What we've learned about hiring engineering managers • Hacker News Board

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#71

Post by fijiaarone » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

vecter wrote: post #57

> 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. They also work across a set of teams to ensure team health, knowledge sharing, business value d…

Notice how every one of these tasks are things required of the engineer to satisfy the manager. None of it contributes to the productivity of the worker. And only a small portion of it has any relevance to the productive of the company as a whole.

In other words, the engineers would not notice if the engineering manager was not there (except they’d spend less time in meetings and reporting). And the company wouldn’t notice either — unless the engineers chose to use that extra time productively without being “managed” to.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#72

Post by itsnevereasy » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 3:28 AM UTC

fijiaarone wrote: post #71

vecter wrote: post #57

> 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. They also work across a set of teams to ensure team health, knowledge sharing, business value d…

Notice how every one of these tasks are things required of the engineer to satisfy the manager. None of it contributes to the productivity of the worker. And only a small portion of it has any relevance to the productive of the company as a whole. In other words, the engineers would not notice if the engineering manager was not there (except they’d spend less time in meetings and reporting). And the company wouldn’t…

I think that's a very cynical view to take. Have you had experiences with good and bad managers? In my professional life I've had both, and I can tell you that the difference is night and day. I'm in a "bad management" spell right now (yay, academia) and I would love to have regular 1:1s and get feedback that I could actually act on.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#73

Post by Myrmornis » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 3:32 AM UTC

Engineering Managers aren’t necessary. Project Managers are, and so are experienced engineers willing to lead technically.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#74

Post by navinsylvester » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

May be the non-technical manager thing works for big companies but it might not be the case with the rest.

The problem i have seen with most non-technical managers is that they tend to crave for recognition from the tech people they manage and somehow think they can prove their worth by micro managing.

Better to have a technical manager who has better people management skills.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#75

Post by granshaw » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

codegrappler wrote: post #60

stronglikedan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is my struggle. Do you go the management route for the money or stay in development where the pressure, and pay, is lower...

Have you considered consulting? Where you have more control and leverage over your earnings? (Especially if you have a spouse whose health insurance you can use)

Or perhaps PMing (which in many scenarios can lead to better pay, and less prone to ageism, though arguably even more stressful than being a manager)

I’m mulling these potential paths myself, to climb the pay scale and fend off ageism.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#76

Post by kasey_junk » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:14 AM UTC

codegrappler wrote: post #60

stronglikedan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is my struggle. Do you go the management route for the money or stay in development where the pressure, and pay, is lower...

In my career at least it’s never been true that the pay or pressure have been lower as an engineer vs a manager.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#77

Post by kartickv » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

twright0 wrote: post #69

bb88 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So usually the EM is either "Technical" or "Non-Technical". The Technical EM is more about design, architecture and progress, and sometimes helping the team to get code out the door. The Non Technical EM is more about this. The technical EM would communicate through a PR, say instead of having 1-on-1's. Edit: They said in the article they used to give coding problems to engineering manager candidates, and then in the…

This isn't the nomenclature I'd use. What you describe as a "Technical EM" is what I'd call a "Tech Lead", who doesn't have people management responsibilities (things like 1:1s, recruiting, growth and success of the team, etc) and focuses solely on the technical execution of a team. In my book an EM is always responsible for those people management things, and I'd use "Technical EM" to describe an EM who secondarily…

I've reported for years to EMs who didn't code, and they were just pointy-haired bosses: coming up with ways to manipulate people to make progress quicker, writing performance reviews mostly based on other people's input (why, then, couldn't those people write the reviews themselves?), not understanding engineering realities like some tasks being unknown, demanding ironclad estimates, judging based on appearance rather than substance (or a mix of substance and appearance), and so on. They were just overhead.

The managers I respected were all TLs who were the most important engineer on the project.

Going back to your point, the TL would be the best person to evaluate the engineers who work under them. 1:1s, growth discussions, etc should all be conducted with someone who knows your work intimately, which means the TL. Which means the TL is a manager.

There's still room for EMs to be more technical or more people/coordination-oriented. A technical EM would take responsibility for a smaller area (backend) and go deep technically into it, having the most impact as an individual contributor, knowing all the code, being able to debug any part of the system, being the go to person for everything in that area. Everyone in the backend would report to him.

An EM can also decide to be focused more on people/coordination. They'd take responsibility for a bigger area (backend, frontend, iOS and Android) and go wide rather than deep. If you ask them how to debug an iOS app that crashes in the background, they may not be the best person for that.

But in both cases, they're managers, not TLs.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#78

Post by Rapzid » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

fijiaarone wrote: post #71

vecter wrote: post #57

> 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. They also work across a set of teams to ensure team health, knowledge sharing, business value d…

Notice how every one of these tasks are things required of the engineer to satisfy the manager. None of it contributes to the productivity of the worker. And only a small portion of it has any relevance to the productive of the company as a whole. In other words, the engineers would not notice if the engineering manager was not there (except they’d spend less time in meetings and reporting). And the company wouldn’t…

Circle CI also supposedly only hires the "best engineers".. I didn't realize the best engineers needed so much focused management.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#79

Post by teknologist » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:53 AM UTC

I've made it a personal rule to never work for a non-technical manager ever again. Having experienced both sides of the coin, I like to think I'm able to learn from past mistakes in life.

There's one "goal setting" exercise I would want you "non-technical EMs" to do - and that's to allow people an opportunity to prove themselves, to build trust, so that they can get access to more parts of the stack and contribute as best they can to the company. That does not mean working at partial capacity within a pigeon hole you know nothing about but have been assigned to create for me anyway.

Trust can be tough to build, but there's no substitute for going through a real exercise of proving yourself "in the field". All of the 1-1s, goal setting, OKRs, and whatever, are unnecessary when all of those things can be determined from a display of dedication through actual, real work. All it takes is an opportunity to show what you're all about.

I maintain that it is very unlikely that you understand what this opportunity means to a developer if you are non-technical.

Disappointing to see this from CircleCI.

Re: What we've learned about hiring engineering managers

#80

Post by Rapzid » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

e3b0c wrote: post #48

gwbas1c wrote: post #9

I firmly believe great software engineering managers are people who are adequate developers, but have excellent people skills. Why? They need to understand enough software at a high level to be able to manage, instead of turning lower-level details into management problems. But, they also need to find software development frustrating enough that they are happy to not have to do it every day.

I recently realized that there are roughly two kinds of people, namely people who are good at symbolic/abstract ideas and people who are good at real/physical/touchable things, which can be considered orthogonal to the extrovert/introvert categorization. For a software engineering team, I find it tends to be suboptimal to have a physical-thinking oriented manager who dislikes abstract, symbolic notions, even though t…

In my experience there are two kinds of people; those who are good at many different things, and those who believe there are roughly two kinds of people.

I mean that only half jokingly. One of the reasons I like to work at smaller organizations these days is the pervasive belief in larger orgs that somebody has to fall into one of two categories. This is often rationalized as a way to identify strengths, however more often than not IMHO it's due to insecurity in ones own deficits.