles and
| what info those roles get to show trust.
|
| Really cool framework as a fundamental baseline.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Do you share credit? Can your reports eat what they kill?
| username90 wrote:
| Here is a fourth:
|
| 4. Do you delegate high visibility tasks?
|
| Managers who don't do this work hard to hog all the glory,
| spend all their time in meetings with other managers or
| presenting to higher level people etc. It isn't good for them
| nor their reports, by not growing the reports skills they have
| a hard time getting to the next level as a manager. Also they
| create a situation where they are the bus factor 1, which is
| problematic in itself.
| seekitabroad wrote:
| A lot of times, the trouble is that it's challenging to say
| no or delegate in the first place. We found that this works
| for us internally for helping to drive delegation:
| https://darja-bunch.medium.com/an-engineers-guide-to-
| saying-...
| jdgiese wrote:
| 4 seems like it is a particular instance of 2
| staysaasy wrote:
| A lot of this post is (good!) tactical advice. I strongly agree
| with the comment on emotional self-control. IMO this is one of
| the top ways that managers fail or struggle, especially as their
| teams grow or if times are hard.
|
| I've thought about this a lot and wrote some more strategic
| thoughts on this topic of management soft skills here. It's
| written more from the perspective of hiring managers, but
| hopefully some of the content transfers:
| https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-man...
| known wrote:
| Protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate
| and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession),
| Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in
| suffering of others)
| asimpletune wrote:
| I think there's a lot of great advice in here, and a useful
| exercise is to find equivalences - or equal but alternate ways to
| rephrase timeless advice x.
|
| One such equivalence that I found to the above is to focus on
| regarding others honestly. Often times there are barriers to
| seeing people for who they are, so if you can focus on
| identifying those barriers and confronting them with yourself,
| you then have a shot at regarding others truthfully. The theory
| goes that if you can do that, you don't need to have so much
| managerial social engineering polish. You can just be polite and
| honest and everything will pretty much work.
|
| I have to say from personal experience that this has worked well
| with me. In the situations that it hasn't it's been due to others
| being caught in their own inability to regard me honestly. In
| such a case, I don't think the smooth operating manager would
| fare any better or worse. So basically you can't win at
| everything, but you can worry about yourself!
| afarrell wrote:
| > regarding others honestly
|
| Strong agree.
|
| Example: One of your reports says something that you perceive
| as self-deprecating.
|
| It can be tempting to dismiss this as mere impostor syndrome.
| Doing so might soothe your fear that someone you manage lacks
| confidence but it does not serve them well as a leader. I
| advocate instead approaching with a spirit of curiosity: What
| about their experience drives them to that imperfect expression
| of their professional needs?
|
| Applying a technique named "Clean Questions" can help increase
| clarity about that, if you're looking for something to google.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I highly recommend "The First-Time Manager" by Belker et al if
| you're interested in this.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I also highly recommend "Managing Humans" to all engineering
| leaders. No affiliation (other than happy reader).
|
| https://randsinrepose.com/books/
| beckingz wrote:
| Obligatory plug for the Soft Skills Engineering podcast.
|
| https://softskills.audio/
| ellisv wrote:
| Soft Skills is my new favorite podcast. I've been going through
| all the old episodes.
| interlocutor2 wrote:
| These guys are funny and insightful. When I wrote in they
| actually answered my question.
| austincheney wrote:
| > Most interactions are ego-based because people aren't as self-
| aware as they could be.
|
| Sad, but I have to agree. Self awareness is something people
| develop as a natural part of maturity. It is not a skill children
| have. For example play a board game or card game with children
| and realize they never know when it's their turn to play despite
| watching the game, numerous reminders, and recitation of the
| rules. They are not self aware. That portion of the brain has not
| developed yet.
|
| It is frustrating to encounter adults lacking of self awareness
| where a commonly expected skill of fully functional adulthood is
| absent. In some cases that can be due to wide spectrum disorders
| like autism but is more generally due to immaturity, the absence
| of expected normal development.
|
| Another queue into this is a false expectation of soft skills.
| That doesn't mean being soft or kind. Soft skills are perceptual
| skills associated is active listening and empathy, which
| sometimes requires being a mean asshole. People with a lack of
| self awareness tend to have a lot of challenge in this area. They
| are not the center of the universe, sometimes fail horribly and
| embarrassingly, and demand harsh unpleasant words. For people
| lacking of self awareness the harsh reality of corrective
| communication is likely poorly accepted as they either continue
| to fail or suffer emotional trauma.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Well this was a very pleasant post to read as an autistic
| person. I can appearantly just have a lack of self awareness
| completely out of my control and this is embarassing, and
| demands harsh unpleasant words, even though this approach is
| likely to fail and inflict emotional trauma on me.
