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From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

thoughtspile.github.io

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Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#61

Post by brycewray »

> Your words have weight. If you, an IC, say "guys, we really should write tests", everybody goes "oh, crazy old Vladimir, all grumpy again, haha, where do you see tests fit here?". If you, an EM, casually say "guys, we really should write tests", you might be surprised to find the tests unexpectedly growing in different places. Pleasant.

Many years ago, I was standing in my then-boss’s office while he got off the phone from an apparently successful request to have somebody in another department do something for him. He looked up at me from his desk, grinned slightly, and said in a bemused tone, “Well, I didn’t get any prettier when they changed my title to ‘Manager’ [from ‘Specialist,’ before I was in his team], but it sure helps me get things done.”

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#62

Post by rsynnott »

yamrzou wrote: post #3

Are there companies that would hire you as an engineer for a team lead position without much prior experience? Or is the only way to transition within the same company?

“Team lead” can mean practically anything, but if you’re talking about an EM, I think most companies would be _extremely_ reluctant to hire one with no prior experience as an EM. A bad EM can completely ruin a team; it’s not something that you want to take any more chances with than you have to.

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#63

Post by thoughtspile »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #60

I have found EM positions (where you lead a team of 4-8 and your reports are ICs) to be way more stressful and don’t really pay much more. VPEngineering is where you get a meaningful pay increase. In addition you need to keep up with the tech as you need to evaluate the skill level of people in your team plus they turn to you for advice. And it is way more tiring. Keeping up with what many people are doing, at a tech…

But then again, c++ hft and payment processing aren't exactly low-stress jobs either

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#64

Post by whstl »

thoughtspile wrote: post #28
mattlondon wrote: post #14

The biggest pain is the people. You'd be surprised how childish grown ups can be. FFS just be adults and get along. 80% of my stress as a manager is basically solving playground squabbles between people old enough and experienced enough to know better. Then of course the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision m…

Well, it's well known that to become a team lead you must eat the previous team lead) To be fair, some managers over-optimize to protect against people undermining them, not sharing knowledge and responsibility and even actively removing top performers with leadership ambitions

Not necessarily! You can just hang in tight and let someone else eat the team lead. In my experience it is often product people wishing to cosplay as tech lead (and they will promptly proceed trying do the same to you), or a middle manager/CTO (ditto).

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#65

Post by spangry »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #34

I’m a problem solver and big picture thinker. I like working out the solution and helping solve the obstacles. The role that has always fit the best is “architect”, but it seems to be going away as a title. No matter, the need for the work remains. But I’ve done a few of the other roles over the years. Team Lead/manager, Scrum Master, Product Manager (without the title). Here’s my take. A good manager requires a very…

I'm similar to you - jack-of-all-trades big picture problem solver - and have arrived at the same conclusion after managing for a bit over a year: stress resilience is the key skill. If you're an IC you can develop your career by learning new skills, domains etc. If you're a manager, career development becomes increasingly about personal development - maturity, perspective, emotional resilience etc. I suspect this in why seniority and interest in things like mindfulness meditation tend to coincide. HN will hate this, and I say this as a confirmed bachelor myself, but I wonder if parents make better managers because they are less likely to lose perspective and become stressed over things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things? Weirdly I seem to do my best managing when I've become emotionally checked out.

Turns out I'm pretty temperamental, and I privately worry that I'm just constitutionally ill-suited to management. I also struggle with the sometimes disingenuous nature of management - I'm not manipulating you, I'm motivating you! I wish I could just float around the organisation fixing problems, streamlining processes and re-jigging work systems...

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#66

Post by whstl »

thoughtspile wrote: post #33
shubhamjain wrote: post #11

> Suffering from front-end fatigue? Can't keep up with the newest shiniest frameworks and tools? Management's got you covered! The "hot new" agile / kanban / scrum methodologies are 20–30 years old. The basic meeting types (demos, dailies, 1-on-1s) have been developing for centuries. > Frankly, after 4–5 years of working in a particular tech area, you can solve the vast majority of practical problems well enough. If…

Not saying management is harder than engineering, at all. It's just another nice big area to learn something new. Big companies tend to be quite prescriptive about role boundaries, so if you're an FE engineer, you can learn design and provide input as much as you want, but you won't likely get to design a new screen from scratch instead of your regular designer. I mean, over the last few years as an IC I fiddled with…

You're mostly right, but: depends on your manager.

