A bad EM can do so much more damage than a bad IC. I don't think that's talked about enough. In my now very long career I've had 1 great manager, a few good/decent ones, and a lot of lousy ones. The lousy ones just make the job so much harder and sometimes outright miserable. A bad EM coupled with junior ICs can be particularly bad combo. At least as I got older I came to realize I can work with bad managers and help move things towards a better place, or bail if I feel it's hopeless.
From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
141–150 of 208 posts
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Maybe. I get that being the best source of information might be a job-security feature. But it doesn't necessarily translate into growth opportunities. From a manager's POV, I might view you as a hoarder of information, a silo builder, a poor communicator, or poor team player. You might get job security out of this, because your knowledge will cement you in place. Why would we promote the linchpin out of the system they are holding together? Or it might just draw scrutiny to the larger business risks of your system, as I mentioned earlier.
If you could leverage your knowledge in a business-strategic way -- e.g., empower a team to work better by clarifying, simplifying, and standardizing the architecture -- you might draw attention as a future leader. (If you have a selfish boss who will steal credit, a little more political work might be needed alongside this.)
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. Going from zero to one has very little to do with engineering management. Being able to hack out code quickly and being comfortable talking to potential customers (preferably not in that order) are the most important things and not at all related to being an EM. It's no guarantee that you'll get to hire anyone to manage…
> I also found it weird that the author thought being an EM is a good path to being an entrepreneur. This was the pitch from my manager that led to me moving into an EM role. He knew I was interested in doing a startup in the future, but I didn't have experience with people management. I don't think it's necessarily a great path to entrepreneurship, but if you are solid on the engineering side it's a good skillset to…
If your company has any chance of success you will be managing other engineers.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#144And 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…
I was the manager for my team for 6 months. It’s not that bad in the end but it’s a completely different job. I’m going back to IC next month. This was my first and probably last stint in my 15 year career
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#145Earlier 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…
I recommend consuming everything Brendan Gregg produces. His work is mostly around kernel performance profiling and tracing, but you can learn a lot from just doing that. Also, the vast majority of time when you need to dive into kernel internals it is for performance reasons.
https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
If you prefer physical books “Systems Performance” by Brendan is good as well.
As the sister comment says, Linux Programming Interface is really good for learning linux system programming topics but it is mostly focused on user space.
For more userspace stuff I like Chris Wellons‘ blog at nullprogram.com
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Frankly I don’t care. If they want to take the responsibility then go for it
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would either of you mind expanding on this? What kind of roles have you held?
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…
> Similarly, you can figure out how almost anything works with strace.
I recently had an example of this higher in the stack than anything you listed: A co-worker couldn't install node_modules because yarn appeared to be running an older version no matter what he tried to upgrade it - turned out there was a hidden config file in his home directory none of us knew about that could tell yarn to use a different version of itself.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Promotions on the engineering ladder " when ready without needing to wait for the star to align " is because very often those promotions only entail better title and pay. Periodic promotions keep people happy. But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.
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…
Most of your points are requirements for staff not “beyond staff”
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#149I’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
The real question is: why aren't they in the same team?
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#150> If you don't have anything urgent, you can go lay on the grass for half a day, thinking about the future of your project or something Is this something common? I'm working as IC at FAANG for 6+ years in different teams, but I've never really experienced something like this. I've always been working on stuff that should have been finished yesterday.
> stuff that should have been finished yesterday.
I’m sure it depends on your org, but you can often choose how seriously to take that pressure. I’m also a FAANG IC and work is usually pretty relaxed. It’s a marathon, not trying to burn myself out. You really have to do near-zero work for a long time to get fired and it seems like promotions happen on a pretty similar schedule regardless of how hard people work.
Keep your commitments, but commit to less. If you want to get promoted do one good piece of L+1 work instead of trying to cram in more L work than everyone else. If your manager tries to manufacture stress to make you work harder, find a better manager.