|
| "Empathy" after a social faux pas to me is kind of like a
| blameless post mortem. Blunt yet unjudgemental with a call to
| action and some discussion of what went right. Perhaps your
| words are so likely to fail because because you're taking the
| wrong approach?
| loopz wrote:
| This is more directed to those who tend to lead in every
| social situation.
|
| You might be perceived more favourably than you feel
| yourself. Try asking people for feedback on your approach.
|
| The environment is infinitely more powerful in most normal
| cases.
| austincheney wrote:
| Usually a person with good empathy can pick up on social
| spectral disorders after some time and factor for this in
| their communications capabilities. This is often not a hard
| barrier.
|
| The problematic people are those that cannot self reflect AND
| are incapable of realizing the nature of their dilemma. The
| problem is present when a situation demands harsh words and
| the troubled person is utterly incapable of receiving that
| communication.
|
| > Perhaps your words are so likely to fail because because
| you're taking the wrong approach?
|
| If a person commits to an action that is potentially harmful
| they must be halted and corrected even at cost of some minor
| embarrassment. If that person then attempts that harmful
| action again they should be severely counseled. The harshness
| of the words should reflect the severity of the failure.
| Empathy doesn't mean agreement or kindness which are akin to
| sympathy.
| Person5478 wrote:
| > Usually a person with good empathy can pick up on social
| spectral disorders after some time and factor for this in
| their communications capabilities. This is often not a hard
| barrier.
|
| There is no such thing as a perfect person who can do these
| things perfectly. There is such a thing as an imperfect
| person who BELIEVES they can.
|
| It takes two to tango, and it takes a minimum of two to
| communicate.
|
| Just this morning I had a quick discussion with a woman who
| asked me a question. When I responded with an explanation
| she realized I misunderstood (her question was meant to
| clarify an earlier statement of mine) and clarified, at
| which point I realized I read it more negatively than she
| intended. I acknowledged it and we both moved on.
|
| Neither of us is super awesome or sucks, we're just two
| people trying to get through the day. We get along
| relatively well and this interaction neither diminishes nor
| exemplifies either of us. It's simply the human condition.
|
| Acting as if you, by yourself, can be the sole arbiter of
| good, successful communication, is exactly why people often
| hate "people managers".
|
| > If a person commits to an action that is potentially
| harmful they must be halted and corrected even at cost of
| some minor embarrassment. If that person then attempts that
| harmful action again they should be severely counseled. The
| harshness of the words should reflect the severity of the
| failure. Empathy doesn't mean agreement or kindness which
| are akin to sympathy.
|
| I don't agree with this either.
|
| The big secret people don't want to acknowledge in terms of
| "people skills" is that if you can't get along with people
| who are significantly different than you, you don't
| actually have great people skills. It's easy to get along
| with people like yourself.
|
| Time and time again I've seen a "people person" complain
| about someone else not having people skills and being
| difficult to work with.
|
| What managers in particular need to understand is that they
| work with people all day, which is malleable. You can walk
| into a room and get what you want through sheer charisma
| and willpower. But Engineers work with reality. No amount
| of charisma and willpower will fix that bug, or keep that
| bridge from collapsing.
|
| The result of this is a fundamental difference in values
| and worldview. The good managers recognize this and don't
| mentally accuse an engineer of being on the spectrum (and
| treating them differently as a result) and/or being
| difficult to work with because they don't appreciate their
| charisma over reality.
|
| The real "secret" is to simply accept people for who they
| are. If that Engineer doesn't appreciate your charisma as
| much as you think they should, accept that they're trying
| to do a good job in their world and don't hold them in a
| negative light as a result. And don't try to manipulate
| them either, acceptance is not manipulation.
|
| As for your specific example, calling people out in front
| of others is exactly what you DO NOT do. The better
| approach is to let it be unless it's bad enough that it
| needs to be dealt with. I say this because it allows the
| other person to approach the offender themselves. If you're
| REALLY worried about it, talk to the person it happened to
| and see how they feel. encourage them to approach the
| offender. If they're not the personality type to do that
| (dislikes confrontation) THEN perhaps you can facilitate
| that conversation.
|
| In my 24 years in this industry I've only ever had a single
| person who did not apologize profusely when approached by
| me about something they said or how they were acting
| towards me. The typical response is roughly "I'm sorry,
| here's what I meant or what I was trying to do".
