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

How do you insure you are working on the most important items for the TEAM?

Whats the thing that drains you the most?

Where do you reach out to get advise outside of your company?

What is missing from the tools you currently have?

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.

1. Constant communication with users to figure out what issues are impacting them and what they would like to do with the product in the future.

2. Trying to convince management to focus on the right things. In practice this is really just me repeating the same thing in meetings and 1:1s until they happen as I gather more and more data from users directly, through analytics and share perspectives from people I manage.

3. Other engineers I’ve met over the course of my career. I also try to read for 30 min in the morning. I read everything from self help sorta books to deeply technical books about my area of expertise.

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.

EDIT: My team is 4 people including myself. 2 senior, 2 junior.

80% of my problems are communication problems. Does X team know about Y team's initiatives and work? Does A team know about B team's weird use cases when they develop their platform?

The rest are resource management. It's difficult to hire the "best and brightest" and task them with mundane maintenance and general housekeeping, but those things still need to be done too. It's about striking that balance between exciting greenfield projects and making sure our older services don't rust away.

Generally people are wired to need a push rather than jump. This works both ways in hiring. Employers will try get away with lower salaries until the employee shows they have leverage and employees won't make the effort to get leverage.