In the trenches: on being an Engineering Manager

https://blog.digital-horror.com/blog/in-the-trenches-what-it-means-to-be-an-engineering-manager/

by juxhindb • 1 year ago

82 49 1 year ago

roenxi3• 1 year ago

Whether it’s debates like the shift from master to main in git or deeper discussions around inclusivity in language (master/slave rename in redis), these things can shape team culture.

Well, that'll certainly do something to team culture. If an EM seemed to be significantly invested in this sort of decisions then I would form strong opinions about their ability to prioritise.

This is just not an issue that is going to determine the success of the company. If, in some amazing conjunction of circumstance, it does there are terrible terrible problems in the hiring pipeline or in who is being promoted to leadership positions because it suggests the company is a barely controlled powderkeg.

And, frankly, this is not what culture looks like. This is preformative name changes to provide a distraction from whatever the real cultural activity is - which is determined by what the EM rewards and punishes; not by what they signal in low-impact cosmetic policies. That is branding - which is important but not a fraction as important as culture.

twelve402• 1 year ago

Yeah if they have time for "deeper discussions" about this, just run. Apparently, it's higher up in the article than the "choose postgres" managerial advice lol

rectang• 1 year ago

Fine by me. Tech companies can sort themselves into groups: those where such discussions are welcomed and those who run from them.

And I'm happy to see a manager put the "people" section above the section on "technology":

As an EM, your role isn’t just about managing the technical—it’s about understanding the people behind the work.

dijksterhuis7• 1 year ago

You're seemingly presenting this as an option between two binary cases.

paraphrasing my impression of the vibe of your comment into the two distinct options:

Your collective opinions about how we work as a team matter
You're only here to work on things that are considered a priority

In reality, there is always some nuance/middle ground available

Your opinions about how we work here matter. If this is something that requires a full rewrite it's probably going to be a no. But if it's not a major change causing a lot of work, we can possibly take a look at it.

If you've set up CI/CD properly, changing the name of the default branch can be done in less than an hour. Source: I did it at $last_company for circa 10x repos in about an hour. This was not related to inclusivity, but it did involve a discussion about whether we should switch or not: why; how; pros; cons.

Having a conversation about changing due to inclusivity is just a different meeting with a different why, how, pros, cons. One of the why/pros arguments might be -- that's now the accepted general default for most (external) repositories so keeping it as master would be kinda weird and might end up needing some explanation during onboarding -- i.e. more work somewhere else later on.

twelve402• 1 year ago

i think this is actually good advice when rephrased as: you are now a low-to-middle manager (that is called out specifically), so you neither call the shots nor are you mainly measured on your daily tech contributions, so from now on you can no longer avoid whimsical, irrelevant BS that is a waste of time like debating the branch names, because fielding that is a part of your job description now, so you need to embrace it and handle these conversations with a happy smile on your face, so that the people who actually move the project forward are not distracted by it.

fallingknife3• 1 year ago

But changing the name of the default branch is not worth one hour of eng time, much less the annoyance of the other team members. I understand that the term "master" is offensive to upper class white people, but I just don't care. They need to stop acting like crybabies and get on with doing their jobs.

zug_zug2• 1 year ago

I think this is a decent article, with some distilled wisdom... Though I also think it has some repeating status-quo mumbo-jumbo.

Every time somebody says a soft-science claim and presents it as a fact, I try to vet it with this heuristic: It can't just sound good, or satisfying, but is it actually true? Imagine whether a case can be made for the exact opposite statement, or whether there may be circumstances that the statement is obviously false.

For example, once a principal engineer asserted rather confidently, "At my level, the most important work you can do is usually in Jira." That's a claim that's hard to assess with any objectivity, but I can certainly imagine a different principal engineer feeling the exact opposite, and I can certainly think of many companies where they wouldn't hire/want a principal engineer primarily for Jira work.

Back to this article, any time somebody says "A manager is X" or a "staff is X" I think to myself... well can I think of a company that would want managers who focus almost entirely on not X? The answer is almost always yes.

jahsome2• 1 year ago

As someone whose been sort of "up and down" the role ladder, and is very intentionally closer to the bottom than the top for right now, I think I am disproportionately perceiving the wisdom in that jira comment.

I don't think it's the _only_ important thing, but I think I do agree with the sentiment that it may be the most important.

Personally I'm all about diversity of perspectives when it comes to building a team. I would be thrilled to have both a principal who loves jira, and one who doesn't. Someone who tries to straddle both just strikes me as neutered.

When it comes to roles, I always end up back to the Ron Swanson quote "never half ass two things; whole ass one thing."

I do agree with you though, one-size fits all definitions are almost all laughably based on "vibes."

Then again, isn't management pretty much just vibe cultivation?

zug_zug2• 1 year ago

I think it only takes a few moments of skepticism to show that "Is X the most important thing about being a Y?" doesn't mean anything.

Being good at something obviously comes down to multiple different skills (manager may require social skills, writing skills, perception, business acumen, intuition, etc). So to try to ask which of those skills is "most" important is a poorly-defined problem, because there isn't such a thing as an 1-unit of of writing skill to weigh against 1-unit of intuition skill.

For whatever reason, a lot of people are drawn to these types of oversimplifications that are so drastic they become meaningless.

austin-cheney4• 1 year ago

I really wish people would stop calling software developers engineers because they aren’t.