|
| People don't set out to hurt others feelings. Oftentimes
| it's an accident because they're valuing something else, or
| they're in the heat of the moment. Communicate with them
| and allow them to communicate and you can often times
| create a better environment for everyone.
|
| But calling them out in front of everyone? Not a good idea.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my
| managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding.
|
| Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been
| people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all
| stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for
| managers who have turned their back on the very craft that
| brought them into management.
|
| Before the people manager crowd chimes in with "it's not my job",
| "we have leads", etc, I want to say that it's about the principle
| of the matter. I don't care if it's "not your job", on principle
| you should want to keep your skills sharp in order to fully
| relate to your supports and, if shit is on fire and you're the
| only one around, to actually do something and fix the problem
| instead of completely leaning on your team.
| temporallobe wrote:
| I have avoided going the management route because I have a very
| strong fear of losing touch with the deep technical aspects of
| software engineering, which I love and have been doing my
| entire professional career. As a lead developer now, my role
| has changed in that I interface more with product owners and
| management, so I can already see that I need to delegate quite
| a bit, which makes me feel uneasy since I want to be the one
| doing those tasks. On top of that, as a lead I am expected to
| know it all while also somehow delegating.
| borvo wrote:
| This. It almost seems like people who lose all interest in
| coding/engineering/tech also lose respect for the people who do
| it, like some weird form of guilt/shame. This doesn't make them
| better engineering managers. You've got to keep that spark
| alive.
| watwut wrote:
| I dont need managers to be coding. I do need them to have
| technical background and willingness to understand what tech is
| relevant to them - I had only bad experiences with non-
| technical managers.
|
| But I really dont understand why they should be coding. Even
| active developers are not able to fix whatever in any module,
| you fix only in areas you understand. When shit is on fire, I
| dont want managers or other random developers to create a bunch
| on hotfixes that will cause new problems.
|
| I want managers to organize the project in a way that shit wont
| burn on every release.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| They should be coding because they're "engineering" managers.
| What's the point of having engineering in your title if
| you're not actually practicing the craft?
|
| They should be coding because they'll be able to relate to
| their supports in a deeper and more fulfilling way. They'll
| be able to mentor and provide guidance on technology best
| practices and patterns.
|
| They should be coding because they'll be able to more
| accurately plan and execute projects. Understanding and
| applying the technology is understanding it's pitfalls and
| anticipating potential upcoming challenges.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >They should be coding because they'll be able to relate to
| their supports in a deeper and more fulfilling way.
|
| That's a valid point although I've seen it go badly when a
| mostly out of touch manager (time is finite, even the most
| technical manager will be out of touch) thinks they're
| still at the top of their technical game. They then force
| out of date engineering decisions on the team.
|
| >They'll be able to mentor and provide guidance on
| technology best practices and patterns.
|
| That should be done by the senior engineers and tech leads
| with support from the manager. These are the people who
| spend 100% of their time thinking technology while even a
| technical manager will do it 25% of the time. The manager
| should be the one to structure these conversations,
| formalize mentorship processes and so on.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > That's a valid point although I've seen it go badly
| when a mostly out of touch manager (time is finite, even
| the most technical manager will be out of touch) thinks
| they're still at the top of their technical game. They
| then force out of date engineering decisions on the team.
|
| Yes, or even worse they don't respect it when their team
| tells them something is hard to build and will take more
| time. You get a very "back in my day I'd put this
| together in a weekend what's the big deal" attitude from
| people like this.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The role where you're still hands-on on a team is sometimes
| called a Tech Lead Manager, and there is a ceiling to this
| role. The next step up is true Engineering Manager where
| you have to be able to talk to engineers on other teams and
| gather information without being familiar with their code.
| If you rely on direct knowledge of code in all
| circumstances you won't be able to effectively operate in
| an organization with thousands of engineers and millions of
| lines of code. This is super hard, and relies on deep
| experience in the trenches (preferably 10 years+), but it
| is the only way to solve broader organizational problems
| that cause projects to fail, and many eng months or years
| to be shitcanned.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| "Engineering" is more than coding and engineering managers
| can provide insights and value by demolishing higher-level
| roadblocks for their IC colleagues.
| dominotw wrote:
| > need managers to be coding.
|
| > understand what tech is relevant to them
|
| can they really understand tech by merely reading whitepapers
| and youtube videos?
