Ask HN: What is the role of an Engineering Manager? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the role of an Engineering Manager?

2 pointszaph0d5 comments

So I am the technical co-founder of a startup and we have a small team. So far I was just busy designing our architecture & writing code; doing very little project management. I pretty much expected my colleagues to manage themselves and build a great product.

It seems that ain't gonna happen. I have been asked to be a much more proactive manager who actively keeps tabs on the developers and pushes the project forward.

The problem is this. I don't know what to do. Honestly, I have never wanted to manage people in any way; I just wanted to keep myself busy with tech.

So I am asking my fellow HN readers here for some tips. I would like to know how I can manage people & projects without being too pervasive.

Thanks in advance.

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Look at Agile best practices. it is not a silver bullet but it does puts in place a basic environment & practices to produce good usable code at a fast pace.

For me, the idea is to treat your developers like profesionals and have a method to measure that they are behaving like such.

The hardest part for non manager types (i.e coders push to be managers) is to have the social skills to lead and motivate. That.. I have yet to find a good a book for.

BTW, It would be good if you already have in place basic software engineering in place: source control, automated builds (ala cruise control), automated unit tests, code coverage tools

Thanks for the tip. I will look into the various agile methodologies. Yeah, we use Git, Basecamp etc. but I was looking for some practical tips about managing devs. I know they don't want to be managed as such, thus the question.

"I have been asked to be a much more proactive manager who actively keeps tabs on the developers and pushes the project forward."

(This may sound flippant but that isn't the intended effect.) If you are the technical co founder of a startup and the early hires aren't managing themselves well, maybe you hired the wrong (type of) people?

Hard to give useful advice for such a generic/vague situation. But if I were you I'd just replace them with more self directed people. In an early stage startip I wouldn't want to do too much people management especially if it distracts the tech co founder.

My 2 cents.

I agree with you completely. Unfortunately we are in a country where getting such kind of people is next to impossible. Engineers here are bred to work for services companies.

"Engineers here are bred to work for services companies."

Heh! sounds like Bangalore (I live there). But otoh I know great (self directed!) programmers who'd love to work with a good startup. There are great engineers who aren't all looking to emigrate to the USA. But most work is the "work on grungy enterprise codebases no one in the west wants to touch. Not many great startups yet. Should write an essay about that one of these days.

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