Obligatory plug for the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. https://softskills.audio/
These guys are funny and insightful. When I wrote in they actually answered my question.
Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
81–90 of 134 posts
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#82I'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…
I do whatever I can to best support the team. It is practically never coding at this point. My team would likely end up frustrated with me (and rightly so) if coding comes at the expense of other things like sourcing, hiring, coaching, distilling and communicating our plans, refining and scaling our processes, etc.
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#83I'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…
I have avoided going the management route because I have a very strong fear of losing touch with the deep technical aspects of software engineering, which I love and have been doing my entire professional career. As a lead developer now, my role has changed in that I interface more with product owners and management, so I can already see that I need to delegate quite a bit, which makes me feel uneasy since I want to be the one doing those tasks. On top of that, as a lead I am expected to know it all while also somehow delegating.
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#84Earlier 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 guess you talk about group leaders, not project managers. Group leaders are from developers, with added responsibilities (and that means with added work).
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been a manager for a while and at best I get 20% time to code. With 8+ reports the weeks tends to break down into: * 20% for 1-on-1s and dealing with management level issues people bring up. * 20% spent on hiring * 20% on various status meetings (team, cross-team, with my boss, etc.) * 20% spent on pro-actively finding or solving issues before the explode. This includes networking with my counterparts in the res…
20% on hiring with 8 reports?
Engineering manager's reports are team leads, so that's like 40-50 people probably. Plus any cross-discipline interviewing.
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#86Lou Holtz [0] has a very pithy mental model for how to evaluate leadership: Everyone asks three questions of people leading them: 1. Can I trust you? 2. Do you care about me? 3. Are you committed to excellence? (aka do you have high standards). Think about someone you admire. Odds are the answer to the above for them is "yes" to all three. Now think of someone you have had a lot of problems with. Odds are the answers…
Here is a fourth: 4. Do you delegate high visibility tasks? Managers who don't do this work hard to hog all the glory, spend all their time in meetings with other managers or presenting to higher level people etc. It isn't good for them nor their reports, by not growing the reports skills they have a hard time getting to the next level as a manager. Also they create a situation where they are the bus factor 1, which…
4 seems like it is a particular instance of 2
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#87Hard skills in eng management are underrated. If you do not have hard skills, you cannot recognize talent among your developer team.
Likewise, your developers will feel they cannot learn much from you and have a meh attitude towards your advice.
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#88Lou Holtz [0] has a very pithy mental model for how to evaluate leadership: Everyone asks three questions of people leading them: 1. Can I trust you? 2. Do you care about me? 3. Are you committed to excellence? (aka do you have high standards). Think about someone you admire. Odds are the answer to the above for them is "yes" to all three. Now think of someone you have had a lot of problems with. Odds are the answers…
Do you share credit? Can your reports eat what they kill?
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#89Please don’t call them soft skills. If they weren’t hard, there’d be better leadership out there.
Soft skills means they are hard to measure. That is the original definition. Hard skills are easy to test, you either solved the problem or you didn't. With soft skills you don't really know, you need to measure it subjectively.
Some of the things mentioned in the article are easy to measure.
Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been a manager for a while and at best I get 20% time to code. With 8+ reports the weeks tends to break down into: * 20% for 1-on-1s and dealing with management level issues people bring up. * 20% spent on hiring * 20% on various status meetings (team, cross-team, with my boss, etc.) * 20% spent on pro-actively finding or solving issues before the explode. This includes networking with my counterparts in the res…
20% on hiring with 8 reports?
Startup so quickly growing team and less recruiting support. Stabler team in a large org would have less hiring but more meetings.