[Timberwolf]

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield.

A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against InfoSec teams stuck in the '80s so the CI/CD toolchain can deploy to production, negotiating freedom with a CTO who wants to specify everything to the level of individual data structures, convincing HR that no, we really do need to pay for a good senior and not hire someone with 2 years experience in a configuration galley because they're cheap.

On top of that there's the process battles; in older firms, all those interminable "but can't they just use Waterfall?" meetings that go on for hours and are spawned every time there's a minor project manager reshuffle. In newer ones, the ongoing fight of, "you can't address debt or build foundations for the future, we need features, if it can't be done in less than a week it's not MVP enough"

There's a fine balance in that I think a good EM lets their team know this is going on and get involved where they want without dumping all the crap downward. Not least because they should be coaching their team leads in that responsibility, so they can take the career step when they want.

Going back to the article, as others mentioned it does read a little bit more like a "why I'm frustrated with my manager" than a "how to be a good EM", but it's easy to misconstrue the meaning of text.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Absolutely. This is especially relevant, these days, when HR departments are basically taking an actively adversarial role towards employees.

I used to get crap from HR, if I chose to resolve personnel issues without involving them.

The problem was, they had only two speeds: Do Nothing, or KILL ALL THE BABIES. Nothing in between; despite their constant harping about how they were "on our side." Their job was to keep the C-suite happy. It was absolutely amazing how many rules that were "hard and fast," and "applies to everyone here," would suddenly fail to be implemented, when it was a C-suite doing the rulebreaking.

There were also companywide policies, meant to appease union employees, that would also apply to the other 90% of the company that wasn't union (and thus, did not have the mitigating benefits), or that were in place to manage hourly employees, but also applied to exempt (from a life) employees.

It was my job to try to mask that kind of crap from my employees, and I got called on the carpet a few times, because of it. I would do it all over again, if I had to.

[29athrowaway]

HR job is to prevent unions or any form of collective bargaining and protect the company from litigation.

Susan Fowler's story can give you an idea of how HR works... https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

[ryandrake]

Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I think in 20 years of working at multiple companies (as an IC), I've never really even had contact with HR besides my first and last days. I don't think I could even name a single HR person I've ever met. They tend to be there to hand me the benefits literature, then at the end I give my badge back to them, and that's it. What on earth is happening in companies where HR is part of the daily life of a standard "3rd engineer from the left" employee?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I was a manager, so I had plenty of interaction with HR.

For the most part, they weren't actually bad people, but their job was to be fairly two-faced. I think it caused a lot of issues. HR had the highest turnover in the company.

[wccrawford]

The last time I had dealings with HR, it was because I had reported that my boss did something illegal, and I told the head of the company.

They tell me to deal with HR, and HR tells me that I should have talked to my boss first.

In short, the heads of the company didn't want to hear about the illegal stuff, and HR was their shield for it.

My boss actually told me, "I could get fired for what you said." It wasn't what he did that was the problem in his mind, but that I told people about it.

I didn't last much longer at the company. They didn't fire me, but they also stopped giving me raises. When I asked for one, I was asked if I could "wait a year". I found a new job for a 40% raise 6 months later.

[nogabebop23]

Additions:

* the crap shield is made of Gor-tex so you need to protect the team but also expunge the toxins that build up within. Not all crap is generated outside of the team but you need to get ride of it.

* the crap shield is transparent so the team can see what's happening outside without being covered in it

* the crap shield is retractable so you can let some into the team's atmosphere. Not enough to cause harm, but keep them grounded in the imperfect world in which their work will live.

* the crap shield has a window lock, and you the manager are in control of it. This is for the same reason the driver of a car can lock the windows in the back seat to stop the kids from opening them when you're in the car wash.

[aprdm]

Totally. I sometimes made the mistake of "venting downwards" or wanting to be more transparent with the team and it wasn't a good experience.

Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company or of someone, it isn't good for anyone.

They also lack the context you have and jump to a lot of conclusions that are usually unfair.

It's a hard job!

[Aeolun]

> Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company

They don’t? In my experience IC’s do most of this venting about horrible processes.

[aprdm]

It is very different when it is between ICs and when it is someone who is more of a manager doing the same with the ICs.

I like this quote by Jason Cox,

- Great leaders are optimistic – They are hopeful, confident, and positive.

[drchopchop]

Agreed. The end goal is usually to make developers as productive as possible, which means a) giving them large contiguous blocks of coding time, and b) removing roadblocks (i.e. crap)

The "crap" can be politics, legal, ancient IT practices, useless meetings, constant demands for status/updates, bickering around cost/budgets, hiring, buying time to fight tech debt, and a whole bunch of other things.