| marcinzm wrote:
| You highlight one of the reasons it's BAD for an engineering
| manager to still be coding or at least able to code your
| production code. It incentivizes them to just hack things
| themselves rather than building proper processes and structure
| for the rest of the team (on call rotations, training, breaking
| silos, etc.). Overall that leads to a worse engineering
| environment rather than a better one.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I don't see where I made the connection between practicing
| the craft and hacking together solutions.
|
| If an engineering manager (presumably one who attained this
| position because they were or are a good engineer) is going
| to fix something, they're going to apply best practices
| because they know what they're doing.
|
| If an engineering manager was hired just because they know
| how to manage, well then they aren't really an engineering
| manager, are they? They're just a straight people manager and
| in my opinion, shouldn't be managing an engineering team.
| They should be a project manager.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I think the response to your original comment was more that
| having the "Ugh, forget it I'll just fix it myself" last
| resort option could be a crutch for a manager
| marcinzm wrote:
| Engineering skills decay with time and even the most
| technical manager will be out of touch compared to someone
| who spend 100% of their time on code. They also have the
| pressure of the buck stopping with them and not having to
| deal with the tech debt fallout which creates an incentive
| to just hack things. Some will avoid this but most won't.
|
| >presumably one who attained this position because they
| were or are a good engineer
|
| Why do you presume this? Management is a very different
| skill set than engineering. The best engineers having to
| become managers to advance their careers is an anti-pattern
| which most modern tech companies avoid. Managers thus tend
| to be average engineers who are good at people and process.
| tootie wrote:
| I was hired into a new leadership role recently. I had
| previously worked my up at a few places and go to the
| point where I was coding maybe 5-10% of the time at most.
| The new role hired me for my management and strategic
| experience since I actually have almost no experience
| with their tech stack. Coding is coding, but I'm slightly
| useless to them as a dev for now and I haven't committed
| a single line so far.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| They don't have to spend 100% of their time coding. Why
| not 50%? If you spend half your 40 hours a week coding,
| after presumably having had a career in engineering as a
| developer in the past, coding half the time will continue
| to support your technical knowledge well into the future.
|
| I refuse to believe that managers shouldn't code. Actual
| managerial tasks do not take up that much time. Like I
| said in a previous comment, in my experience (as a
| manager), managerial tasks take up maybe 20% of my time
| per week. What's going on with the other 80%? I'd be
| bored out of my mind if I wasn't coding as much as I
| currently am.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I've written in another post where I spend 80% of my
| management time. I could cut it down to 20% but then I'd
| be building up the management version of technical debt.
| As I see it, there's a lot of things you don't have to do
| but doing them makes your team function better in the
| medium and long term.
| ammanley wrote:
| Read this, and it gave me a lot of clarify and
| appreciation for my own manager. Thank you for adding
| this. You sound like you've got a balanced perspective on
| the engineering manager experience.
| [deleted]
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| The best engineering manager in my career was not amongst the
| best developers I knew. (Conversely, the worst engineering
| manager in my career was one of the best developers I knew).
|
| He had two particular skills that many will never have or take
| a decade or two to cultivate: he could provide you feedback,
| empathetically, and make you feel like he is genuinely
| interested in your success and improvement, and he could read a
| room like no other, often times being the one to say the right
| thing to break the tension in the room or ask the right
| question to get us over a roadblock.
|
| I know you aren't saying be the best or focus on coding, but if
| I look back and had to pick between the two, I'd pick the
| engineering manager who has cultivated the soft skills. At a
| certain scale, all engineering problems become people problems.
| temporallobe wrote:
| You need both. And in my experience it's rare that an
| engineer will have strong soft and hard skills. I have known
| exactly one person with that rare combination, and he has
| since started his own successful company.
|
| Unfortunately the smartest and most component engineers I
| have known have nearly always come across as being arrogant.
| They have a very solid grasp of their domain and a strong
| skillset, but they also expect everyone around them to be at
| their level and instantly follow everything they're saying.
| These people sometimes even have disciples who follow the
| philosophy of arrogance and engage in gatekeeping. I have
| concluded that while this is not ideal, it's often par for
| the course.
|
| Conversely, the best engineering leaders I have known
| (architects, tech leads, product owners, requirements
| analysts, etc.) have had really strong empathy and encouraged
| healthy debate while also making everyone's input and
| analysis feel welcome and valued. Their technical skillset is
| not necessarily the strongest but they've usually been good
| generalists who could talk intelligently about something at a
| high level without having to know the technical details.
| These people have also been able to take those arrogant
| engineers and have gotten them to successfully collaborate
| with everyone from the junior devs up to management. A good
| tech leader really is just a good mediator.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| That's fair but my perspective as a lowly engineer was I
| wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career.
