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Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

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Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#21

Post by gpm »

Frost1x wrote: post #16
gpm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely disagree, but to take the other side: When you're being hired both you and the company are taking a bet. The company is betting that you're worth $x+$y/year, where $x is the salary and $y is bit extra to accommodate the risk that you aren't, you're betting that it's worth working for the company for $x-$z/year, where $x is the salary and $z is a bit extra to accommodate the risk that you aren't. I.…

>Splitting the difference by not changing the salary at all seems fair, and nicely lines up with the agreement you already have in place. You're not splitting the difference if market rates change. If pay is going up for marketable skills, the employee is eating the cost, if pay is going down for marketable skills, the employer is eating the cost. If there's inflation, the employee is eating the cost. General inflati…

Right, my argument above is assuming a sort of "all else remains constant (or within the value range of the raises you are given)" except for experience with the company.

Change in market place conditions, and change in skills, definitely do create an argument for raising pay. In the tech industry I'd argue that this isn't being accounted for enough (why turn over rates are so high), but if we look at something like "wallmart manager" I think it probably is. This is a good portion of why I started my post with I don't completely disagree.

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#22

Post by throwarayes »

> How do you insure you are working on the most important items for the TEAM?

Getting away from work is the best tool in my experience

Managers are self-selected from a group of hard workers committed to the organization. They can want to jump on urgent tasks to shield their teams. This is a great instinct.

BUT... it can cross a line where the manager becomes ineffective and begins feeling like they need to do everything, and loses trust in delegating to others to handle these tasks. You can get into a negative "I alone" mindset, where you feel like you have to carry the world on your shoulders. This can be pretty damaging to the manager and the team...

So getting away is a way to (a) force others to take on more responsibility thus building your trust in their ability and (b) get away from the urgent, crystalizing what's remaining as the true 'important' ways you can help the team.

> Whats the thing that drains you the most?

Respond to slack, go to meetings, slack, meetings, repeat... day ends and it feels like nothing got done

> Where do you reach out to get advise outside of your company?

Honestly, peers at other companies. We have some strong relationships with companies we don't compete with, and we share a lot of learnings about technology we use.

> What is missing from the tools you currently have?

IMO recruiting tools suck for hiring managers. In my experience, the best devs react more positively to hearing from a hiring manager than a recruiter, yet recruiting tools are built for what feels like impersonal bulk-emailing. As the hiring manager, if I see someone with relevant experience, I just end up sending a real email or LinkedIn message with warm details about why the recruit looks interesting (with real tech details, not recruiter BS).

Yet on LinkedIn/Email the contact isn't in our recruiting system... So when they do want to be interviewed, you have to get them in the system somewhat manually.

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#23

Post by peter_l_downs »

I help run an all-remote team. I'm NOT the "single manager", thank god, I'm not capable of that. Product/eng is about 10-15 people right now. This is my first time in a managerial role but I'm still split between managing and IC work. I worry about a lot of things, but here's the rough priority list:

- Do all the engineers know what they should be working on?

- Do they know who from the product side they should go to for questions if the specs are unclear?

- Do business, product, eng, all agree on what we're doing? Does what we're doing match that agreement?

- Are our current communication norms meeting our needs (as little wasted time due to different timezones, working styles, as possible)?

- Is the build / test / dev loop fast enough? Are there tools that I need to upgrade / add / improve because we're now bottlenecked? Can we still get away without building XYZ?

- Are people happy with the work they're doing and with the people they're working with?

- Are people getting to work on things that push their skills and limits in a way that helps them keep growing? If not, is that OK for now?

- Are people taking enough time off when they want to so that they're not burning out?

- Hiring: do we need to, are we pipelined correctly so that we're bringing new people on roughly when we'll need them?

- Are we meeting all of our legal / security needs?

- Are we meeting the right amount of the eng needs from the rest of the company, that may not be explicitly product related?

- Is my dev work good enough / on time?

- What's this new error, is it important, do I need to help diagnose and debug?

- I should write a blogpost about

---

The thing that drains me most is trying to do both management/comms work and hard technical work on the same day. I do my best to manage my schedule so I have long blocks of either one or the other but inevitably I'm interrupted. So it goes.

I reach out to former coworkers and mentors for advice. Everything I'm doing is based on what I've seen my former managers and team leads do in the past, and I'm so grateful to them for having demonstrated good leadership.

I'm not missing any tools. Team is largely happy. We're going to switch to BuildKite to improve build times (currently on Google Cloud Build) for our frontend container, but after that we should be set for a while.

I'm thankful to work with the team here at Pipe. I don't need to be perfect for things to work. We all give each other room to experiment. I have never had a more enjoyable working experience.

