Engineering Manager - Managing People, Developing Talent

Şimdi Ne Yapmalı

Açıklaması şöyle

Having the hard conversation when two engineers have a conflict that's affecting the whole team. Figuring out that someone is burned out before they quit, not after. Helping a mid-level engineer figure out what they actually want in their career, not just what the promotion criteria say. Shielding the team from organizational chaos that would otherwise eat their focus.

Eskiden Engineering Manager Ne İş Yapardı?

Açıklaması şöyle

EM was the hub of everything. 

- He ran standups. 

- He ran retros. 

- He ran planning. 

- He tracked velocity. 

- He reported status to leadership. 

- He handled 1:1s with every engineer on the team. 

- He managed hiring. 

- He dealt with HR stuff when someone had an issue.

Bunların bir kısmını artık yapmaya gerek yok.

Standup

Açıklaması şöyle

We stopped doing synchronous standups eight months ago. We post async updates in Slack. A bot summarizes them. Nobody misses the meeting. Our EM used to facilitate standups and now there's nothing to facilitate.

Velocity tracking, Status reporting

Açıklaması şöyle

Velocity tracking. We have a Linear dashboard that shows velocity, cycle time, PR throughput, deployment frequency. Updated in real time. Our EM used to spend hours every sprint compiling this stuff into slides for leadership. Now the VP just looks at the dashboard directly. The middleman step disappeared.

Status reporting. Same thing. Leadership has access to the same dashboards we do. They can see what's in progress, what's blocked, what shipped. Our EM used to translate this into narrative form for weekly updates. Two months ago the VP told him to stop sending the weekly email because "I can see everything in Linear."

Sprint planning

Açıklaması şöyle

We still do this. But the tech lead runs it now. He knows the codebase better than our EM does. He knows which tasks are actually complex and which ones look complex but aren't. Our EM sits in the meeting but mostly listens. I watched him last sprint. He spoke three times in 90 minutes.

1:1s

Açıklaması şöyle

We still do this. But the tech lead runs it now. He knows the codebase better than our EM does. This is the one thing that hasn't been replaced. Our EM still does 1:1s with everyone. But I'll be honest. Half the engineers on the team treat 1:1s as a formality. They say things are fine, talk about something surface level for fifteen minutes, and go back to coding. The 1:1s that actually help are the ones where someone is struggling or frustrated. Those happen maybe once a month per engineer. The rest are calendar filler.

Hiring

Açıklaması şöyle

We haven't hired anyone in seven months. So this whole category of work just doesn't exist right now.

Otomasyon

Açıklaması şöyle. Yani bazı şeylerin otomasyona geçmesi için çaba sarf eder

... as an engineering manager (EM) on the Interfaces team in October 2022, I was focused on organizing the work in our Jira board and setting up automation to streamline the software development lifecycle.

Teknik Lider vs Engineering Manager

Şeklen şöyle

Açıklaması şöyle

- The manager should delegate the team technical leadership to the technical lead and get out of the weeds. Managers should not fall off the bus and forget decades of technical background. However, managing is fundamentally a policy job, and managers should respect boundaries. Anything else is micromanaging and breaking trust.

- The technical lead should delegate the career, team growth, communications, and coordination work to the engineering manager and focus on architecture, technical choices, technical direction, and helping to drive execution.