| My people manager managers never had the skills to provide me
| with any growth, the only reason I'm at where I am today is
| because I decided I wanted to level up and taught myself
| outside of work.
|
| It's my goal as a manager to be that manager that I never had
| and lead by example for my reports technically in addition to
| the expected soft skills of a traditional people manager.
| ska wrote:
| > I wanted a role model to learn from
|
| Another general comment on this theme. In my experience
| people making the engineer to manager transition typically
| need a mentor and guidance in management even more than
| they ever needed a technical mentor.
| kvutza wrote:
| I guess you talk about group leaders, not project managers.
| Group leaders are from developers, with added
| responsibilities (and that means with added work).
| marcinzm wrote:
| A manager is only a role model if the promotion structure
| is Engineer->Manager. At most modern tech companies that is
| not the main promotion structure. It's Engineer->Senior
| Engineer->Staff Engineer->Etc. Engineering management is a
| different path you can choose just like you can become a
| product manager but it is not the expected path.
| aliston wrote:
| Companies like to claim this, but it's not the reality
| due to an imbalance in power between managers and IC
| engineers. A manager controls a reports salary, career
| progression, has more face time with VPs and so on.
| Software engineering is unique in that ICs can still
| scale to a similar level of impact as executives, but it
| is a mistake to think that a Staff engineer and Manager
| are equal in the eyes of the organization. They aren't.
| majormajor wrote:
| A title bump without the reporting structure changes to
| go with it is just a fancy way to dress up a raise, sure,
| but that's not the only option.
|
| In companies doing this well, the high-level engineer
| _doesn 't report to_ the immediate team lead, but reports
| to the same director that lead does. Or VP vs director
| for even-higher-level engineers vs higher-level managers.
|
| That structure, more than the title, is what shows you if
| you're really on an equivalent track.
| ska wrote:
| > Software engineering is unique
|
| There is nothing special about software engineering as a
| technical track this way. There is no one way to set up
| an organization. To a large degree they are how they
| actually work (i.e. not what's on paper).
|
| This balance has been an issue in managing technical
| teams for about as long as that has been a thing, which
| is a lot longer than software has been a thing. There is
| a fundamental tension though, in that the focus you need
| to maintain expertise in your field contends with the
| breadth you need to understand the context well enough to
| make good decisions.
|
| I suspect the real reason that you don't see more of it
| in practice is that it's actually really hard to continue
| to do both well at a very high level, and it's also
| organizationally hard to do.
| aliston wrote:
| There is something special about software engineering
| because it is fundamentally about automation. As a
| result, an individual software engineer can create the
| sort of impact that traditionally would require a team.
|
| I'm trying to make sense of the rest of your post, but it
| uses a lot of pronouns that don't appear to reference
| anything.
| ska wrote:
| > fundamentally about automation.
|
| I agree software has more leverage, sometimes but we are
| talking here about how decision making power is
| distributed in a company.
|
| Regardless about how much impact the IC technical output
| can have that is about _how_. The skills & information
| needed to make good decisions about _what_ and _when_ are
| different.
|
| Unfortunately, being highly effective at both requires
| spending time and focus in ways that are somewhat
| mutually exclusive, which makes this quite hard.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I can't say I've ever been in a company where the path
| wasn't either:
|
| Engineer -> Senior -> Principal -> Staff -> Distinguished
|
| OR
|
| Engineer -> Senior? -> Manager -> Senior Manager ->
| Director
|
| In both scenarios though, they've been a more senior
| engineer.
| scruple wrote:
| I've seen people go from Engineer to Manager, skipping
| over, for want of better phrasing, the senior engineering
| ranks. In both cases it went poorly and a founders child
| was involved, indirectly at first and then later
| directly.
| angrais wrote:
| What do you mean a founders child was involved? Was that
| the person who skipped the senior rank?
| ska wrote:
| > ... as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to
| learn from and help upskill my career.
|
| There is no reason this has to be your manager. Your
| managers job was to understand that this was something you
| needed, and find a way to try and provide it for you; it's
| unfortunate that didn't happen for you.
|
| > It's my goal as a manager to be that manager
|
| Can I make a suggestion? As a manager it's important that
| you respond to what your team actually needs, rather than
| your perception of what you would have needed in their
| place.
