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by garyjlin 1571 days ago
Engineering management skills are very, very hard to evaluate. From what I'm aware of, you can get a general idea of someone's competence as an engineering manager by seeing how their engineers perform under them vs under someone else. For example, if a team is doing so-so, then a new EM comes in, and a few months later the same team is now suddenly all rockstar devs, this is a sign of a good EM.

Also, the best engineers aren't necessarily the best engineering managers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle.

We don't believe tech management interviews should at all be automated. You really want these to be as qualitative and human-driven as possible.

1 comments

> We don't believe tech management interviews should at all be automated. You really want these to be as qualitative and human-driven as possible.

It is a convenient myth that people who build the actual systems can be put through an automated filtering process capable of sifting wheat from chafe where as those who manage them are doing subjective, qualitative work that cannot possibly be measured.

How would you measure the quality of a manager?

I do think everything can be measured given the data, and hence automated. The problem in the latter case seems to me that the data is not easily accessible.

Look to the GMAT for inspiration. GMAT measures Critical reasoning skills, analytical skills, comprehension skills, etc. Also, case interviews (think: management consultancies) can be applied to tech management applicants.