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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?

#31

Post by handrous »

stackdestroyer wrote: post #29

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 (ty…

> 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.

This is often a sign of there being too many channels of communication or authoritative sources of information, and/or of lots of low-value information being sent out over those channels. Unfortunately, that's not always something one manager in an organization can fix, as it may be cultural or organizational-structural.

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

#32

Post by jawns »

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…

> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard.

I have interviewed a bunch of women and non-white devs lately, and I doubt they would agree with you. This morning I interviewed a very impressive woman of color who said that she's struggled to find engineering jobs.

I've noticed that it can be MUCH harder to find women and non-white candidates when your existing engineering team does not already have much gender/racial diversity. And that stands to reason. Nobody wants to be the token "diverse" hire.

Is it possible that your company has already developed a reputation for its lack of diversity, so those candidates just aren't interested?

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

#33

Post by Jemaclus »

dan_quixote wrote: post #28
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 astrono…

I haven't seen that myself, but I don't think it's particularly surprising. We do get a lot of fresh college grads applying for jobs that I wouldn't normally consider them for, but we just either redirect them toward more junior roles or don't even process them altogether. I also have a fantastic relationship with our recruiter--we talk almost daily--and our minimum requirements (vs what's posted on the job ad) are clear enough that I normally don't get a lot of low-quality resumes sent to me directly.

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

#34

Post by epicureanideal »

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…

> Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes.

Aren't "marginalized" and "in such high demand" somewhat contradictory?

Rather than "marginalized", which implies active resistance to the entry of people into the industry, which is clearly not the case, perhaps a more neutral term like "relatively rare" would be both accurate and not contradictory.

But of course, what I just said is thoughtcrime, even though it's obviously true.

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

#35

Post by wpietri »

My main tool for ensuring we're working on the most important thing is simplicity. A kanban board with strong limits on unit size and WIP.

Humans are bad at grand strategy. But if I insist that stakeholders order granular units of work by priority and then my team delivers at least a few things a week in that order, I put the questions back into a realm that humans are reasonably good at: I can give you X or Y by Friday. Which one do you want?

So honestly, my biggest fight isn't to find new tools. It's to stop people from introducing more tools so that they can sneak unhelpful complexity and the resultant chaos back into the way we work.

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

#36

Post by shostack »

UncleMeat wrote: post #10

Hard: I have a handful of possible customers for my team, which projects and outcomes will be the most impactful? Harder: I have long term relationships with other teams. How do I maintain those relationships even if every single person on the other team turns over? Hardest: How do I provide opportunities for my individual reports to achieve their personal career goals while also ensuring that all of the work adds up…

How do you approach supporting/maintaining relationships with teams whose work is not the most impactful but who still come to you for engineering support?

Also, how do you balance or position for greater long term impact vs lesser immediate impact?

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

#37

Post by avelis »

How do you insure you are working on the most important items for the TEAM? The most important to me are the items that deliver impact for the team and the business at the same time. Very hard to get right 100% of the time. Where do you reach out to get advice outside of your company? Previous managers and my own manager. What is missing from the tools you currently have? Recording impact over time. How to measure that capacity of work achieved is creating desired results.

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

#38

Post by stuff4ben »

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…

I hear you on the diversity front. As a former team/tech lead engineer, I was responsible for most of the hiring and resume screening on my team. Finding women and minority candidates was difficult, but unfortunately I was also hampered by the application intake process. In other words, my company wasn't reaching out to places like HBCU's or non-tech-bro events/meetups. That was mostly a function of HR. As a director you'd probably have more sway that I did at the time so maybe rejigger your outreach efforts to be more diverse?

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

#39

Post by Jemaclus »

abatilo wrote: post #26
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?

I would love to take credit for this, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly mind-blowing. I would honestly attribute it to sheer luck. That said, my company has had increased turnover in the last 6 months, but my organization has not. Just to be clear that I'm not claiming nobody is leaving the company. But if the company overall has attrition and my team doesn't, I must be doing something right, right? Not necessarily... again, could be sheer dumb luck that I have people that hate looking for jobs or something.

(Disclaimer: I have fired people, and I have had two people transferred off my team onto other teams, and both of them have left the company, but I don't count those as attrition under me.)

But if I had to pick something as a thing that I do to make sure my teams are happy and want to stay, it's this: I care deeply about the people who work for me. I'm a people-first leader. I firmly and strongly believe that unhappy people do shitty work, and happy people do good work. I believe that you don't get what you don't ask for (eg, raises, promotions, cool projects), and I also believe that most people won't ask for those things... so I pro-actively ask for them. Our 1:1s are their time to talk about whatever they want to talk about. It's not my time to pontificate. But if they don't have anything to talk about, I'll ask them questions! Things like: where do you see yourself in 5 years? Are you happy with the project you're working on? Are there cool projects that you want to work on? Is there a piece of technology that you haven't used that you would like to learn?

And then once I get those answers, I work with them to achieve those goals. If they want to be a manager in 5 years, then we work on that. If they love the project they're on, then I get them more involved. If they want to work on Project X, then I figure out a way for them to transition off what they're doing now and move on to the other thing.

I also spend a lot of time getting to know them as people. I know their partner's and kids' names, their hobbies, where they go on vacation. I frequently ask questions about those, like, "Did [partner's name] get that promotion?" or "Are you looking forward to your next trip to Disney World?" or "Has [kid's name] seen the movie The Mitchells & The Machines?" and so on.

I'm transparent and honest. I make it clear that I support them as much as I possibly can, and that I would rather they be successful and happy than successful and miserable. One of my guys came to me about three months ago and said, "A recruiter from Stripe reached out to me about a role there. Why shouldn't I apply there?" and I just shrugged and said, "You should. You should always have an idea of what you're worth on the market, and if you think that's a better fit for you than here, I support you." And he applied and he got an offer and it was a little more than he was making here, but he declined because he felt like he'd be a cog in the machine at Stripe versus a valued member of my team. On the flip side, the offer clarified some ideas that he had in his mind about where he wanted to take his career, and so for the past few months we've been talking in our 1:1s about how to shift his career into a different direction, and he's been taking advantage of some opportunities that have come up.

(NOTE: Despite the above scenario, I would never ever suggest to your boss that you are looking elsewhere, no matter how good your relationship is with your boss. It puts us in a very difficult position regarding certain decisions around pay raises and bonuses and promotions and hiring and so on. I did give this feedback to this engineer.)

So if I had to claim credit for anything, it's just that. The soft skill of treating people like people, trusting them to do their jobs well, and giving them the space to make mistakes, learn, and grow along with me. After all, I don't know what the hell I'm doing either. :)

(I really do think I got lucky with a team of rockstar engineers.)

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

#40

Post by dijit »

jawns wrote: post #32
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…

> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard. I have interviewed a bunch of women and non-white devs lately, and I doubt they would agree with you. This morning I interviewed a very impressive woman of color who said that she's struggled to find engineering jobs. I've noticed that it can be MUCH harder to find women and…

I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure).

We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well.

This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down.

I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual.

The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.

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