Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

developing.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 109 posts

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

#71

Post by jameshart »

HellDunkel wrote: post #7

I 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 would you care or think much about hiring as an engineer? You probably would not even be asked to attend interviews

Not with that attitude you won't, sure.

But engineers who do care about hiring, take the training seriously, and make themselves available to participate in interview loops, can make a big difference to the team with which they are surrounded.

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

#72

Post by xwdv »

For a 10x engineer, heads down coding is the best state you can get them into.

If you suspect someone is a 10x engineer, throw them your hardest, seemingly impossible problems, where they can stretch their legs and spend long periods of time in a flow state solving and thinking about the problem and writing large amounts of code with little to block them.

The quickest way to waste your 10x engineer’s potential is throwing them lots of little, bite size problems, that require frequent interruptions and little concentration. They will do this work just fine but they’ll never end up producing a cathedral of code that leaves you in awe.

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

#73

Post by yCombLinks »

bitwize wrote: post #54

tl;dr Play the game. Watercooler politics mean more than your code when it comes down to who gets promoted. Why all the stuff about hiring? As an engineer, hiring isn't even your job. You may end up participating in the interview process and offering feedback, but ultimately you're not making the hiring decisions unless you're a manager anyway, so ignoring hiring isn't really a mistake you make as an engineer.

It's not just about getting promoted. It's much easier to get things done when you work well with the people on your team. And the more influence you have because of those connections, the more influence you have on hiring decisions. Keeping a bad team member from joining your team is huge.

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

#74

Post by lovich »

Aeolun wrote: post #53
IanCal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need focus on other parts though, you can have the most beautiful codebase with the most efficient algorithms, the highest coverage and the most extensible yet simple and elegant architecture but if you're not solving the business problems someone's going to eat your lunch with a hacked together excel sheet. The other view I have on this is around trust. Do I need to "focus" on the code if I have people on the te…

> businesses have different goals and its focus should be on achieving those For most businesses, still being around and profitable is an implicit, if not stated goal.

This is a forum for VC backed startups. We sell dollars for 90 cents here but we’ll make up for it in scale

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

#75

Post by rubidium »

lamontcg wrote: post #68

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.

Yea, it’s from a pretty green manager it seems. Not great advice to engineers.

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

#76

Post by tenpoundhammer »

jcparkyn wrote: post #40
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…

> 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.

I should have added more detail but I was attempting to be brief. I meant that a junior engineer should focus on learning how to do the basics of their job so that they can provide features that help our group meet business objectives. A large part of getting there will be needing mentorship and asking lots of questions. The context is that often juniors need so much hand holding that the cost of their mentors time is more expensive than the value of the feature being produced. I wasn’t even considering their salary.

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

#77

Post by Clubber »

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.

>An employee spinning their wheels getting nowhere for a month

I get aggravated when juniors ask me questions right off the bat without researching. It's because they are lazy and want a quick answer and of course submitting to this just leads to more questions more often, which leads to me getting less work done.

This is also bad for them because they don't learn how to figure it out for themselves through google / code research / debugging / etc. Learning how to learn is the essence of growing in the field. I've been dumped into codebases I didn't know before with little to no help, and it sucks; but you certainly learn how to learn.

I think spinning your wheels for a month is the opposite of that. If it takes someone a month to not figure something out, that would be a red flag for me.

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

#78

Post by taeric »

The hiring point is... Nuanced. Heavily.

Growing a team will make work for the whole team. And making work for the whole team will produce output from the whole team. And that will lead to more legacy product faster than keeping a lean team.

Very well could be the right choice, but clearly has limits.

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

#79

Post by willjp »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #14

A 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…

This resonates with me on multiple levels.

I do feel even when scoping large projects that it is difficult to hold on to all of the pieces. I split it into chunks I can reason about and then (sometimes fearfully) return to the bigger picture. By the end of the project I can see all of the mistakes I made fumbling in the dark, but I’m not sure I could have managed more at the time that I did it.

I also feel this way about socializing at work. There’s something maslowian about it, when you are uncertain if you’re going to make it, it feels perilous to join socials. They’ll never fire me for not being social enough, is the message that fires through my brain at least. Though I’m sure social anxiety plays a role here as well.

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

#80

Post by willjp »

WalterBright wrote: post #61
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m sure some people would find this overbearing, but to me this sounds like an exceptional manager.
Post reply on HN