I do let my FE engineers do mockups when they want. It is often objected by other people who wanted to do it (but didn't) or wanted someone else to do it (but didn't have time). But whoever is trying to make me and my team's job hell, will get the same treatment from me.

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#67

Post by spangry »

warkanlock wrote: post #7

I started as an engineering manager (CTO of a small startup) a few years ago; my life has changed a lot, and for every aspect you love and hate, I share the same feelings. My additional advice here is to meditate. For real. Sit quietly long enough for your brain to switch off before making essential and impactful decisions that could harm your people. In the beginning, you become a kind of parent-to-child genius. You…

> My second advice is to always behave as if you are going to leave tomorrow.

In a similar vein, my ultimate management technique is to take leave and have my subordinates act in my position (for at least 2 weeks). It really accelerates their development and it's oddly reassuring to discover that I'm not indispensable. At the same time, I do wonder if it indicates that I'm doing something wrong given they seem to develop faster when I'm not there...

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#68

Post by badpun »

t8sr wrote: post #40
yodsanklai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ladder isn’t really taller. In my company, I think it's roughly 2-3% at L7 or more. It takes really special skills to reach that level, not just years of experience. I don't know how it compares to EM though, but it's a tall ladder! > those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work My concern as an IC is ageism. I wish that I can say that when I'm 50+. I feel EMs are a little more immune t…

There were slightly more L7 EMs than L7 SWEs every time I looked, but there's nuance to that. If the company decides it needs an L7 EM and nobody is available to promote, they'll hire externally. Your chances of being promoted into that role are reduced by the proportion of L7 EMs who were external hires. The other nuance is that those numbers don't correct for overall tenure, but I don't know how that would change t…

> Finally, getting to L7 EM is maybe 30% in your control and 70% circumstances, but that ratio is IMO inverted for ICs.

That sounds like a positive. As an EM, there's a good chance you'll be promoted to L7 via pure luck - with no abnormal amounts of effort, and with no outstanding talent for management. It sucks if you're in the minority which "deserves" the promo (is super hard working and talented), but for everyone else, it's a free lottery ticket to a higher comp.

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#69

Post by sumedh »

t43562 wrote: post #18
grilledcheez wrote: post #9

I’m a senior dev currently interviewing for a team lead position at a startup. While I consider myself highly technical, the things that frustrate me the most day-to-day are teamwork related. Lack of trust. Teammates who don’t want to talk to each other. Other seniors getting away with subpar work. Lack of clear team purpose and product vision. Lack of buy in on common engineering practices. As a people manager these…

I felt this - a lot of the problems I've experienced with teams before could have been solved by the management. In practise now I find that I am a Team Lead and yet I have far less ability to influence things than I thought. There are a host of people including my boss who want to run everything and expect me to be a rubber stamp. In fact I get into shit more because I have to speak up for people in the team who are…

> how can QA work in parallel on automated tests when they don't know what to test?

They can write the test cases based on the feature requirements with some boiler plate code in those tests

e.g TestUserSignUpIsSuccesful() {

   User.SignUp(email)
   User.Login(email)

   user_record = GetUserDetailFromDB(email)

   Assert.NotEmpty(user_record)
}

Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

#70

Post by spangry »

mattlondon wrote: post #14

The biggest pain is the people. You'd be surprised how childish grown ups can be. FFS just be adults and get along. 80% of my stress as a manager is basically solving playground squabbles between people old enough and experienced enough to know better. Then of course the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision m…

> the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision making processes, going behind your back and contradicting previous agreements, trying to short-circuit or subvert agreed processes etc etc

The worst part about this? It's just in some people's nature to do this. I'm a manager in the public service so it's basically impossible for even the CEO of my organisation to go "oh, that undermining backstabber guy is way better than spangry, let's fire spangry and replace him with undermining backstabber guy". And yet one of my reports constantly does this kind of thing anyway. It's utterly inexplicable.

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