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

In some orgs, engineering managers are responsible for all of product delivery - figuring out what needs to be done, hiring people to do it, making sure things ship on time, and making sure the app is always live. In other orgs, they are only responsible for hiring and share that responsibility with HR/recruiting.

In some orgs, they are both inward and outward facing - they manage their team and represent engineering in the broader organization. In other orgs, they have no interaction with those outside their direct reporting chain.

Some orgs expect managers to report only on a regular schedule. Others have a more "pop quiz" approach to communicating status.

The broader the manager's scope, the more concurrent communication threads there are - "balls in the air," so to speak, and the more tools they will have to interact within any given hour. I don't think another tool would help unless it removes the need to interact with others for these managers.

It's kind of like dating. You fill out your Tinder profile and you say you want someone SMART and FUNNY and BEAUTIFUL and TALENTED and INDEPENDENT and NERDY but also ATHLETIC and WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU and MAKES A LOT OF MONEY and HAS COOL PARENTS and ENJOYS THE SAME THINGS YOU DO and and and and...

And then you go on dates, and you realize that that perfect person doesn't exist, so on a case-by-case basis you say, "This person is smart and funny and talented and nerdy and I love spending time with them, but not the most attractive or the most athletic, and you know, that's OK!" or maybe "This person is beautiful and funny and athletic, and they also can't carry a tune or understand the complexities of my work life... but I can deal with that!" or in many cases, "This person ticks off every one of those boxes except.... we don't have anything in common and our conversations are boring... so no thanks."

Similarly, we have job descriptions that are say that we want someone with these 100 different things... and then we get the applicants in and pick the ones that satisfy as many of them as we possibly can. OK, so maybe you don't have 10 years of Go experience, but you have 5 years of Python experience AND you built your own CI/CD pipeline? That's cool! Let's talk. I can teach you Go, and you can bring your CI/CD genius to the table!

It's about putting your ideal case out there and seeing what comes in and then deciding what to compromise on.

If this sounds weird to you, consider the alternative: posting the minimum requirements. It would like filling out your Tinder profile and saying you want someone who CAN BREATHE and HAS SKIN and BATHES SOMETIMES. lol, how big of a disaster would THAT be?

(The big secret is: apply for any job that looks interesting, whether you think you satisfy the requirements or not. You never know! Honestly, most of it's for SEO anyway.)

Does that help?

At small companies, my biggest challenge has usually been employee growth/satisfaction and hiring. The saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" is very true at startups. Either everyone succeeds together, in which case even the below average performers will have great opportunities for growth and advancement, or everyone languishes and eventually fails together, in which case even the very top performers may have to go years without any real opportunities for advancement or raises. Some churn is inevitable in most startups when the trajectory of the company is not a perfectly smooth exponential (which it almost never is even in successful companies). Hiring is also difficult, because as the manager you often need to handle more of the process themselves without the support of a recruiting org, and you'll always be at a disadvantage not being able to pay nearly as much as big companies or have the name recognition so closing candidates can be much harder (at least for me, I'm not a natural salesperson so this is something I've really needed to work on).

At big companies, my biggest challenge has been navigating the organizational complexity or what some might call "office politics". There is often no shortage of opportunities at big companies, the cool thing is that even modest improvements can lead to huge amounts of incremental revenue for the company. But there are also a lot of things that are less exciting but need to be done to keep the lights on. As a manager, if you have the chance to seek out the former kinds of opportunities for your team and get new exciting initiatives greenlit with upper management, that's often one of the best things you can do for them. Or if the purpose of the team is more the latter category, then it's your job as manager to still make sure everyone in the org understands that this is an important and high impact area, and that you can show clear success metrics of what your team doing a great job looks like. Individual growth and hiring are still important of course at big companies, but there are existing resources in HR and Recruiting that you can lean on to help with it (and there are often strict rules that mean you couldn't deviate from the official processes here even if you wanted to).

Unsolicited speculation: I wonder if this is related to your hiring woes? I have vague memories of seeing research along the lines that marginalized groups are less likely to apply to positions that do things like "Want 10 years of Go experience". Of course not everyone already knows "the big secret" and maybe (some?) marginalized groups are less likely to know it.

I'm pretty sure I've seen lively debate on HN about this practice, as well, though I wouldn't know what keywords to search for. It's definitely not universal in the industry, or at least it's a continuum. An example I remember recently seeing of a posting on the lower end of the "requirements" spectrum is Mighty App[2], where the list of posted requirements is two items long. I think HN user 'tptacek has written about taking this even to the extreme of having no posted requirements, and doing all candidate qualification via a practical exercise.

Of course if you go that route then you might make the screening phase more difficult. You'd also have to convince Recruiting/HR to go along with it.

[1] After a month at my first job in the industry (I came from academia) I idly checked out the job listing for the position I was then holding, since I hadn't come in through a job listing but rather through a recruiter. There were something like eight "requirements", and I held exactly one of them (a PhD).

[2] https://www.notion.so/Mighty-is-hiring-945d3168d3e34a37883ca...