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…
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.
In most companies, once you’ve built or found the people to delegate that too, and handed it off successfully - congrats, you’ve demonstrated you can handle the next level and you get the next round of challenges. If you’re sitting around with nothing to do, either you’re in a dead end, or no one actually trusts you with more once you’ve ‘succeeded’ because you’ve burned too many bridges or alienated key people - eve…
You don't delegate everything to a single person, you delegate the parts to the person best fit to do it. And no, delegating a lot of those tasks doesn't mean that you as a manager have nothing to do. Instead you can spend 20% time doing management tasks and 80% time coding. Each person in the team sharing the "management" burden makes it pretty manageable. (it isn't really management to coordinate with other teams o…
I literally do this for a living (20+ years now), and have never seen anyone successfully pull this off that was doing what I (or the company) called managing.
I have seen a few people convince themselves this is what they were doing (usually in a line manager/tlm role), while everyone around them was suffering from lack of a proper manager, which their lack of EQ was hiding.
If you somehow found the secret sauce for this, please do share!
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…
And conversely coders - work on your people/management skills (even if you are not a manager). I have worked with coders who were highly opinionated that a great coder is all about the code and not about relationships and people. He wasn't fun to work with and probably destroyed team morale more than his technical contributions helped. Being a 160IQ asshole is worthless, if it were my business I'd avoid hiring / fire such people or at least stick them on their own project away from everyone else.
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…
As an EM, 20% of time spent on project management sounds about right. What you are overlooking is the time spent managing the people on a team. Hiring, recruiting, promotions, coordinating parental leave, working out visas with immigration attorneys, check ins, comp adjustments, etc all take immense time and energy to do properly. It’s a full time job and then some.
Lou 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…
Very good! A correlary to point 2 is “Will they give me time?”
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…
I've struggled with the "keep coding" part. Not just because I don't have time in between my other responsibilities, but because my teams feel ownership over their products and have all the deep knowledge it takes to build and maintain them correctly. I still know how to code, but I rarely have enough depth in a particular system to know the appropriate way to solve something. I'm like a plucky junior dev/everyone's…
Yeah, it's a great way of burning respect in the team, take on projects you don't have the time or expertise to deliver. There's a special kind of management veto - where an important project gets completely stalled because the manager has decided "I'll take this one" and then spends the next 6 weeks sitting on it because they're too busy dealing with everything else.
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…
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.
Once you start crossing the sr eng -> staff eng rubicon, you start doing more managmentesque things anyway. Maybe less 1:1s with specific reports, but you are definately talking to a lot of people and teams trying to lead the direction & design of what you are working on as a group.
I agree. I consider delegation of high value or visibility tasks as a combination of 1 and 2. Regardless I recognize it as being very important overall.