In the trenches: on being an Engineering Manager

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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...

> 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.

Welcome to being a line manager.

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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.