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Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

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Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#61

Post by WalterBright »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #60
bitwize wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code should always be focused on; it should be constantly rewritten, Your PO: I've noticed you've been rewriting a lot of methods in the code base. Can you please tell me which stories on the board this sprint those rewrites are attached to? We need to focus on sprint work, and as we established as a team last PI Planning meeting, the emphasis this quarter is on shipping features from the Customer Experience epic.…

Then again, if I had been given a cent every time I had to tell a member of my team "please, do the job we pay you for before doing the thing you find fun but have no actual business value" I would be a rich man by now.

A programming manager told me once that his job consisted of, every day, visiting every programmer on the team, and asking them about what they were working on. He'd then gently nudge them back onto what they were supposed to be working on.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#62

Post by gweinberg »

tenpoundhammer wrote: post #18

I 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…

Yeah, I sort of had the same impression. Imagine as a junior engineer having the following conversation with your manager: "Guess what? Yesterday I managed to triple my productivity going forward!" "Great! How did you do that?" "I hired two more engineers as good as me!" "You did what?" "Of course I had to pay them more than my own salary. Finding engineers as good as me who also work as cheaply as I do is basically impossible, I have no idea how you did it. I guess that's why you make the big bucks!"

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#63

Post by eggsmediumrare »

allenu wrote: post #30
ryanlpeterman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's easy to see it that way as an IC (I thought the same!). I think the more senior you become the more you will view impact from the lens of your team/org, even as an IC

I'd say the higher you move up in management, the more and more your own goals should represent the business's goals. A lot of ICs don't really care about the business, however, and I think this is where promotions are used as a tool to get them to care. If you act in the interests of the business, the leadership of a company will (usually, but not always) reward you for your service to the business. Whether or not t…

This is why every time I take a management, I regret it. I don't care about any business and I'm beginning to suspect I'm incapable of caring about any aspect of the job other than the wellbeing of the people on my team.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#64

Post by irrational »

I’ve been fortunate to work with the same core group on engineers and qa for more than a decade. Managers come and go, but we all get along well, enjoy our work, have great benefits, and are compensated well enough that none of us have felt like moving on. However, we recently got a new manager who is a pain in the ass. Fridays are normally no meeting days (this comes from much higher up), but he scheduled a 1 hour meeting this morning that he managed to drag into 3.5 hours. I pretty much have done nothing else today because I’ve been brain dead after that long meeting. For the first time in years, a number of us are talking about moving on. It is amazing how bad an effect a manager can have on a team.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#65

Post by jeffdn »

irrational wrote: post #64

I’ve been fortunate to work with the same core group on engineers and qa for more than a decade. Managers come and go, but we all get along well, enjoy our work, have great benefits, and are compensated well enough that none of us have felt like moving on. However, we recently got a new manager who is a pain in the ass. Fridays are normally no meeting days (this comes from much higher up), but he scheduled a 1 hour m…

This seems like the kind of thing you could take to your skip-level or even higher in the management chain. A single new manager causing multiple long-serving employees to become disgruntled should be a bright red flag to a competent leadership team.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#66

Post by ryanlpeterman »

IanCal wrote: post #44
jcparkyn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

An employee spinning their wheels getting nowhere for a month because they didn't ask a question that someone more experienced could answer in 5 minutes is not a good tradeoff. Unless you work for free, you are taking. It's important to explain this kind of thing though, and guide people to when it is and isn't appropriate to ask for help.

Agreed there is a balance. I wrote a little about when and how to ask questions as a junior engineer - https://twitter.com/ryanlpeterman/status/1628803643171557376

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#67

Post by smcin »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #28
munchbunny wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think "soft skills" disguises what these skills generally are and their importance in the context of an organization. Things like navigating an org, knowing how to make asks that have a high % of being accepted, writing things for a specific audience and keeping conversations on track are all very important "soft skills" that are completely hidden by the "soft skills" label.

Right. The "soft skills" that make you popular and likeable with your peers are seriously disjoint from the "soft skills" that show you're in tune with management's (possibly unstated) priorities and know how to navigate them and know where the actual decision-making power centers are (and aren't). Sometimes, these skills are antagonistic to each other.

Trying to munge these all together under one label seems counterfactual. Certainly, they're very different sets of skills: the former are social, the latter overtly political.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#68

Post by lamontcg »

These seem almost a bit simplistic?

What about something like hard business tradeoffs? You can never produce the perfect system if it will take so much effort that the system never ships. Your security posture will never be perfect, it just better be good enough to keep you out of the headlines, etc.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#69

Post by beebmam »

bitwize wrote: post #56
beebmam wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Focusing on code is probably a good thing when you are a junior. I've seen what happens when people stop focusing on code. It's a timebomb for institutions. Code should always be focused on; it should be constantly rewritten, taking the lessons into account from previous iterations.

> Code should always be focused on; it should be constantly rewritten, Your PO: I've noticed you've been rewriting a lot of methods in the code base. Can you please tell me which stories on the board this sprint those rewrites are attached to? We need to focus on sprint work, and as we established as a team last PI Planning meeting, the emphasis this quarter is on shipping features from the Customer Experience epic.…

It's funny people tolerate this kind of stuff. I'd be out the door immediately, and I have been before. You don't have to work for companies that do this kind of insanity.

Re: Mistakes I made as an engineer, but had to become a manager to see

#70

Post by l_theanine »

I’ve trained hundreds of people across many roles for thirty years.

I have two things I’d like to add:

- A mistake you are willing to learn from is not just a mistake. It’s a lesson. It can yield as much reward as you’d like, depending on the effort you spend to reflect and change things.

- Most advice like this, when it comes to things someone learned after moving up a rank in some org chart, is not as portable as we might like to think. Teams are always different shapes. In the end, if business functions are being executed well and if the people doing those things are paid well and happy to stick around, then you’ll find over time it really just doesn’t matter what the process looks like or the permutations of productivity-fu you put on it.

Anyhow, this is a nice article. I enjoy reading stories about career progression like this. I wish I had read more twenty years ago to learn this stuff, I made a lot of “mistakes” then.

Keep it up!

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