EDIT: we're hiring for product / frontend-oriented engineers, feel free to email me peter@pipe.com if you're interested.

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#24

Post by qudat »

MattGaiser wrote: post #2

Based on what my engineering manager seems stressed about and has his calendar filled with, it is hiring. I'm surprised that the high rate of turnover in tech is not considered a crisis given all the time he spends on that. Even assuming that employee tenure is worthless, a senior level engineer loses 1/3 of his time to this.

I'll echo the same sentiment as others: we get the biggest salary raises by switching jobs. Like others have mentioned, there is a pernicious incentive for employers to not adequately bump salaries over time.

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#25

Post by noir_lord »

qudat wrote: post #24
MattGaiser wrote: post #2

Based on what my engineering manager seems stressed about and has his calendar filled with, it is hiring. I'm surprised that the high rate of turnover in tech is not considered a crisis given all the time he spends on that. Even assuming that employee tenure is worthless, a senior level engineer loses 1/3 of his time to this.

I'll echo the same sentiment as others: we get the biggest salary raises by switching jobs. Like others have mentioned, there is a pernicious incentive for employers to not adequately bump salaries over time.

My salary went up 60% by changing job twice.

The first place could have kept me by offering me fair market rate for the role I had.

The 2nd place couldn't have kept me with a bar of Gold every morning but it was a pay bump which levelled me into the salary I'm on now.

If your biggest issue is recruitment then it seems pretty obvious you pay your existing staff fair-market rate because replacing them is more expensive than just paying them (and because it's fair though fairness doesn't appear to a motivation).

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#26

Post by abatilo »

Jemaclus wrote: post #17

(I'm a Director-level with 30 reports in my organization, with a few managers as direct reports. These thoughts below reflect my current problems as well as problems I had when I was "just" an engineering manager. Note that the problems don't go away, just increase in scale...) Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I pro…

Not having any turn over in 6 years in our field is kind of amazing. Do you think you're doing something different than the standard set of practices? How have you retained people for so long?

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#27

Post by rorykoehler »

MattGaiser wrote: post #12
rorykoehler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally people are wired to need a push rather than jump. This works both ways in hiring. Employers will try get away with lower salaries until the employee shows they have leverage and employees won't make the effort to get leverage.

But is that true in tech where tenures keep on decreasing? If you are losing the entire staff every 2-3 years or so (my last employer), the push clearly exists and it is widespread.

If the employer is bad the employees will leave. If the employer is good then the incentive will be reduced. Practically no one leaves my company.

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#28

Post by dan_quixote »

Jemaclus wrote: post #17

(I'm a Director-level with 30 reports in my organization, with a few managers as direct reports. These thoughts below reflect my current problems as well as problems I had when I was "just" an engineering manager. Note that the problems don't go away, just increase in scale...) Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I pro…

Have you found hiring to be significantly more difficult in the last 6/12/18 months? I don’t mean the process - that’s universally more difficult since COVID began. I’m referring to the quality and behavior of candidates. Our job postings get as many responses as ever, but the candidates rarely match their resumes lately. And the number of interview no-shows is much higher than normal. This has turned into an astronomical rejection rate. Is anyone else seeing the same? If not it is long past time to re-evaluate our process.

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#29

Post by stackdestroyer »

1. Being informed about what the top level company goals are as well as department context and goals. If you can't draw a straight-ish line between what you're working on and those goals, it's probably not aligned. Make sure you have a defined and prioritized backlog of projects so that when you have the time/resources, you can easily pluck the next one off of the stack.

2. Repeating myself over and over and over (typically ~7 times) to get a message out to the team/org. Even smart people act dumb sometimes, and don't listen/read when they should. It feels like babysitting, sometimes.

3. Books, blogs, industry friends, and some mentors. I have found it difficult to make external mentor friends, but still working on it.

4. It's never about the tools. Jira sucks, slack sucks, and so do most tools. Make sure you keep your workflow simple and make it transparent, however you do it, so that not only can YOU see what's going on, you can confidently share it with others (see? THIS is why your feature isnt being worked on right now, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

#30

Post by deedubaya »

MattGaiser wrote: post #2

Based on what my engineering manager seems stressed about and has his calendar filled with, it is hiring. I'm surprised that the high rate of turnover in tech is not considered a crisis given all the time he spends on that. Even assuming that employee tenure is worthless, a senior level engineer loses 1/3 of his time to this.

Well idk about you, but when my program crashes frequently and consistently, I just spawn new processes rather than retrospectively look at the code I've written to see what is causing the crash. /s

Maybe if managers spent more time on making sure their employees are happy, challenged, managed effectively and compensated adequately instead of looking for the next hire they'd be in a better spot? It seems that most employees quit managers, not jobs.

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