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

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

#131

Post by surajrmal »

gmfawcett wrote: post #110
t8sr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many different ways to grow beyond staff engineer: - Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This requires sticking around for longer than most people, maybe 10 years or more. - Have impact across the industry. Maintain a kernel subsystem, run a C++ subcommittee, etc. - Be a TL for multiple teams, because you have experience and a plan the other TLs can get behind. - Wear multiple hats…

> Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This is risky advice. :) Context matters. It's going to sound very appealing to a self-motivated, mobile IC, and could work very well in orgs that value individual effort. But in many orgs, solo experts playing non-fungible roles are very big red flags, and can draw negative management attention. Maybe I could build a team around you... but I might not h…

It might be better to phrase it as an architectural expert. Being in a position where you understand how everything works together better than anyone else is valuable. You can't necessarily train any other person to have such diverse knowledge, nor outsource it. This might lead to you being able to solve otherwise unfixable bugs, but that's more of a side effect.

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

#132

Post by sorokod »

deutschepost wrote: post #80
sorokod wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience) In Band of Brothers TV series there is a plot line where an NCO is promoted to be an officer. Soon after he is moved to a different unit because the Army has a policy to distance such promotions from their organic units.

Also there is a comment by Major Winters that this is a stupid rule, because Lipton is one of the best and most respected platoon leads in the company.

True, Winters indeed said that but the interesting question is why would the Army have such a policy in the first place (I assume that here as in other things BoB sticks to the realities of the time).

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

#133

Post by zeroonetwothree »

fabianholzer wrote: post #46
asQuirreL wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles: The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more. I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management r…

> The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I've sworn to myself, that the moment that this idiotic idea get introduced in the "performance management" process at the place I work, will be the day that I'll start to send out resumes. Even if it were handled lottery style ("the short straw") I would not cut slack to either manager or company for such an indignity.

IME in ~20 years I’ve never been on a team where there wasn’t someone underperforming (I acknowledge sometimes it was me!). So while I agree it’s stupid to force a curve, it also doesn’t seem realistic when every manager claims their entire team is great.

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

#134

Post by zeroonetwothree »

yodsanklai wrote: post #36
t8sr wrote: post #16

I have been a manager four times, twice at FAANGs. I disagree with a lot that the author says: - The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was…

> 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…

Ageism doesn’t seem to apply so much at the higher levels. At my company I see many L7+ in the 50+ range.

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

#135

Post by zeroonetwothree »

sorokod wrote: post #129
Fripplebubby wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this seem like a useful bias to have?

The word bias has a negative connotation so perhaps you mean something else. Given two EMs, one that came organically from a team and another that came "from the outside" and spent a few months working with a team - what advantages and disadvantages would the first EM have over the second?

IME internally promoted EMs are 4x better. They understand what problems the team is facing, how the product works, the various interactions with other teams, and the company processes. It takes at least a year for an external hire to ramp up to that level of familiarity.

I will say that for very dysfunctional teams it could be valuable to get an outside perspective which can do more severe change but hopefully this is less common.

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

#136

Post by robertlagrant »

asQuirreL wrote: post #39
t8sr wrote: post #16

I have been a manager four times, twice at FAANGs. I disagree with a lot that the author says: - The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was…

A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles: The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more. I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management r…

> The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken

I didn't realise places still did this. Even Microsoft stopped, and I think acknowledged that it was crippling to them in the 2000s as talent rushed to less silly companies.

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

#137

Post by atomicnumber3 »

rcbdev wrote: post #37
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've noticed the most effective managers I've worked with came from calm low-stress countries with similar work cultures - maybe the key to solving crunch and burnout is to create a regulatory environment where a worker's entire livelihood (health, rent, loan payments towards public universities etc.) is not solely dependent on keeping their job?

"But of people aren't mortally afraid, they won't work hard enough!" - American capitalism

I once had a manager (not my direct manager) tell me "maybe some fear is good?" No, it's not. Fear is useful for outrunning predators, but it is a useless emotion for programming computers. Unfortunately that particular phrase had come to that manager from the CEO, so, yeah. That company is a mess of short termism and hasty irrational decision-making and constant thrashing / "why can't we execute on big projects". It's because everyone is so scared that they're just trying to survive, and rule number 1 of surviving is to avoid large unpredictable projects.

I detest this whole line of thought because it's completely at odds with the reality - that people, and especially programmers, are creative and inventive by nature and are the last people who would "do nothing" if not afraid.

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

#138

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

pipes wrote: post #130
t8sr wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked on security, databases, some distributed systems, a couple of video games, AR/VR and some ML systems, mostly connected to database and data pipelines. Knowing what the kernel is likely doing underneath has been useful in all those domains. More than that, being able to set up a production environment by yourself is hugely useful. If you know the internals, the complexity of a lot of middleware kind of c…

Are there any books etc that you could recommend on Linux internals. I am mostly write c# code, and I didn't do computer science, I mostly self taught. I recently set myself the task of learning some c as I was finding that I was hitting a brick wall when it came to trying to learn more lower level concepts. I want to work my way through computer systems a programmers perspective : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-S…

If you're the kind of guy who likes to work through one 1000+ page behemoth at a time, I can recommend The Linux Programming Interface specifically. As a nice secondary bonus, the code examples are all in good old fashioned C, so you can compile and run them to test things out as you please. :)

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

LtWorf wrote: post #76
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…

In my experience most "big picture thinkers" are actually just saying things with no idea of what they mean, what the consequences are, how to actually do them, and why their idea is bad.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by elevatedastalt »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #6
askonomm wrote: post #4

And here I am, 12 years into my career as a software engineer, never, ever, wanting to be a manager. I just want to build things, I don't want to manage them. I see what it is like to be a manager as I work closely with them, and I just don't find it appealing at all. As a senior engineer, my words also often matter, but I don't have the huge amount of responsibility that comes with being a manager, which is nice. I…

Senior engineer is fairly low. At some point you may get tired of stagnating salary and being told what to do all the time. They are higher technical positions that have no or very little management responsibilities (up to senior principal engineer, architect, etc). It depends also on the company and how much they value you. Best I have seen is engineer with PhD and decades of experience be the research/architecture…

Agreed. It's nice to be "Senior engineer" when you are 28. Not when you are 38 and being lorded over and over-ridden by "Staff Engineers" with half your experience.
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