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Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

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Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#111

Post by mlboss »

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…

There was a post on HN few months back where the author listed atleast 30 tasks that a manager should be doing. The list included planning, mentorship, motivating team, hiring, communicating to higher management etc. It was a long list. I don't thing any person doing those task can also be a competent programmer.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#112

Post by tootie »

Traster wrote: post #107
tootie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I liken it to the old star quarterback coming out of retirement for one more big game and then twisting his ankle on the first play.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#113

Post by groby_b »

hyko wrote: post #92
alexpotato wrote: post #71

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…

This seems very close to the stereotype content model, which asserts that every interpersonal impression is formed along two dimensions: warmth and competence. Feeling someone cares fits the warmth dimension; commitment to excellence is a hallmark of competence. I would say the word trust can encompass both. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_content_model

Trust is neither warmth nor competence - trust is the assumption that our mental model of the person we trust somewhat reliably predicts how they actually act, combined with somewhat aligned values.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#114

Post by majormajor »

username90 wrote: post #80
lazide wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Instead you can spend 20% time doing management tasks and 80% time coding.

If you're that good at delegating that you're only using 20% of your time and your team is humming along at a high level... congrats, we've got these other four teams that AREN'T being managed that well, you're now the senior manager in charge of all of them, please get those other managers up to your level too!

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#115

Post by jarjoura »

The article mentions self-awareness as the number 1, but I disagree.

  | Creator mindset
  | Having a creator mindset over a victim mindset is great for leadership. The victim treats situations as if they can’t change them, while the creator takes responsibility and actively shapes reality. Creators turn every situation into an opportunity.
I've actually seen this more broadly labeled as someone having a Growth Mindset instead of a Fixed Mindset, and I 100% agree. This should probably be the #1 value that makes someone a great leader. In fact, I believe it's so important, that it should be the basis for all other qualities and skills a leader develops on their journey.

It's actually a rare trait amongst software engineers and I think this is the trait that either propels someone into a great leader, or holds them back when they are forced into it.

My #2 on the list is perseverance and that goes hand-in-hand with having a growth mindset. The best way to test this quality on anyone is if you can successfully answer yes to the question, "is this person reliable?"

If you have a growth mindset and perseverance, then I believe you can pick up the other traits and learn on your way up the ladder.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#116

Post by groby_b »

lazide wrote: post #103
username90 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seconding that - managing for ~15 years, with 15 years eng career before that. If you're a manager who spends 80% coding on anything but a small team (You might think you're doing a good job, but you really aren't. 20% of your time are only 8 hours. Even if you just spend half an hour with everybody on your team of 8, 4 of those are gone. You haven't spent any time yet coordinating the team as a whole. You haven't spent any time planning. You haven't even answered e-mails yet. Neither did you do any signficant coaching. Nor did you spend time hiring. Or even writing a job description. Or planning compensation. Or helping your two star engineers who are at loggerheads to come to an agreement. Prioritized the backlog? Set up a triage process? Spent way too much time to find out why your junior is super-withdrawn and doesn't ask questions? Set them up with mentorship? How's that design review coming along? Talked UX of the latest "luxe UI" ledge? Got yelled at by them because one of your engineers decided that specs are just suggestions? How's that training program for the new toolkit coming along? Also, the team is kind of nervous because the big project will end in 9 months, and there isn't a new big project yet?

TLM roles are the biggest mistake this industry makes. They work beautifully for 3-5 people, start crumbling for 6-10, soak 100% of your time for 11-14 people just managing while you despair you can't do technical work any more, and become an incredible way to burn out people at 15+ direct reports.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#117

Post by _ek94 »

brandall10 wrote: post #51
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

> 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.

Just because you've never seen this dynamic work successfully doesn't mean that it doesn't. The best manager I've ever had operated like this. She spent most of her time coding and made sure to know what everyone on the team was up to. We were all competent professionals, so we did a perfectly fine job of prioritizing our work and working with others within the team and across teams to get things done. It helped that much of our work could easily be undertaken in parallel with strong ownership of different parts of the code by a single person, but when there were projects that required strong and frequent collaboration she just carved out a sub-team and designated a lead then trusted the lead in the same way she trusted us as individuals. Not only did this mean that we got the benefit of her very impressive technical contributions, but it also meant that we were all able to be more productive because we spent vastly less time in BS meetings.

Afterwards, I moved to a company with a more traditional structure. Ostensibly there were three people in charge of me: my engineering manager, my product manager, and my designer (since we are "design lead"). It was a pretty big culture shock. One difference is that there are a lot more junior people in my new company (the average age was around 50 in the first one), and I think younger engineers may need a firmer hand, but I'm not sure that that explains it all. I joined the first place right out of college and thrived in that environment.

I think most people don't understand just how effective a minimal management strategy can be because they've never experienced one that works well.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#118

Post by _ek94 »

lazide wrote: post #103
username90 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As long as we are throwing out anecdotes, I've been doing this for 3 years and have seen successfully done it on several teams, though they were all at the same company. It absolutely can be done with the right culture.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#119

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

temporallobe wrote: post #91
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…

You need both. And in my experience it’s rare that an engineer will have strong soft and hard skills. I have known exactly one person with that rare combination, and he has since started his own successful company. Unfortunately the smartest and most component engineers I have known have nearly always come across as being arrogant. They have a very solid grasp of their domain and a strong skillset, but they also expe…

> Unfortunately the smartest and most component engineers I have known have nearly always come across as being arrogant.

Funny, in my experience these aren't competent engineers so much as dangerous. Engineers who worship at the altar of complexity and get enraged if you point out their mistakes.

The smartest and most competent engineers I have ever known have nearly always been furries.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#120

Post by [deleted] »

username90 wrote: post #68
brandall10 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

> general meetings, presentation prep, working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc You as a manager don't need to do all that. If you can't delegate most of that to reports then you have a problem.

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