[peterwoerner]

The #1 job of a manager (in all fields) is to keep his people working. It doesn't matter if it is engineering, manufacturing or the local burger joint. A managers #1 job is to keep his people working.

[madeofpalk]

To keep their people working. Women can be managers as well.

Edit: I understand other languages might have gendered nouns for words like Manager, and when learning English it can be difficult to break these habits.

In English, we have gender neutral pronouns to use when were talking about "generic people" where the gender isnt known. Managers are not just male, so when a sentence is gendered like that I struggle to parse it because I think I've missed a the reason why this hypothetical manager is male.

[eklavya]

Maybe we should lighten up a bit and not bring in politics into everything. The writer could be a male and this would be natural for them just like it would be for a female and her.

[madeofpalk]

How is it “political” to acknowledge that women can be managers?

[eklavya]

Can you point me to the part where I or the original poster said that women can or can’t be managers? Is that what was being discussed at all before?

Please reflect on whether this is the best you can contribute to a thread about being an engineering manager.

[halfmatthalfcat]

Using male pronouns instead of genderless/more inclusive pronouns in your speech is indicative of a bad managing style (or just bad style all together). As a manager you should be inclusive of all genders both directly and indirectly, which includes how you use whatever language you speak.

The people you manage could easily identify with a gender that is not physically obvious and using incorrect pronouns leads to a less inclusive and potentially more hostile workplace. This is Management 101.

[halfmatthalfcat]

This is a privileged assumption.

[textgel]

Oh but not trans of course, so polite of you to leave them out in your heteronormative take on the world.

I would have hoped most were aware of the pressures the transgender community is under and would offer more care than such casual takes on gender in the workplace.

A good place to start https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/trevor-support-ce...

You don't have to be perfect but you could at least try to be better.

[madeofpalk]

Trans people can be women as well, so saying "Women can be managers as well" does not exclude trans people because female-identifiying trans people are still "women".

It's not totally inclusive of people who identify outside of the binary genders, but saying "women can be mangers" does not exclude men or people who don't identify as either. I hope my point still remains though that using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun is a perfectly easy way to be inclusive.

> your heteronormative take on the world

I mean i am a (cis) gay male, so I don't think I have a heteronormative take on the world, but you do you.

(acknowledging this comment seems to be puposefully trolly, like a "false flag" troll)

[textgel]

Oh so now you get to decide how they should self identify; how very generous of you.

At this stage you really need to stop and think about what you are doing and who you are hurting; they're just words to you but they're a lifetime of hurt to others.

Be . Better.

> I mean i am a (cis) gay male, so I don't think I have a heteronormative take on the world, but you do you.

You really want to call upon the equivalent of the "some of my best friends are black" excuse? I can't even...

[madeofpalk]

If you have some constructive feedback on how I could have worded what i said to be better, I’m definitely open for it. I’m always trying to be better.

Perhaps it would be been better (for a number of reasons) to say “not all managers are male” instead?

[aynsof]

But you need to take a very long position on this.

Someone's beloved cat died? That's your problem, because it's affecting the way they work. You need to help them through it.

Someone's working well? That's great, but you can't rest on your laurels. You need to help them grow into a more senior position so they don't get bored or disillusioned.

[danielheath]

That’s a “utilisation” view, and it’s a terrible model.

People who already have work to do are not responsive to new input.

By ensuring everyone is working all the time you also ensure nobody can respond to the unexpected.

The counterpoint to utilisation thinking is latency thinking (“how fast can our team respond to requests”).

An instance of utilisation thinking: “Our roads are not always full of traffic, how can we get more cars onto them?”. This is clearly absurd; why is “developers have work to do” a goal when “roads have cars on them” is not?

[pojzon]

What to do when people dont deliver ? In my current company mgrs say “we did our best”, when in fact I see ppl slacking as hell (days of doing nothing).

[peterwoerner]

I didn't say that it was the only part of the job, just that it was the most important thing. Hopefully you have some knobs you can turn. At my current company if people can't deliver you try to hook them up with more mentors and if they still can't deliver, you stop giving them direct labor to work on and eventual force them out because they don't have any work and they stop getting pay raises (or you fire them usually they push them out).

[halfmatthalfcat]

s/his/their/

[yowlingcat]

Hmm. I think the #1 job of a manager is to hire, motivate and let go of people the right way. It's up to them to keep working, and it's up to the manager to figure out how to do that no more often than required.

