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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?

#51

Post by Jemaclus »

dijit wrote: post #40
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…

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…

I, too, feel guilty sometimes about being in the position I'm in as a straight white man. But at the end of the day, I have two options: quit, or use my position to better change the world, for lack of a better term. Despite being a white male, I am also a marginalized member of society due to my disability. Because of this, I spend a lot of time thinking about diversity and what it means and how we can improve our workplaces to be more inclusive and welcoming to marginalized groups.

I feel you. Don't let it get you down. Let's try and use our privilege to make the tech industry a more inclusive and welcoming place for those who do not have our privileges. Good luck. :)

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

#53

Post by thrrck »

rurp wrote: post #47

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 woul…

If something like this would ever come up where I work, I would start running. How would these sort of numbers even translate to something remotely related to measuring the quality or even quantity of the teams output?

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

#54

Post by handrous »

Jemaclus wrote: post #50
andyxor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goi…

This is not a dig at you, but describing even relatively humane processes like this to folks who aren't in tech will get you some real WTF reactions. Hours of homework to even get an actual interview, for example. "Whiteboarding" sessions in which one often has very little idea what will be asked about in advance (yours may not have this problem, but, for all that's shitty about FAANG-style interviews, at least it's pretty clear what sort of thing you need to be ready for—lots of other companies seem to want to keep even hints at the specifics of their interview process hush-hush like if it's not a goddamn pop-quiz drawing from potentially all of software development, trivia about languages and systems, and CS, then it won't work). The sheer length of the interview process is often surprising to people outside our industry, even. Multi-step and a single one of those steps may involve being grilled for half a day or more? That alone will get you some puzzled or alarmed looks from non-tech folks.

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

#55

Post by Jemaclus »

epicureanideal wrote: post #34
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 peop…

You might be incorrectly conflating "underrepresented" with "marginalized." While it's true that the marginalized groups that we're talking about (women, people of color, people with disabilities) are also underrepresented, those are not the same things at all, and I chose the word "marginalized" intentionally.

Here's a link to what seems like a decent definition of "marginalization" to me: https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization

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

#56

Post by vbtemp »

asdfman123 wrote: post #3
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.

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.

Over the past 4 years, my salary more than doubled. And my role is two rungs lower on the "career ladder". Every time I switch companies for a reduction in job title, I get a 50% raise. At the current rate, I'm looking forward to being an intern while making an executive salary.

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

#57

Post by vbtemp »

asdfman123 wrote: post #3
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.

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.

My other comment here was cheeky, but I think what happens is the following:

Applicant A has the precise set of skills Business B needs desperately at that moment. Business B is willing to pay whatever needed to get Applicant A ASAP (because they are growing quickly, or in crisis, or just need that role filled fast). This is normally what causes salary bumps in job switches... because A would not accept an offer if it _wasn't_ substantially above what they make now.

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

#58

Post by matheist »

Jemaclus wrote: post #33
dan_quixote wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

This might be obvious, but not to me --- why are your minimum requirements not the same as what is posted on the job ad?

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

#59

Post by Jemaclus »

handrous wrote: post #54
Jemaclus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goi…

This is not a dig at you, but describing even relatively humane processes like this to folks who aren't in tech will get you some real WTF reactions. Hours of homework to even get an actual interview, for example. "Whiteboarding" sessions in which one often has very little idea what will be asked about in advance (yours may not have this problem, but, for all that's shitty about FAANG-style interviews, at least it's…

Yup, totally agree. A friend of mine is interviewing for a job and he's scheduled for a 3 hour "deep dive technical challenge" this afternoon. I think that's bonkers.

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

#60

Post by fatnoah »

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.

I was a VP Eng with a slightly larger team, and EVERY subteam in my org included one or more folks in those groups.

I didn't go through any particular effort, but it's one of those things that builds on itself. Finding ANYONE was really difficult, so I couldn't target specific groups and hired anyone qualified that accepted an offer (which is probably how things should work).

The key was that many of the leaders of this tech company, including CEO and COO were women. That helped demonstrate that we weren't hiring folks just to hit quotas and that there really wasn't a glass ceiling at the company.

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