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Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

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Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#51

Post by brandall10 »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #20
blacktriangle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that role model should not be your manager, it should be a senior developer. A good manager is not a role model to teach you, a good manager realizes the importance of lowly engineers having role models and creates a structured mentorship program to make sure that need is being met.

I don't understand why managers cannot fulfill both roles though? The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it). Outside of the project management responsibilities, there is a lot of time doing nothing. If I wasn't coding, as a manager, 80% of the time I would sit around doing nothing. I strongly believe that managers should be able to fulfill both roles but maybe it's just because I've been burned by so many manag…

I'm going to pile on here with the others. If you're legitimately a people manager (not a low grade 'team lead'), there is no way, no how, you could have 80% free time.

I've been doing this for some 23 years and had a stint as a proper manager for a year, where I spent about 20% of my time coding, and I was more starved for time than just about any other phase in my career.

I'm currently a principal eng/ arch at a mid-size medical device company, and my principal eng/people manager complement, perhaps one of the strongest devs I've ever encountered (close to a fabled 10x dev), barely has time to code at all. He's just slammed all day every day with general meetings, doing 1-on-1s, presentation prep, working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc, it just kills his day for anything more than tiny bits of coding here and there, and because he is such a great dev, he does provide meaningful contributions.

I have worked at small startups where things are a bit better, but I can't recall ever seeing a case where a good manager has more than 1/3 of their time to code. 80% dead time would mean hardly managing at all.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#52

Post by scruple »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #24
marcinzm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A manager is only a role model if the promotion structure is Engineer->Manager. At most modern tech companies that is not the main promotion structure. It's Engineer->Senior Engineer->Staff Engineer->Etc. Engineering management is a different path you can choose just like you can become a product manager but it is not the expected path.

I can't say I've ever been in a company where the path wasn't either: Engineer -> Senior -> Principal -> Staff -> Distinguished OR Engineer -> Senior? -> Manager -> Senior Manager -> Director In both scenarios though, they've been a more senior engineer.

I've seen people go from Engineer to Manager, skipping over, for want of better phrasing, the senior engineering ranks. In both cases it went poorly and a founders child was involved, indirectly at first and then later directly.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#53

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #7

I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding. Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for managers who have turned their back on the very craft that brought them into management. Before the pe…

> have empathy and keep coding.

This.

I worked for a company that didn't encourage managers to be technical. In fact, they sometimes deliberately interfered with my efforts to remain technically relevant. They really lost some good stuff, that way. I'm no tech slouch.

Luckily, I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract, so I did a lot of open-source work, in order to remain relevant.

They directly benefitted from that; though they would never admit it.

So did thousands of others. I did work for NPOs, and the work I did went towards a lot of lifesaving stuff.

The "empathy" part is every bit as important. It pays huge dividends, as a manager. It needs to be real empathy, though; not the two-faced kind that only appears when someone's watching.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#54

Post by thdc »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #7

I've had some god awful managers in my engineering career and my managerial philosophy is twofold: have empathy and keep coding. Most, if not all, of my managers over the past 10 years have been people managers cloaked as engineering managers who have all stopped programming a decade ago. So much respect is lost for managers who have turned their back on the very craft that brought them into management. Before the pe…

My last engineering manager came from a technical background but ended up being a people manager after a decade of managerial duties.

He was a nice guy but useless in that he could not relate with problems the engineers were experiencing and advocate time to fix them - kind of like a black hole for complaints. Engineers by themselves had virtually no say in what they actually worked on here.

This, coupled with a non-technical PM, meant we were constantly adding features on top of a weak foundation which created plenty of fires. And for each fire we were only given time to wave away the smoke rather than put out the fire.

So I'd agree having true empathy and being able to act on it is important for managers - they don't necessarily need to code but they still need enough technical experience to fully relate to what the engineers are doing.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#56

Post by staysaasy »

A lot of this post is (good!) tactical advice. I strongly agree with the comment on emotional self-control. IMO this is one of the top ways that managers fail or struggle, especially as their teams grow or if times are hard.

I've thought about this a lot and wrote some more strategic thoughts on this topic of management soft skills here. It's written more from the perspective of hiring managers, but hopefully some of the content transfers: https://staysaasy.com/product/2020/09/06/soft-skills-for-man...

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#57

Post by ska »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #13
dimitrios1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best engineering manager in my career was not amongst the best developers I knew. (Conversely, the worst engineering manager in my career was one of the best developers I knew). He had two particular skills that many will never have or take a decade or two to cultivate: he could provide you feedback, empathetically, and make you feel like he is genuinely interested in your success and improvement, and he could re…

That's fair but my perspective as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career. My people manager managers never had the skills to provide me with any growth, the only reason I'm at where I am today is because I decided I wanted to level up and taught myself outside of work. It's my goal as a manager to be that manager that I never had and lead by example for my reports technica…

> ... as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career.

There is no reason this has to be your manager. Your managers job was to understand that this was something you needed, and find a way to try and provide it for you; it's unfortunate that didn't happen for you.

> It's my goal as a manager to be that manager

Can I make a suggestion? As a manager it's important that you respond to what your team actually needs, rather than your perception of what you would have needed in their place.

There are a number of ways to do this well, and a much larger number of ways to mess it up.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#58

Post by ska »

aliston wrote: post #44
marcinzm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A manager is only a role model if the promotion structure is Engineer->Manager. At most modern tech companies that is not the main promotion structure. It's Engineer->Senior Engineer->Staff Engineer->Etc. Engineering management is a different path you can choose just like you can become a product manager but it is not the expected path.

Companies like to claim this, but it's not the reality due to an imbalance in power between managers and IC engineers. A manager controls a reports salary, career progression, has more face time with VPs and so on. Software engineering is unique in that ICs can still scale to a similar level of impact as executives, but it is a mistake to think that a Staff engineer and Manager are equal in the eyes of the organizati…

> Software engineering is unique

There is nothing special about software engineering as a technical track this way. There is no one way to set up an organization. To a large degree they are how they actually work (i.e. not what's on paper).

This balance has been an issue in managing technical teams for about as long as that has been a thing, which is a lot longer than software has been a thing. There is a fundamental tension though, in that the focus you need to maintain expertise in your field contends with the breadth you need to understand the context well enough to make good decisions.

I suspect the real reason that you don't see more of it in practice is that it's actually really hard to continue to do both well at a very high level, and it's also organizationally hard to do.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#59

Post by ska »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #13
dimitrios1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best engineering manager in my career was not amongst the best developers I knew. (Conversely, the worst engineering manager in my career was one of the best developers I knew). He had two particular skills that many will never have or take a decade or two to cultivate: he could provide you feedback, empathetically, and make you feel like he is genuinely interested in your success and improvement, and he could re…

That's fair but my perspective as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career. My people manager managers never had the skills to provide me with any growth, the only reason I'm at where I am today is because I decided I wanted to level up and taught myself outside of work. It's my goal as a manager to be that manager that I never had and lead by example for my reports technica…

> I wanted a role model to learn from

Another general comment on this theme. In my experience people making the engineer to manager transition typically need a mentor and guidance in management even more than they ever needed a technical mentor.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#60

Post by TheBlerch »

Ron Lichty https://ronlichty.com/ is a highly experienced engineering manager based in SF and Seattle who writes, speaks and trains internationally, as well as occasionally jumping into teams as interim VP Engineering. I've had the pleasure of hearing several of his talks in-person and he's constantly emphasizing the importance of soft skills. He wrote a very helpful book on the subject, Managing the Unmanageable, published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley https://www.managingtheunmanageable.net/.
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