|
| There are a number of ways to do this well, and a much
| larger number of ways to mess it up.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| The thing is that role model should not be your manager, it
| should be a senior developer. A good manager is not a role
| model to teach you, a good manager realizes the importance
| of lowly engineers having role models and creates a
| structured mentorship program to make sure that need is
| being met.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I don't understand why managers cannot fulfill both roles
| though? The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it).
| Outside of the project management responsibilities, there
| is a lot of time doing nothing. If I wasn't coding, as a
| manager, 80% of the time I would sit around doing
| nothing.
|
| I strongly believe that managers should be able to
| fulfill both roles but maybe it's just because I've been
| burned by so many managers in the past.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I'm going to pile on here with the others. If you're
| legitimately a people manager (not a low grade 'team
| lead'), there is no way, no how, you could have 80% free
| time.
|
| I've been doing this for some 23 years and had a stint as
| a proper manager for a year, where I spent about 20% of
| my time coding, and I was more starved for time than just
| about any other phase in my career.
|
| I'm currently a principal eng/ arch at a mid-size medical
| device company, and my principal eng/people manager
| complement, perhaps one of the strongest devs I've ever
| encountered (close to a fabled 10x dev), barely has time
| to code at all. He's just slammed all day every day with
| general meetings, doing 1-on-1s, presentation prep,
| working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for
| backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc,
| it just kills his day for anything more than tiny bits of
| coding here and there, and because he is such a great
| dev, he does provide meaningful contributions.
|
| I have worked at small startups where things are a bit
| better, but I can't recall ever seeing a case where a
| good manager has more than 1/3 of their time to code. 80%
| dead time would mean hardly managing at all.
| username90 wrote:
| > general meetings, presentation prep, working on process
| improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming,
| interfacing with other managers, etc
|
| You as a manager don't need to do all that. If you can't
| delegate most of that to reports then you have a problem.
| lazide wrote:
| In most companies, once you've built or found the people
| to delegate that too, and handed it off successfully -
| congrats, you've demonstrated you can handle the next
| level and you get the next round of challenges.
|
| If you're sitting around with nothing to do, either
| you're in a dead end, or no one actually trusts you with
| more once you've 'succeeded' because you've burned too
| many bridges or alienated key people - even if the org
| chart looks good.
|
| Of course if someone is finding themselves in that churn
| all day for any length of time, you are quite correct -
| they are busy not succeeding.
| username90 wrote:
| You don't delegate everything to a single person, you
| delegate the parts to the person best fit to do it.
|
| And no, delegating a lot of those tasks doesn't mean that
| you as a manager have nothing to do. Instead you can
| spend 20% time doing management tasks and 80% time
| coding. Each person in the team sharing the "management"
| burden makes it pretty manageable. (it isn't really
| management to coordinate with other teams or present to
| people etc though, no reason you should have a bus factor
| of 1 for that role)
| afarrell wrote:
| Question for HN: If you were talking with someone at a
| conference and heard him say
|
| > The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it)
|
| What signals would you look for to tell the difference
| between these two possibilities?
|
| A. This person has so much tacit knowledge of good
| management that they don't realise how much skill they
| are applying day-to-day.
|
| B. This person has zero awareness of how their team is
| burning out underneath them.
| lazide wrote:
| I don't think I've seen it ACTUALLY be anything but B in
| the real world, but theoretically, to answer your
| question -
|
| 1) that's interesting! What do you consider the hardest
| people management issue you've run across? 2) what is the
| people management problem you think most people overrate
| in difficulty?
|
| It usually will surface if they, for instance, consider
| people management easy because they have zero emotional
| affect and hence never bear any emotional load, or if
| they've been bless by ignorance and don't see the work
| their peer and senior managers are doing to avoid them
| setting everything on fire, or never consider coaching or
| growth of someone to be a problem - because they never do
| it.
| temporallobe wrote:
| I have concluded that nothing is easy. Being a manager
| (at least a good one) is definitely not easy; being a
| good engineer is definitely not easy. They are both
| difficult in their own district ways.
|
| The most important skill to have in the workplace,
| management or not, is humility. This absolutely does not
| mean that you're a pushover, but it does mean that you
| should never deceive yourself with the notion that you're
| infallible.
| theptip wrote:
| A well formulated question!
|
| I'd ask a few questions about the bits of management that
| I think are hard.
|
| How do you get your team aligned on the company's
| priorities as they shift?
|
| How do you foster growth?
|
| How do you assess who needs to be promoted/given a raise?
|
| How do you handle feedback for employees that aren't
| doing well, or aren't meeting your expectations (or even
| harder, employees who think they should be promoted but
| you think are just solid at their current level)?
