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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?

#41

Post by andyxor »

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…

more likely they optimize along the same dimensions as FAANG companies, i.e. proficiency in Leetcode and memorizing "system design" templates.

This leads to implicit discrimination against anyone who doesn't spend months grinding for these "exams", with the same distribution of "grades" across races/ethnicities/genders as e.g. math tests in schools.

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

#42

Post by UncleMeat »

shostack wrote: post #36
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?

> 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?

If it is a new relationship, I tell them no. I then provide them with my estimation for the impact of the proposed collaboration and my estimation for the impact of the work that we are funding. And I encourage them to escalate through my management if they disagree with my conclusion.

The harder one is if we have already provided something for this team. The way to avoid this is to try to document support expectations as clearly as possible in the very beginning and ruthlessly prevent things from growing beyond that. I've done this poorly in the past and ended up inheriting support for less impactful collaborations that I can no longer deprioritize.

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

Work with leaders to define their priority balance for short vs long term impact and try to match that. Some orgs really really need short term wins. Other orgs can afford to take a longer vision.

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

#43

Post by Jemaclus »

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…

Totally possible! I'm just going by my own experience. Most of the applicants I've seen have been unqualified, though, at least going by their resumes. I'd love to find some talented women of color to join

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

#44

Post by throwitoutpls »

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…

My company tries to go out of its way to be inclusive in the hiring process (including trying to do away with requirements etc) and the hiring pipeline is predominantly white/Asian men, and outside of it the occasional Asian woman. The really rare candidate that falls out of this category interviews alright at best and we have given them offers in the past. Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme.

The poster clearly mentions they want to increase diversity and unless they do something sexist /racist as part of their interview what more are they supposed to do? If they look all white now what are they supposed to do about it? Find the token colored person from some corner of the company and paste them in every page in their website?

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

#45

Post by jk20 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #15
handrous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Having used Jira and Azure DevOps, scheduling tools still don’t seem great. The PM I work with prepares a schedule in excel with me every quarter and we revisit it every few weeks. People look at that like 5x as much as they look at our planning tool and it takes like 1/10th the time to edit or less. I've a suspicion that in an ideal world, reporting/planning tools for management and day-to-day task tracking for…

I am relatively new to the workforce, but I am struck by the amount of time spent reporting estimate, redoing estimates, and planning work.

Yeah, you noticed? These activities did not exist when IT was driven by enthusiastic and clever developers rather than lazy managers creating artificial activities in order to justify their existence.

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

#46

Post by Jemaclus »

stuff4ben wrote: post #38
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…

I do attend a number of Women Who Code meetup events and I've been to two HBCU career fairs in the last few years. It's definitely something we do, but as you suggest, we could always do better. I'm a big advocate of this, but our recruiting team is the one who does most of the sourcing efforts and it's been tough to get them to think outside their traditional high-yield tech-bro mindset. I'm working on it!

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

#47

Post by rurp »

I'm curious what the engineering managers here think about code metrics. Things like PRs per week, comments per PR, average time per Jira ticket.

Are there statistics of this type that you find useful? If so, I'm interested to hear which ones and why.

My current company relies on these sorts of number much more heavily than anywhere else I've worked. There's so much noise that I'm skeptical of their utility, but would be happy to learn more.

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

#48

Post by teachingassist »

gpm wrote: post #11
asdfman123 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make any sense that you have to leave your job to get a big salary raise. Surely you're a lot more valuable to a company with two years' of experience in a codebase vs. a new company with no experience.

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.…

> but why would they?

They should, because they observe the parent's point:

The employee now has the potential to jump ship and re-start this process for a higher $x, meaning that the employer risks losing the institutional knowledge/institutional memory that this employee contributes, and the employer will suffer the cost and risk of hiring someone(s) new.

An employer declining to give a regular pay increase is depending on their employee's loyalty and kindness to remain in employment at lower than their market value, and/or that the average employee has very minimal capacity for risk, because they must constantly stay housed and fed.

That might work for the employer a while, but personally I don't find it a wise long-term strategy.

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

#49

Post by borroka »

gpm wrote: post #11
asdfman123 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make any sense that you have to leave your job to get a big salary raise. Surely you're a lot more valuable to a company with two years' of experience in a codebase vs. a new company with no experience.

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.…

This is quite a complex explanation of a process that I see as pretty basic and linear and as old as homo sapiens: new people are exciting, old tenure-wise people are usually not exciting because they are not new people, and their importance - especially in a big 1000+ company - is often overstated. The ship carries on anyway.

You can see this phenomenon everywhere and it is as clear as Caribbean water in marriages or relationship: one can be married to the most good-looking, engaging partner around, but doesn't the so-and-so looking person you have met a bar after a few drinks feel like a rush of life? After choosing the rush, some of them have regrets, but it appears that, in the vast majority of cases, life goes on. And it surely goes on for a company, so companies are not very motivated to spend more money for someone who's old news.

My experience in consumer and enterprise tech tells me that most the rationalizations one reads on HN and similar forums, that is the cost-benefit analysis of hiring or retaining, the calculations of how many hours of engineers' time are spent on hiring (or meetings!) instead of working on product, are fun academic discussions as much as doing a cost-benefit analysis of marrying your partner or going on as is, or getting a dog. They all talk about them, but how many do those analyses? How many go by feelings instead, or aspirations?

For example, in my current company (but isn't it the same in all companies?), when somebody leaves, there are the customary "I wish the very best in your future career" and when someone joins there are the customary "It is so exciting to have you here, let's book a 1:1". Opportunistic messages, but they also say something real about how we feel about the old and the new.

I remember a Uber guy who left the company after a few years of tenure. On Twitter, they wrote the usual: "It's been great to be here, I met so many exceptional people (...and all that customary boredom)". After 6 months, another Uber-er wrote on Twitter: "We worked so well on that product, I did not know you left!". It was an enlightening exchange.

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

#50

Post by Jemaclus »

andyxor wrote: post #41
jawns wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

more likely they optimize along the same dimensions as FAANG companies, i.e. proficiency in Leetcode and memorizing "system design" templates. This leads to implicit discrimination against anyone who doesn't spend months grinding for these "exams", with the same distribution of "grades" across races/ethnicities/genders as e.g. math tests in schools.

We don't do this, actually. Our take-home code challenge is fairly straightforward (I suspect anyone with 2-3 years of real-world experience could complete it in a few hours). I do spend about 45-60 minutes per candidate in a phone screen to talk with them and get a sense of their experience. Our on-sites convert to hires at a pretty high ratio, because I try not to bring people on-site unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to hire them, and while we do a few whiteboarding exercises, my team is trained to ask questions that don't have a single correct solution. This isn't about memorizing trivia questions. It's about critical thinking skills and problem solving in real-time, and that's what we're trying to measure. If I give them a question and they take the entire 30 minutes to get halfway to the answer, that's OK.

But, having interviewed at a number of other companies in Silicon Valley, you aren't wrong. Most companies optimize on the FAANG dimensions and it's not particularly accessible for anyone who hasn't spent months grinding on those challenges. Not a good way to hire, imo.

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