A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer

Never does that occur in software. Most people employed to write software struggle to use giant tools to put text on screen and cannot measure things. That isn’t engineering. By the time a developer does graduate to a level commensurate with engineering we call them senior principles to distinguish them from the false engineers.

fffrantz• 1 year ago

Also, and it's striking to me that there never was a crackdown on this, but in a lot of countries, you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you have an engineering degree from a vetted higher-ed institution and are part of your provincial/state engineers' association.

For example, in N.S., your job title cannot contain the word engineer unless you're registered as an engineer with Engineers Nova Scotia, the provincial regulatory body. And to get the EIT status (engineer in training, the provisional period before becoming a professional engineer), you must hold a CEAB-accredited undergraduate degree. So, software engineers rarely exist and it's mostly software developers in N.S.

jmillikin3• 1 year ago

There's a difference between software developers who glue together libraries to build cat picture voting sites and software developers who write real-time avionics firmware. The second type of developer can reasonably claim to be "software engineers" -- blueprints for a garden shed and for a skyscraper are distinguished by content, not medium.

Between those two limits the line must be drawn somewhere, and honest people will disagree about exactly where, but it seems reasonable to claim that people working in most software development positions of interest to Hacker News are closer to the latter than the former.

If you want to claim that junior developers are apprentices (journeymen? are apprentices interns?) and senior/staff/principal/whatever are engineers then that's fine (if idiosyncratic), but that's not what other people mean when they say or hear "software developers aren't engineers".

fallingknife3• 1 year ago

Reasons why nobody worthy of the title engineer should take this definition seriously:

1. It is recursive

2. It equates training and education with competence

3. It was written by a bureaucracy

sevensor2• 1 year ago

As someone who holds degrees in Real Engineering, I don’t care what computer programmers call themselves. I agree that most of the time, Software Engineer is an aspirational title, but you could say that about a fair number of electrical engineers too. You’re just not close enough to the field to see what marginal competence looks like. For that matter, Doctor was once an aspirational title for physicians, having been reserved for those licensed to give instruction in church doctrine. My point being, it’s fine. Nobody is ever going to confuse a software engineer for a real engineer, any more than you’re going to ask an MD about the nature of the Trinity.

odiroot• 1 year ago

Sorry, not going to stop calling myself that. I have a diploma to prove it. It is in no way worse (or better) than any other diploma issued by my university.

BikiniPrince• 1 year ago

Welcome to being a line manager.

dijksterhuis7• 1 year ago

Nice write up. Liked the thing on spotlighting. Experienced that in a non-dev role before and never really realised what that was at the time.

Some bits reminded me of some of the lessons in the linux kernel management style guide, so gonna link it here in case someone hasn't come across it before.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/management-st...

AllegedAlec• 1 year ago

Before reading: making the text highlight colour the same as the background is a choice.

drorn• 1 year ago

This needs to be discussed more.

Great article though.

bilvar3• 1 year ago

In my experience engineering managers have been just exception handlers, not leaders. If they can handle the exception by finding the right person to delegate to its fine, otherwise they rethrow so that that it bubbles up and the next level of management can catch it.

Generally, they never made any real decisions or have any real vision to inspire with and execute.

withinboredom2• 1 year ago

Are you on a team with strong personalities that actually lead? If so, then that manager is probably a bug in their ear about what the business wants. I love and hate managing those types of team because it is literally like herding cats. When they are going in the right direction, it is a blast. When they disagree with you, it can be painful. Especially if you have no real teeth to provide negative feedback.

Leading a team when everyone is just "there for a paycheck" is much easier, but not as much fun. You basically just need to make sure all the tickets are lined up and everyone is working on the right things.

dfee• 1 year ago

For those looking to transition into leadership,

My biggest pet peeve in this industry is the self anointing of the “leadership” attribute.

Its management. Just management. Some managers may be leaders, but most aren’t. Some ICs may be leaders. Most aren’t. Some politicians may be leaders, but most aren’t.

Or maybe I just never grasped what leadership means. Either in the context of the world or our industry.

cbsmith• 1 year ago

I'm with you. There is a world of difference between leadership and management. Plenty of engineers who are good leaders.

t43562• 1 year ago

Cultural fit to me is a completely inadequate term to describe what I'm thinking about in an interview.

Are they going to be an arsehole? This is my biggest worry after dealing with a couple, first as people above me then as members of my first team as a combined team lead/line manager. This is about being able to be reasoned with and not destroying team morale. I have always tended to feel that being right is more important than harmony but over time I realised how many of my "right" decisions were balanced by wrong ones and however many times I thought I saved the team with some good idea, someone else did it just as much with another one.

In other words I'm on the very edge, at best, of being the arsehole myself. Someone who is further over the line than me definitely makes it miserable to go to work. I want my team to get on reasonably and each get a feeling of fullfillment out of the day and feel respected which requires good behaviour from me but also from them. I perhaps wouldn't want to say this to my own boss (who is ok) but I really care about this more than about the company itself.

Companies have no loyalty and will make you redundant at the drop of a hat. They also sometimes do silly things which doom them and prevent you from being able to save the situation. You get given impossible things to do and stress out trying to do them. While this is happening, however, we can have a reasonable week without undue drama, fights, humiliation or fear. There's no reason that good software can't be the end result but more importantly you'll have an experienced team at the end who get better and better at working together and are potentially going to stay on.

In the trenches: on being an Engineering Manager

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