|
| And the big/meta one - what do you think the job of a
| manager is? (Could just be a semantic disconnect on what
| the job entails).
| Aeolun wrote:
| There's also C. It's just a small, experienced team, and
| doesn't need much management to be successful in the
| first place.
| [deleted]
| bitL wrote:
| Would you consider the possibility that you might have
| done it wrong all the time and all your previous managers
| taught you the wrong way?
| marcinzm wrote:
| I've been a manager for a while and at best I get 20%
| time to code. With 8+ reports the weeks tends to break
| down into:
|
| * 20% for 1-on-1s and dealing with management level
| issues people bring up.
|
| * 20% spent on hiring
|
| * 20% on various status meetings (team, cross-team, with
| my boss, etc.)
|
| * 20% spent on pro-actively finding or solving issues
| before the explode. This includes networking with my
| counterparts in the rest of the org so I get information
| and build political capital.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 20% on hiring with 8 reports?
| pnut wrote:
| Engineering manager's reports are team leads, so that's
| like 40-50 people probably. Plus any cross-discipline
| interviewing.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Startup so quickly growing team and less recruiting
| support. Stabler team in a large org would have less
| hiring but more meetings.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| >The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it).
|
| Where do you work? Sign me up! I have hardly any time to
| code after weekly sprint-related ceremonies, 1:1's, cycle
| planning, and architecture and code reviews.
|
| The job of management, like the job of any developer,
| varies from company to company, and situation to
| situation. Thankfully, the people side of my job as a
| manager is easy right now, but only because the people I
| manage are reasonable people to work with, and well
| receptive to feedback. It was very difficult last year
| when I had to work through more delicate relationships
| between the employee and employer. As always, it comes
| down to people.
|
| It also sounds like the place you may be managing at may
| not be challenging enough for you. Perhaps it's time to
| make a change?
| dairem wrote:
| I'm an engineering manager and find it hard to relate to
| this. With 1:1s, ops reviews, planning, retros, design
| reviews, support syncs, etc., I have ~6-10 hours of
| meetings per day - then for non-meeting work I'm writing
| roadmaps, interviewing, managing escalations, doing
| project management, status reports, etc. How do you have
| 80% of your time free as a manager after this? I think
| that makes sense to code if you have that time, but my
| experience is that having that much time available as a
| manager would be an outlier.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Keeping current on coding, while not attempting to be the
| _best_ coder in the building, is a key soft skill in terms of
| participating understanding, and evaluating technical
| decisions and problems. Empathy comes from placing yourself
| in the other person 's shoes.
|
| This is also true for communicating enterprise-wide
| considerations to coding teams. They have to trust you not to
| blindly push senior management priorities. If you know the
| cost of both capital and tech debt, you are more likely to
| have represented the coding team and influenced decisions,
| and be able to communicate decisions effectively.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I am having a hard time understanding what you are saying,
| perhaps you could restate? Coding is not a soft skill, even
| if that is in a capacity where it's used ancillary to other
| tasks such as the ones you mentioned.
|
| I am glad you mentioned it, because communication and
| trust, on the flip side, are soft skills. You can foster
| trust through excellent communication and understanding
| Where the engineering manager does not excel in a
| particular area of expertise, he or she will defer to the
| ones that do. A good engineering manager knows their
| weaknesses, and how to ask for help. The good engineering
| manager will seek to gather understanding of the technical
| debts and use that to represent the coding team well. Again
| communicating those decisions effectively are orthogonal to
| that process (meaning you can communicate a _poor_ decision
| effectively just as well as communicating a _good_ decision
| effectively)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's obviously a really great manager.
|
| I think they're also very rare. And that kind of
| personality/social skills is not something most people,
| especially engineers, have.
|
| I imagine someone with such skills went on to greater things?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| We worked together at what I can only describe as a data
| collection meat grinder. One of those places that loves to
| say it's all about people one side of their mouth, and act
| completely contrary to that in the day to day when it comes
| to chasing revenue and growth. He was met with heavy
| resistance from senior level business directors because he
| actually put what the company said were their principles
| into practice every day. This burned him out a little bit,
| so he took a break, and is now looking. You hiring?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sorry, we're not hiring for that role :)
|
| There are _many_ places were his skills would be _very_
| appreciated. The hard part may be to find them.
| ssully wrote:
| I would just leave it at empathy personally. I've had
| technically minded managers, but my best manager actually
| empathized with the issues I was having and advocated for me
| when I needed it. She basically helped me handle non-technical
| issues to clear the way for me to do my technical work. When I
| needed technical help, she would assist in getting me the help
| I could if she shouldn't provide it. If I ever end up in a
| management position, I hope I can treat people in a similar
| way.
