Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

>On the other hand my ability to focus on a task has dropped considerably. I am no longer able to code for 1h straight. I would say that 15 minutes is a victory. This is a problem I will try to fix somehow during 2018.

My suggestion is: don't try to fix it. As an engineering manager with a team of more than 5 people, coding is no longer the most impactful thing you're doing. Making people and the team do better is far more leverage. As a fellow EM who also loves code, I've stopped coding at work. I find there are many, lot more impactful activities I can do: from hiring activities, onboarding & training, making oncall better, spending more time with my high & low performers and building bridges with fellow EMs, PMs, executives and other stakeholders and so on.

Also, you've not mentioned 1:1s. With a team of 12, 1:1s take a lot of my time (I do weekly 30mins - this is a lot, but has been essential to spot issues early and support people better)

Good luck for 2018!

How do you get another job if you've stopped coding? Most jobs I've seen, even in management, still require the interview song and dance.

That doesn't make sense because logically you'd be interviewed by even more senior managers than the position they're hiring for, and hence those people haven't coded in 10 years.

How long does it take someone to forget fizzbuzz, I wonder...

I have never seen fizzbuzz in an interview.

Or powersets, or segment trees, DFS.

Seen everything in an interview at this point.

As an EM, if I were asked about a segment tree in an interview for an EM position, it would signal to me that I do not want to work for that company.

Yeah I think I'm getting in the wrong loops.

Can't speak for the parent to your comment, but in my case my intent is to continue as a Manager and seek promotion to Senior Manager/Director as soon as it is feasible.

My policy is this: in this industry if the job description includes anything that hints at coding it's not a management job. It's an Individual Contributor role with some people-management thrown in, and one (coding) or the other (managing) is likely to suffer.

According to the "HN Who's Hiring" monthly post, nobody hires Engineering Managers. At least, not the kind of companies that post to that thread.

Or they come to HN to recruit individual contributors and not managers. You're wrong, though: every month I've looked there have been one or two posts including open EM positions.

One or two out of hundreds of openings. For a definition of "nobody" that really means "next to nobody", you're making the parent comment's case.

> coding is no longer the most impactful thing you're doing

This is pretty bad sentiment for an engineering manager. The reason you do coding is not because you want to contribute in overall output but because you want to understand nitty-gritty details of what your team is doing and where are the bottlenecks. For example, I as an engineering manager quickly learned that our build system was too slow and too fragile. Or that talking to one of the external system was huge struggle. Or that there was lot of code duplication in many places for certain functionality. Many junior and less experienced engineers would usually tend to just accept these pains and rather focus on their immediate deliverables. An experienced engineer would immediately see this as opportunity to sacrifice little bit of short term goal for huge long term gain. You can't build a city by only supervising things from 30,000 ft.

At absolute minimum, an engineering manager should do code reviews very frequently spending at least 20% of their time. My litmus test for an effective engineering manager is if they can debug and fix a trivial bug that any of their junior developers easily can. There are "engineering managers" who can't even build their own product that they claimed to have lead. Those are usually a disaster-in-works.

I'd agree if the team has no senior engineers, or in which the senior engineers are not adept at finding and communicating the issues you note, that the EM should fill in the gaps. I'd be skeptical of the long term viability of such a team. What you describe is more properly the purview of a Lead/Principal Engineer, in my opinion. The people in those roles should be able to communicate the technical issues to the EM, and the EM should have the technical chops to understand it (and the code). She shouldn't be hip-deep in builds and coding, and shouldn't need to be.

That's not to say no coding should be done by the EM, but it shouldn't be "impactful" in the same way an IC's coding activities should be.

I disagree and this is exactly the reason there is often so much dissatisfaction in the team with role of EM and consequently the rise of movement for "management-less organization". Why do you need bunch of MBA types just moving around from meetings to meetings and having no interest in how sausage is made while claiming to run the sausage factory. Delegating core technical responsibilities to some senior or principal is typical escape hatch adopted by such EMs. Such EMs are typically lacking monumental level of technical skills and delude themselves that somehow magical ill-defined "management" skills plugs those holes. The fact is that such EMs are not qualified to do pretty much any other duties such as hiring or firing except for making pretty Powerpoints to other higher up EMs who are exactly like them. In my opinion, non-technical management chains with views like above are precisely the reason why so many software companies are just B or C grade.

It's interesting you perceive that I am describing an MBA type and ignored the closing thought in my comment.

By the way, I was just last week promoted from Lead Engineer to EM. I am, as you say, qualified to hire, fire, design and code. I think you're too dismissive of key aspects of running a business. Coding isn't everything. It's not even the most important thing.

Agree. At some point you have to give away your Legos

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