What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

In short, don't give managers the same interview as engineers. Sorry but seems pretty obvious.

Developers can acquire 'real manager' skills. Jerry Weinberg, from volume 2 of 'Quality Software Management"

"In the four decades I've spent in the software business, I've learned that there are three fundamental abilities needed to do a quality job of managing software engineering:

* "the ability to understand complex situations so you can plan a project and then observe and act in order to keep the project going according to plan, or modify the plan;

* "the ability to observe what's happening and to understand the significance of our observations in terms of effective adaptive actions;

* "the ability to act appropriately in difficult interpersonal situations, even though you may be confused, or angry, or so afraid that you want to run away and hide."

Though I have all four volumes of QSM, I lifted the quote from here: http://wiki.c2.com/?QualitySoftwareManagement

I have worked for Intel for a bit. I haven't stayed there for long but I have learned a lot about how great engineering management works.

Best managers I met had almost nil technical knowledge or if they did they were not advertising it very much. They were gardeners. They made sure you were occupied, you provided value, you did what you liked and all projects that needed staff were allocated staff. They will meet with you every week for mandatory half an hour 1:1 chat to make sure everything is heading in the right direction and have general sense of how happy you are and how happy others are about you. If the manager thinks you are doing well that's about how much supervision you are getting.

I like this style A LOT.

Or, like me, they love development and don't find it frustrating, but they would rather follow the money.

> Engineering managers at CircleCI are now dedicated to people management: focused on development of a set of engineers, tech leads, and team leads. They hold regular 1:1s and career growth conversations with the engineers who report to them, and are responsible for goal setting, feedback, coaching, and mentoring for them.

Do you really need this? Developers will have their own set of mentors, coaches as well as people in their network that will help them grow if they are interested in remaining relevant. Why one earth, would you spend so much money on EMs when developers should be given time to think about what they want to do themselves.

The title should be changed to engineering nannies. Furthermore, having non-engineers as engineering managers _can_ work, but it can be a risky move if the person in question does not have enough respect and empathy for the work an engineer does.

It saddens me to see the continued emphasis on hierarchy throughout the industry. Best way to support an engineer is to give him or her a fixed budget for development, and time to actually learn new things and not have their skills stagnate.

I think we need to go back to team leads having hiring and firing power. At the end of the day, they code and are down in the trenches with the rest of the engineers.