| tootie wrote:
| I've struggled with the "keep coding" part. Not just because I
| don't have time in between my other responsibilities, but
| because my teams feel ownership over their products and have
| all the deep knowledge it takes to build and maintain them
| correctly. I still know how to code, but I rarely have enough
| depth in a particular system to know the appropriate way to
| solve something. I'm like a plucky junior dev/everyone's boss.
| thdc wrote:
| My last engineering manager came from a technical background
| but ended up being a people manager after a decade of
| managerial duties.
|
| He was a nice guy but useless in that he could not relate with
| problems the engineers were experiencing and advocate time to
| fix them - kind of like a black hole for complaints. Engineers
| by themselves had virtually no say in what they actually worked
| on here.
|
| This, coupled with a non-technical PM, meant we were constantly
| adding features on top of a weak foundation which created
| plenty of fires. And for each fire we were only given time to
| wave away the smoke rather than put out the fire.
|
| So I'd agree having true empathy and being able to act on it is
| important for managers - they don't necessarily need to code
| but they still need enough technical experience to fully relate
| to what the engineers are doing.
| yitchelle wrote:
| If the shit hits the fan and it relies on a people manager to
| fix the problem, I would say that the problem is more with the
| company not having the right mitigation plan in place for this
| catastrophic problems.
| draw_down wrote:
| Nope.
|
| I don't need my manager to be a coder; I can do the coding. I
| need my manager to fight for me in our organization and to
| shield me and my team from various organizational BS. I don't
| believe that any of that has anything to do with coding
| ability.
| asimpletune wrote:
| If anything "keep coding" = empathy haha
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> have empathy and keep coding._
|
| This.
|
| I worked for a company that didn't encourage managers to be
| technical. In fact, they sometimes deliberately interfered with
| my efforts to remain technically relevant. They really lost
| some good stuff, that way. I'm no tech slouch.
|
| Luckily, I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment
| contract, so I did a _lot_ of open-source work, in order to
| remain relevant.
|
| They directly benefitted from that; though they would never
| admit it.
|
| So did thousands of others. I did work for NPOs, and the work I
| did went towards a lot of lifesaving stuff.
|
| The "empathy" part is every bit as important. It pays _huge_
| dividends, as a manager. It needs to be _real_ empathy, though;
| not the two-faced kind that only appears when someone 's
| watching.
| gtaylor wrote:
| I do whatever I can to best support the team. It is practically
| never coding at this point. My team would likely end up
| frustrated with me (and rightly so) if coding comes at the
| expense of other things like sourcing, hiring, coaching,
| distilling and communicating our plans, refining and scaling
| our processes, etc.
| TheBlerch wrote:
| Ron Lichty https://ronlichty.com/ is a highly experienced
| engineering manager based in SF and Seattle who writes, speaks
| and trains internationally, as well as occasionally jumping into
| teams as interim VP Engineering. I've had the pleasure of hearing
| several of his talks in-person and he's constantly emphasizing
| the importance of soft skills. He wrote a very helpful book on
| the subject, Managing the Unmanageable, published by
| Pearson/Addison-Wesley https://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| I discussed some related soft skill tactics in this post - for
| the specific problem of managing technical respect for a
| specialist team (in this case a machine learning team).
|
| - https://managingml.substack.com/p/the-myth-that-machine-lear...
| zerop wrote:
| I liked managersclub as well. Interviews with real managers from
| diverse set of companies... One thing I like most about them is
| that they ask same questions to all managers.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Hard skills in eng management are underrated. If you do not have
| hard skills, you cannot recognize talent among your developer
| team.
|
| Likewise, your developers will feel they cannot learn much from
| you and have a meh attitude towards your advice.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Please don't call them soft skills. If they weren't hard, there'd
| be better leadership out there.
| username90 wrote:
| Soft skills means they are hard to measure. That is the
| original definition. Hard skills are easy to test, you either
| solved the problem or you didn't. With soft skills you don't
| really know, you need to measure it subjectively.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Some of the things mentioned in the article are easy to
| measure.
| kaoD wrote:
| This might be just a problem on English where hard is a homonym
| ("rigid" vs "effortful"). Notice their antonyms differ: "soft"
| vs "easy".
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Soft skills != easy skills.
| superzadeh wrote:
| Shameless plug for the Bunch app, this has been the most useful
| for me so far on soft skills.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunch-daily-leadership-coach/i...
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