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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?

#81

Post by Jemaclus »

epicureanideal wrote: post #76
Jemaclus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue that people with disabilities are the only people in that list who are actually discriminated against and marginalized in the tech industry (or in most other areas of life), and yet far fewer resources are dedicated to reaching out to them and encouraging them to join companies than the other groups mentioned. I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, a…

As someone else mentioned, when we say "marginalized" in the context of diversity hiring not just referring to the hiring process. There's value in hiring people who have been marginalized elsewhere. Black people in the United States go through life in a totally different manner than white people. Immigrants face hurdles that citizens are not even aware of. Women face obstacles like harassment and dismissiveness everywhere from their local grocery store to parent-teacher conferences to their jobs and even in the courtrooms. Having teams that reflect these viewpoints in the room where it happens is valuable.

Consider a lot of the camera-related fiascos in the tech industry recently. Until very recently, Twitter routinely cropped out non-white faces on photo previews. Why? Potentially because people of color weren't involved enough in the process to notice. Augmented reality and facial recognition routinely fail when paired up with the faces of people of color. Amazon in the not-so-distant past tried to use AI to filter resumes, and it wound up throwing out all of the women. If more women had been involved, perhaps that might have been caught earlier.

A lot of these are hypotheticals, and we may never know how the ethnic composition of the teams affected the final output, but it's hard to argue that having a more diverse team is a bad thing when it comes to issues like this.

And for what it's worth, the thought isn't "ugh, we gotta hire this white guy," but rather "does hiring yet another white guy bring something to the table that we don't already have and couldn't get from a woman or person of color?" The answer is "probably not."

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

#82

Post by lifebeyondfife »

Working on the most important items: automate measuring the most important metrics for your team. Releases, paging events, outages, bugs, support issues. You can look at your data and get a feel for trends and whether you need to focus on quality, or delivering more features.

Look into KPIs (key performance indicators). They should be proxies for customer success - Key means only have a few. The engineers should know what they are and be given the autonomy to influence the roadmap and innovate on how best to improve them.

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

#84

Post by epicureanideal »

Jemaclus wrote: post #81
epicureanideal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that people with disabilities are the only people in that list who are actually discriminated against and marginalized in the tech industry (or in most other areas of life), and yet far fewer resources are dedicated to reaching out to them and encouraging them to join companies than the other groups mentioned. I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, a…

As someone else mentioned, when we say "marginalized" in the context of diversity hiring not just referring to the hiring process. There's value in hiring people who have been marginalized elsewhere. Black people in the United States go through life in a totally different manner than white people. Immigrants face hurdles that citizens are not even aware of. Women face obstacles like harassment and dismissiveness ever…

I have heard words very similar to "ugh, we gotta hire this white guy" actually expressed out loud. So yes, that really is the thought some people have. It is NOT "does hiring another white guy bring something to the table...". And even if it were the latter form, it would still be an ugly thing to say.

Also, not all white people, black people, or any other group of people based on their skin color, sex, or other obvious characteristics are the same. A black person and a white person both with a net worth above a million dollars will have life experiences more similar than two white people, one of which grew up incredibly poor and one of which has a million dollars.

In my opinion, we shouldn't be trying to achieve diversity on the basis of outward characteristics. What that ends up doing is giving huge advantage to already-advantaged people who look like people from sometimes marginalized groups, and a huge disadvantage to non-advantaged people who look like people from sometimes advantaged groups, statistically speaking.

We should judge people as individuals, not as members of categories.

What about the advantage and disadvantage of people who grew up in single parent vs two parent households? What about people who are first vs 3rd generation college students? People who had to work during college vs those who didn't? What about their mental health? Abuse as a child? Are we going to put all these on a questionnaire? There are too many possible influences on a person's life to account for, and focusing only on the outward physical appearance seems like a very blunt and inaccurate instrument.

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

#85

Post by readonthegoapp »

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #72
dijit wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD) Just my opinion; as an aside. ANY engineer worth his or her salt, should be able to pivot from one to another. This is probably THE primary skill an engineer should have. Industry hiring practices mostly disqualify candidates based on this type of thing, and it's a terrible practice, and it leads to good qualified engineers getting pigeonholed into a skills-dead-end.…

If you think MS-focussed people are generally low-skill and uninterested, it will be difficult to hire them for a non-MS skill (or any skill, for that matter).

But that can apply generally.

Need C# but they only know Java?

Cancel.

I'm fine with canceling people who are lazy or not smart or not interested, but canceling someone because of their stack just seems like finding plausible deniability.

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

#86

Post by readonthegoapp »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #77
Jemaclus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? No…

No turn overs in 6 years is really impressive. Not currently looking, but would love to know the company you're working for and possibly/hopefully grab a coffee when I'm in the area. Please shoot me an email (under my profile).

My general understanding of 'turnover' includes firings, but not layoffs.

And that seems appropriate to me.

Maybe 'attrition' or some other term would more accurately describe how stable a unit/org is outside of firings.

Or you could just say 'Nobody has quit me/the org, but I helped two folks transfer.'

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

#87

Post by 908B64B197 »

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 one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates.

Spending 30-40% on hiring is a lot. How is the current compensation and what does your hiring pipeline looks like? Internships? One of the smartest decision I've ever seen was to simply raise initial offers by quite a bit. Suddenly the quality of applicants just jumped.

> 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.

I'm curious why does it matters? Shouldn't folks be hired on their abilities rather than some arbitrary reasons?

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

#88

Post by readonthegoapp »

My mgr experience is relatively light

But I needed

1. Better predictability about how much new features would cost

2. Ways to limit the soul-crushiness of scrum micromanagement and just management in general

3. Easier/better way to communicate upcoming features, and features once they were actually live. Doing weekly product update emails with screenshots was fine-ish but it was a chore that just took too much time, and was it worth the effort/ROI? Eh.

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

#89

Post by 908B64B197 »

throwitoutpls wrote: post #44
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…

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 a…

> 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.

Nobody will acknowledge it publicly but diversity-quota and affirmative action is actually hurting minority candidates. Some places are notorious for lowering the bar for "diverse" applicants. So when faced with a resume, I know that the non-diverse candidate got there on merit alone. But the "diverse" one? Maybe it was merit, maybe it was the quota... Why should I be the one to take the risk?

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

#90

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> 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)

That's incredibly racist.

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