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Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

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Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#121

Post by brandall10 »

_ek94 wrote: post #117
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…

> 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 perfect…

I meant specifically things only a manager does. For instance, the presentations he does are for director/vp level, hefty slide deck stuff.

Of course the more senior ICs do more than simply code AFA talk across teams and divisions to scope and define work, present workshops and presentations to the team and cross-departments, contribute to architecture decisions, present as SMEs across various parts of the stack, and mentor juniors. None of the ICs year on my team spend more than 80% of their time simply coding, the more senior staff spend probably more like 60-70%, and I spend about 50%.

I’ve worked at 14 companies over 23 years, from 3 Fortune 500s, to a couple mid-sized, to a bunch of smaller companies, to a handful of early stage startups. Have had probably close to 20 supervisors over this time and interfaced with dozens of other managers on related teams, and been a team lead about 5 or so times and a manager once.

I’ve never seen this dynamic play out. IME you're talking about a team lead not an actual people manager. Even in the most streamlined/simplest environments, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a people manager spend the majority of their time coding, not unless they were pushing 60+ hours doing so. Something as simple as 1-on-1s should be done at least once every week or two, and that can take up to an hour (or more counting prep) for every report.

Your mention of having multiple sups and junior heavy ICs at one place sounds dysfunctional and has little relation to any place I’ve worked at.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#122

Post by _ek94 »

marcinzm wrote: post #46
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to spend 100% of their time coding. Why not 50%? If you spend half your 40 hours a week coding, after presumably having had a career in engineering as a developer in the past, coding half the time will continue to support your technical knowledge well into the future. I refuse to believe that managers shouldn't code. Actual managerial tasks do not take up that much time. Like I said in a previous comm…

I've written in another post where I spend 80% of my management time. I could cut it down to 20% but then I'd be building up the management version of technical debt. As I see it, there's a lot of things you don't have to do but doing them makes your team function better in the medium and long term.

As someone who has been managed both through traditional management techniques and a manager who mostly coded, I could not disagree more.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#123

Post by virtue3 »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #28
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…

>The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it). Where do you work? Sign me up! I have hardly any time to code after weekly sprint-related ceremonies, 1:1's, cycle planning, and architecture and code reviews. The job of management, like the job of any developer, varies from company to company, and situation to situation. Thankfully, the people side of my job as a manager is easy right now, but only because the peopl…

Your job isn't to code anymore homie.

It all becomes a bunch of soft targets as a manager and that's really hard.

The one big success I had when I was a manager was getting our client teams to unify on the bugs they were having and to be much more cohesive. When I first got there the android and ios and web people never talked and refused to believe they had the same types of issues/bugs. LOL.

I ultimately hated it because really... I don't want to yell at people for being late to standup, so went back to engineering.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#124

Post by andrei_says_ »

From Google’s epic study on successful teams:

But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

And the long form nyt article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#125

Post by hizxy »

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 you lost respect for the CEO? Should they be coding still or you rather they make sure there is enough money to make payroll?

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#127

Post by Schwolop »

mlboss wrote: post #111
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…

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358795 might well be what you're referring to. It was a great comment!

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#128

Post by _ek94 »

brandall10 wrote: post #121
_ek94 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perfect…

I meant specifically things only a manager does. For instance, the presentations he does are for director/vp level, hefty slide deck stuff. Of course the more senior ICs do more than simply code AFA talk across teams and divisions to scope and define work, present workshops and presentations to the team and cross-departments, contribute to architecture decisions, present as SMEs across various parts of the stack, and…

Those presentations to the higher levels didn’t really happen because the corporate structure was very flat. Also, I would not expect those to take up all that much time.

You may have worked at a lot of places, but your experience is still only a tiny slice of the different shops out there. My experience is likewise limited, and I acknowledge that such light touch management is probably very rare, but it can and does work.

You said she was a team lead not a real manager, which does have some truth to it, but it’s not like there was someone doing the “real” management work to pick up the slack for her. In the right environment that stuff simply isn’t needed.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#129

Post by scruple »

angrais wrote: post #96
scruple wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean a founders child was involved? Was that the person who skipped the senior rank?

One of the founders children was hired on to a low ranking managers team as an entry level Software Engineer. They were hired specifically by the low ranking manager and without the typical interview process. That low ranking manager, inside of a calendar year, became the director of an entirely new division in the engineering org. That division eventually went defunct, having never shipped a single product to production or having accomplished anything else of note.

The other was a founders child being promoted from SE I or SE II into a middle management role. That also did not end well.

Re: Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership

#130

Post by hyko »

groby_b wrote: post #113
hyko wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean that when you trust someone, that can mean you either trust them not to screw up or trust them not to screw you over.
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