If you do it right, it's like 90% teambuilding and 10% line management, IMO. When that ratio is inverted is where you see mediocre management.

[dionian]

I would agree and add: working on the right thing and delivering results

[LeifCarrotson]

Absolutely! A manager can either be an umbrella to shelter under, or they can be a shit funnel.

Great work gets done when you can give your engineers a hard problem (or a long list of easy problems) and let them put their nose to the grindstone to get it done, while deflecting the rabble of inane ideas for new features, shifting deadlines, office politics, customer/supplier relations, etc. etc. etc. If a manager sidesteps all those, and passes them to the engineer, there will be have no time or energy for the actual work. If they are a single point of contact where an engineer can pull in a prioritized task list and push out questions and results, that's an ideal environment to get things done.

Unfortunately, other managers which interact with these EMs can sometimes have a hard time telling the former from the latter, and have a hard time evaluating the quality of the work/difficulty of the problems being solved, so the only visible difference is the happiness of the engineering team and the accomplishments that were made.

[x87678r]

I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

[pkaye]

This is why I decided to stopped doing engineering manager roles. Working on the crap stuff all the times is no fun. And the longer you do it the more your technical skills fall behind. I'm fine with the technical roles along with mentoring the new engineers.

[pc86]

"The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous.

The best managers I've ever worked for have all, without fail, worked daily to keep as much nonsense away from the team as possible. The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.

[balls187]

> The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.

It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.

[hitekker]

Yep, a manager can focus on climbing the ladder once they offload their responsibilities onto the people beneath them. If their boss can't detect this abdication, or worse, doesn't want to see it, then the manager's opportunism will naturally be rewarded, and will encourage the opportunism of other managers in the org.

[Aeolun]

> It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.

And thus the rain of crap continues.

[x87678r]

Curiously in your opinion who ended up being more successful?

[pc86]

I think in general most companies, especially large ones, reward managers who push crap onto their directs. Anecdotally, the best manager I've ever had viciously protected us from executive nonsense, and he's also the most successful by far (and he was before I started). I don't think that's the norm, though.

[vonmoltke]

> "The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous.

I agree that it isn't objective, but how is believing it is disingenuous?

[pc86]

Management isn't math. It's not a science, and there are successful managers who push as much crap onto their directs as they can, and there are successful managers who take as much of that crap as they can to prevent it from reaching their teams.

[nogabebop23]

>> The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

This is true of "crap work" (i.e. stupid bugs, wading through documentation) but not of the crap external to the team. Your job as the manager is to deal with it all. You can either work to slow it's generation or suck it down, but it's all on you.

[andi999]

Maybe it is different in Software engineering than in Hardware, but if you have a team developing hardware and they encounter a problem they cannot solve they have to turn to their manager. So the manager also gets technical crap/difficulties to solve. The 5% he cannot solve goes one level higher, so basically the higher you get, the more distille/purerd crap you get.

[_y5hn]

Software is more like turd production, than bridge building!

[Aeolun]

I feel the attempt itself is a little bit like trying to turn a turd into gold.

[brianwawok]

You don’t really make turds so much as glue together library turds.

[vlod]

> I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield.

One of my first jobs, it was described colourfully (it was in the UK) as being the team umbrella. i.e. Protects the team from the ever circling pigeons from above that like to frequently 'deposit'. :)

[Maascamp]

I wouldn't call that being a crap shield. I'd call that executing on the non-technical aspects of your team's strategy.

When teams don't see (and/or frame) those things as key part of achieving their goals the results aren't gonna be great for anyone.

[bitbckt]

All of the managers I’ve worked with on the “great” end of the quality spectrum have excelled at being sh*t umbrellas. Perhaps that speaks also to the quality of the orgs I’ve been in, as well...

This is a (the?) differentiating quality between effective management and not.

[JJMcJ]

> crap shield

In Office Space, one thing that makes Lumbergh the manager so distasteful is you just know he would never do one thing to help anyone reporting to him.

> configuration galley

I like that. "Ramming speed."

[strig]

> configuration galley

What does this mean?

[ertemplin]

My interpretation of this is a junior SDE position where you mostly update system configuration parameters all day instead of writing code or designing systems. People in these positions still get paid SDE salaries but aren't gaining any useful software development experience.

[dmoy]

A galley was a large-ish, primarily oar-powered ship.

However it also refers to the kitchen on certain even larger boats.

So, it's kind of ambiguous what GP meant - either picking a cook out of a galley-kitchen (who is not the best chef, but rather someone making huge amounts of food for a ship's crew), or picking a slave off of the oars in a galley-ship.

I don't know.