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Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#52I recently interviewed a whole string of experienced engineering managers. My interview style tends to be pretty open ended. Most of the folks I interviewed were eager to talk about specific technical achievements they and their team accomplished.
This is understandable. Conquering and deploying a specific technology is hard and feels like a real achievement. That said, I found myself being more interested in each person's specific approach for determining what work to do, quantifying that work, and tracking it to completion. I had a surprisingly difficult time leading the conversation in that direction.
Specifically, I want to know how one interacts with product managers, prioritizes features, determines architecture, distills architecture to actual tasks, and guarantees that those tasks get completed in a timely fashion.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author seems to be pretty clear about having been a team lead but never having directly managed anyone. Huge difference. Having a similar background myself, I can say this is probably one of the biggest hurdles if you're looking to get into management. You can talk at length about mentorship and leading through influence and judgment and all the stuff that goes with being a "technical lead" but it doesn't make mu…
I would agree that I wouldn't typically hire a manager from outside my company if they have no previous time in that role, mostly because ramping up on all of the internal company structure, technology and processes is enough to keep people quite busy without having to learn how to be a people manager. That being said, I feel the opposite about internal hires. One of the great joys of being a manager is coaching and…
The book What Color Is Your Parachute? recommended that people looking to make a career change do it in two steps: changing your job/role and then industry/company (or vice versa).
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without going into details, the product was started 10 years ago by one of the programmers whom I suspect wanted to be a game developer, so the product is filled with gamedev patterns and due to a tech choice it's not possible to migrate to a modern architecture without rewriting the whole thing.
Would be funny to see, say, an enterprise software filled with gamedev patterns. Would you care to elaborate on any of it? What kind of patterns were specifically glaring/out of place?
you're right, that does sound pretty funny. "the database backend was actually on the GPU - it was all in openGL, just in case. We were Mobile first, too - got 1 GFLops on iOS. Unfortunately we sold irrigation controllers for large farms."
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct, but I think the original comment is more geared to the idea that you probably shouldn't revert back to what you are comfortable with and jump in and start coding when there are bugs, or tight deadlin s, etc. I do think you should do some coding, even if you can only do it 10% of the time. It'll give you credibility with the team and you'll get to better understand what everyone deals with on a daily…
You should be writing code, experimenting, attending technical reviews, but never put yourself in the critical path. Your job is no longer to deliver code, it is to lead the team or product.
Agreed
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without going into details, the product was started 10 years ago by one of the programmers whom I suspect wanted to be a game developer, so the product is filled with gamedev patterns and due to a tech choice it's not possible to migrate to a modern architecture without rewriting the whole thing.
Would be funny to see, say, an enterprise software filled with gamedev patterns. Would you care to elaborate on any of it? What kind of patterns were specifically glaring/out of place?
I can imagine someone using component entity systems where they don't exactly make sense. I worked with a manager who considered using it, under a different name and not tied to game dev, in a very LOB application because he thought the requirements were changing too rapidly to manage in a traditional way.
Another possible artifact would be a custom memory allocator or patterns around memory or object management that make no sense in an application that isn't memory constrained or allocating large amounts of objects in such a way that is causing a bottleneck.
Maybe the programmer was unrolling loops in the name of maximizing performance where it wasn't actually required.
I am sure there are plenty of other signs a game dev hopeful would leave in a code base if left unchecked.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without going into details, the product was started 10 years ago by one of the programmers whom I suspect wanted to be a game developer, so the product is filled with gamedev patterns and due to a tech choice it's not possible to migrate to a modern architecture without rewriting the whole thing.
Would be funny to see, say, an enterprise software filled with gamedev patterns. Would you care to elaborate on any of it? What kind of patterns were specifically glaring/out of place?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#58I have hired few dozen people during last decade just for my own projects so speaking from my own experience. I am listing some of the responsibilities that an engineering manager should have -
1. Facilitating your team to succeed.
2. Shielding your team from company politics and making sure they are getting the resources they need.
3. Know your team's strengths and weaknesses
4. Understand your project\product
5. Be a leader and not a manager. Leadership is just like any other skill which can be learned and developed
6. Share your vision with your team.
7. Understand that your team members are also humans and they have emotions too so do not try to come across as a cold person.
Good luck.
Reading list - https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-develop...
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#59I recently interviewed a whole string of experienced engineering managers. My interview style tends to be pretty open ended. Most of the folks I interviewed were eager to talk about specific technical achievements they and their team accomplished. This is understandable. Conquering and deploying a specific technology is hard and feels like a real achievement. That said, I found myself being more interested in each pe…
For me a major disconnect here - and this is always the case with management - is that what management means differs greatly from one organization to the next. For instance, I would consider all of those: "how one interacts with product managers, prioritizes features, determines architecture, distills architecture to actual tasks, and guarantees that those tasks get completed in a timely fashion." senior engineering tasks, not engineering management tasks. Of course, line managers often are going to be also senior engineers who do senior engineer things part of the time, so these aren't inappropriate per se, but engineering management, to me, is more about people and organization management. Employee evaluation, hiring, empowering, professional growth, organizational growth, that kind of stuff as opposed to making product/project/engineering decisions, which should primarily be steered towards product management, project management, and/or senior engineers. With that said, at a lot of places - and I think this is what every organization drifts towards if you don't try hard to fight it - engineering managers are expected to manage projects and provide technical leadership, with people management responsibilities merely being used to give engineering managers the stick to perform their primary duties.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for an Engineering Manager interview?
#60Just remember you are there to support your team always have their back and you'll do just fine...