> Having motivated, happy teammates is critical to getting things done.
Here it is, in case anyone was looking for a good reason to care about people's happiness
Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#32Technical skills are teachable to a coachable person, soft skills not so much
Soft skills are also teachable to a coachable person. I've seen it in action. However, far fewer people are receptive to coaching on soft skills because fewer people understand what "soft skills" are and why they matter. I've met plenty of engineers (anecdotally, not a majority, but enough that it's a clear pattern, and strongly correlated with how junior they are) who lump soft skills into a single category represen…
Understanding why soft skills matter is teachable to a coachable person. But not without a coach and when it comes to soft skills there is a general reluctance towards providing soft skill coaching, with a prevailing attitude, as seen in the first comment, that anyone who "wasn't born" with soft skills is unteachable, leaving few willing to try to be the coach.
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#33> Hiring well is one of the best uses of your time When I was an engineer I used to think this, but now that I'm a manager, I'm not so sure... If you want to maximize your impact, and make the biggest contribution possible to your company, then yeah, sure, it's absolutely the best use of your time. But a lot of engineers are trying to contribute to the company in ways that are mutually beneficial to them, and the way…
Investing in 'hiring well' is worth it for the skill, sticking around in 'hiring' is probably not unless you're using it to swing some cool free international trips. There's a lot of value in knowing exactly how you'll be judged at your next job interview.
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#34I dont get it. Why would you care or think much about hiring as an engineer? You probably would not even be asked to attend interviews. If you vibe with the company and share the vision okay but this is not a matter of perspective. Why would you NOT be interested in getting to know your coworkers? Why NOT have interesting conversation or a good laugh at lunch? This has nothing to do with beeing an engineer or manager…
Why? Because you will eventually have to work with these people and their problems will become your problems, especially if you are seen by management as someone who can fix those issues. Young adults tend to group together and cling to co-workers because they haven't learned to cope with life independently of the situation they find themselves in. I generally like my co-workers, but I have no inclination to spend an…
> It's not that I don't want to make friends at work, it's that I don't want a condition of my friendship to be tied to the workplace. If I'm not seeking that person independently now, then I'm probably not going to do it later after switching jobs.
I've made friends at previous companies who I still see regularly. Not a ton, but some. I have dinner plans with one of them this coming Monday.
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#35> People problems are as important as “real” problems
I would go even further and say, "all technical problems are really people problems."
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#36A more interesting question is, are these actually mistakes or just part of the journey from a junior engineer to manager? People problems and building relationships with your co-workers are things that I have realized are important over the last couple of years (Haven't done any hiring yet). In saying that, I'm not sure it would have been wise to focus on these things earlier than I did. There were too many other th…
> Focusing on code is probably a good thing when you are a junior. Leave the higher level problems for a little later down the line. Agreed that junior engineers should focus on code with most time (but not all). If you focus on the low hanging fruit outside of code you can have more impact overall without too much time investment there.
I disagree - I think juniors should pay attention - but actively moving outside their role is almost always more trouble than worth.
I've seen so many misguided proactive attempts waste everyones time, create noise, break focus.
If there's low hanging fruit, and you're not in a dysfunctional environment, it will probably give you diarrhea.
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#37Also my observations.
But importance of some of these things changes as you evolve and gain seniority.
Definitely it is a mistake for a junior developer to obsess over hiring people. This is something you should start paying more attention somewhere around when you become senior dev. As a manager/tech lead I really need help to make hiring decisions but for that help to be valuable it must come from somebody with enough experience and also understanding of the project.
People problems are also best left to your seniors if you are a junior dev. You should pretty much be in observation/learning mode. Be respectful and kind to other people and stay away from drama. Don't try to resolve problems for others -- if you don't yet have experience you are more likely to cause more trouble than solve the problem.
On the other hand getting to know other people is always important, regardless of your level.
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#38Created a temp account to say please let there be others that cringed when reading this thinking that it was insanely obvious.
I originally went to the comments expecting a big flurry of people trashing this saying that the author was really late to the game, but to my surprise this line of thinking is incredibly common here. And it appears that some people are actively pushing back on this. :(
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#39I dont get it. Why would you care or think much about hiring as an engineer? You probably would not even be asked to attend interviews. If you vibe with the company and share the vision okay but this is not a matter of perspective. Why would you NOT be interested in getting to know your coworkers? Why NOT have interesting conversation or a good laugh at lunch? This has nothing to do with beeing an engineer or manager…
It's pretty obvious: thinking about hiring is important because you want smart and effective coworkers on your team. If engineers are not interviewing potential engineers, big problems can occur. Basically, you wind up with people who don't know what they're doing technically, but happen to "interview well." It takes a long time to fire someone. In the meantime, you got a big mess to deal with.
Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see
#40I think of all of these problems as being the managers problem and not the engineers problems. Maybe a better title is "10X Manager tasks, I wasn't aware of as an engineer". To help engineers maximize their career I tell Junior/Level 1 engineers focus on becoming net productive, meaning providing more value than you take. Midlevel/Level 2 engineers should becoming independent and solving lot's of their problems on th…
> I tell Junior/Level 1 engineers focus on becoming net productive, meaning providing more value than you take.
This feels like it could backfire, by encouraging people to ask less questions. It's easy to provide more value than you take if you never take.