[HN Gopher] Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager
___________________________________________________________________
Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager
Author : sebg
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-02-21 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (css-tricks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (css-tricks.com)
| amirkdv wrote:
| > _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.
| ubersync wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Ohhhh boy you're in for it now. I'd suggest a quick edit on why
| you feel it is favoristism.
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And we'll cancel and silence everyone's opinions and feelings
| until that happens?
| ubersync wrote:
| 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.
| RulingWalnut wrote:
| Women ABSOLUTELY ask for equality/equity in other
| industries!
|
| Firefighting: https://www.powerdms.com/blog/women-in-the-
| fire-service/ Sanitation: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news
| /feature/2019/08/27/breakin...
|
| This took me literally 45 seconds of googling.
| shortandsweet wrote:
| Actually it's not a myth. Look up bureau of labor
| statistics. Women clearly make less than men. I feel
| something must be done to resolve compensation when
| controlling for skills, experience, etc, gender alone
| shouldn't result in lower pay.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
| shortandsweet wrote:
| Oops wrong link
|
| https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
| ubersync wrote:
| Again, there is no difference in average hourly rate of
| wage. Men make more money than women because men (on
| average) work more hours a week as compared to women.
| Also men take fewer days off (on average). Thats the
| reason behind the mythical "wage gap". So, the correct
| term for it is "earnings gap".
|
| In fact, the reverse is true for younger women. Younger
| women make more money than younger men:
| https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-
| in-20s-e...
|
| edit: The updated link you provided tells average "weekly
| earning", not an hourly wage rate.
| shortandsweet wrote:
| Read the data. Salary jobs don't get paid more for
| working more. Paid vacation is the norm for
| professionals.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
| ubersync wrote:
| > Salary jobs don't get paid more for working more.
|
| Incorrect. Many salary jobs pay for over-time (and again,
| men are more likely to work over-time, on average).
| mancerayder wrote:
| >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.
| mancerayder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ram_rar wrote:
| > 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.
| shortandsweet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| >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 ;)
| kwanbix wrote:
| 100% agree. The problem of knowing too much.
|
| I recently joined a great team that has lots of different
| services that do things.
|
| Some people explain to you how things using names of things you
| don't know about, they don't realize that telling me and then
| we get "info from dragon" means nothing to me.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I'm always blown away when companies don't have a knowledge
| base. Imo, if it's not written down, shared with me, and told
| how important it is, then it's your fault.
|
| Email isn't your knowledge base. Slack isn't your knowledge
| base (unless you're using a tool like Guru).
|
| Use Notion, use Roam, shit even organized GDocs can work.
| There's no excuse to not have things written down, maintained,
| and constantly shared.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I agree with Tafster. I've been a consultant for 6 years and
| so I've seen dozens of knowledge bases and wikis. Some
| companies even have great processes to fill them in.
|
| I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are
| actually read.
|
| One company I worked with had a very detailed weekly logging
| of changes, important things etc. The goal was to keep other
| teams informed of what each team was doing. It took many
| times many hours a week to keep it up to date. When they
| looked at the usage log, literally no one logged into to read
| the stuff except when going into to upload their part.
| etothepii wrote:
| > I have never, ever seen a company where those wikis are
| actually read.
|
| The problem with documentation is that it is the making of
| it that creates most of the value. Like so many things the
| value looks like duplication.
| taftster wrote:
| I respectfully disagree to an extent. I think most/all
| documentation ends up rotting and being ignored. If you take
| the time to write it down, it doesn't mean that others will
| take the time to read it or refer to it.
|
| I think it's better to just continually verbalize any "core
| values" with your team as you go day-to-day. Thinking that
| you've written it down inside of an organized GDocs is not
| much different than having sent it via email (the location to
| retrieve it just changes).
| carbocation wrote:
| Not really a general counterpoint, but I do think that if
| documentation is concise and useful enough so that
| stakeholders keep it up to date, it can work.
|
| For example, I maintain a document that helps me keep track
| of bioinformatics files and some of their quirks (which
| files have two-line headers, etc). I do it for myself, but
| this information is also referred to by dozens of people in
| our group.
| Kranar wrote:
| This might be fine at a smaller company, but as you grow,
| having people verbalize these things results in slight
| variations that over time grow into very big
| inconsistencies.
|
| Setting up MediaWiki and throwing it up on a Linode server
| costs 20 bucks a month and can be deployed from a Docker
| image in roughly 15-20 minutes. It can referenced by
| everyone, anyone can contribute to it with a full audit of
| changes, and it's easily searchable.
|
| I use it to document technical and non-technical things
| like company policies, work flow processes, security
| practices, coding style, pretty much anything. New
| employees have a standardized on-boarding process that is
| clearly documented step by step for them to get setup with
| everything they need to start being productive by their
| second day of working here.
|
| It's actually fairly low effort to do this and is a lot
| easier than having a bunch of people have to remember God
| knows what and when, or forgetting and then having to ask
| someone else who may have a vague recollection of it.
|
| An authoritative source of knowledge that everyone has
| access to and anyone can contribute to is worth setting up.
| keithnz wrote:
| from years of doing wiki documentation, document rot is
| fine, if it rots, so be it. Most of the time I write the
| docs for me but with a "getting started" frame of mind. On
| our wiki there are a whole bunch of actively maintained
| pages now that were initially seeded by myself or other
| devs, and there's a bunch of dead pages which are
| occasionally very useful , some of it is horribly dead. But
| the active pages are great, they save everyone time. Main
| thing is to not invest vast amounts of time to the docs,
| don't spend time drawing diagrams unless its a photo of a
| quick hand drawing, and just put in more effort as things
| prove useful
| harryf wrote:
| 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.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| 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?
| alphadevx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Have you had that happen?
| alphadevx wrote:
| 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.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| > All of your problems are people problems, the tech parts
| are much easier to manage.
|
| This cannot be emphasized enough. I have seen lots of smart
| engineers attempting to "architect" the engineering manager
| role, while not being able to handle the people aspect at
| all.
| fma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| flowerlad wrote:
| 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.
| anotheryou wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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....
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-21 23:00 UTC)