Hacker News Reader

Comment by vecter | Hacker News Reader

> Engineering managers at CircleCI are now dedicated to people management: focused on development of a set of engineers, tech leads, and team leads. They hold regular 1:1s and career growth conversations with the engineers who report to them, and are responsible for goal setting, feedback, coaching, and mentoring for them. They also work across a set of teams to ensure team health, knowledge sharing, business value delivery and alignment across teams. This means that our engineers have managers who have great interest and investment in their personal and professional growth, and teams have someone to coach them through the product delivery process.

Was this not the case before? What were EMs doing then? This is the only definition of EM that I've ever known.

View on HN

Notice how every one of these tasks are things required of the engineer to satisfy the manager. None of it contributes to the productivity of the worker. And only a small portion of it has any relevance to the productive of the company as a whole.

In other words, the engineers would not notice if the engineering manager was not there (except they’d spend less time in meetings and reporting). And the company wouldn’t notice either — unless the engineers chose to use that extra time productively without being “managed” to.

This sounds like you haven't had a competent manager before (nothing to be ashamed of, I was there once!)

Meetings like weekly 1:1s are supposed to be helpful for you as the engineer. They're a safe space for you to complain, and share what sucks about your job, and brag about what's going well. It's like work therapy, but a lot of the things that you complain about can actually become things your manager can fix over time.

Things like help in goal setting might not seem strictly necessary if you're self-driven enough. But doing good work doesn't help your career if nobody notices, and spending your time focused on Doing The Thing is time you're not spending playing a game of politics to make sure upper management is hearing your name all the time. Having a manager to establish a paper trail of what you claim your goals are, and then doing them, makes it easier for everybody above you in the organization to justify giving you a raise/promotion/etc.

I agree that, in a lot of situations, poorly-trained managers do more harm than good. But I promise it's theoretically possible for good managers to provide value!

> They're a safe space for you to complain, and share what sucks about your job

Not trying to be a jerk here, but they're not meant to be a place just for employee to vent. They want the manager to do something about the problems. This is usually frustrating for both people, as the manager is often not empowered to fix the problem (such senior execs not having their shit together, other teams fighting, and all that usual fun stuff) and the employee gets tired of essentially asking every week for things to change, with no improvement.

Your description does not sound like good management. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a mutual working meeting where both IC and manager commit to goals and achieve organizational changes in a more coordinated manner? How could a conversation with a manager with hire-promote-fire power be considered a safe space? An EAP specialist would be a more appropriate outlet for venting.

Now, I would commend a manager teaching an employee to not see management as an enlightened therapist/advocate/accountability partner, but rather as just another kind of specialist in the organization with certain powers and access channels. Sadly, that seems unlikely in the age of Rands, Ask a Manager, etc.

I think that's a very cynical view to take. Have you had experiences with good and bad managers? In my professional life I've had both, and I can tell you that the difference is night and day. I'm in a "bad management" spell right now (yay, academia) and I would love to have regular 1:1s and get feedback that I could actually act on.

Circle CI also supposedly only hires the "best engineers".. I didn't realize the best engineers needed so much focused management.

This is totally consistent. The best athletes receive the most focused coaching. This makes perfect sense. They need experts because they're at the leading edge. The slightest of annoyances is costing you major productivity. It is precisely the best that you need the best coaches for.

Before I write out a long response on how I, as somebody who played sports and received coaching, believe that non-technical managers of software engineers and sports coaches contrast more than they compare I have to ask.. I'm guessing your being sarcastic? :D

If that were the case, why does practically every company that has engineers also have engineering managers? Are we all just doing it wrong?

I've worked at companies, and know others who work at companies, where being an Engineering Managers means you're 90% developer and 10% manager. You're expected to do one on ones, assign work, but mostly code.

I would expect that to be called tech lead. Though probably closer to 80/20 (or lower) than 90/10 by the time you include all the extra work and meetings he or she has to go to by dint of being in that role (vs say the next most senior engineer).

I completely agree and that's been my argument the whole time as well.

So usually the EM is either "Technical" or "Non-Technical".

The Technical EM is more about design, architecture and progress, and sometimes helping the team to get code out the door.

The Non Technical EM is more about this. The technical EM would communicate through a PR, say instead of having 1-on-1's.

Edit: They said in the article they used to give coding problems to engineering manager candidates, and then in the onsite interview, they found their managing ability is so far off of what they were expecting.

So they're making a shift from a Technical Managers to Non Technical Managers.

This isn't the nomenclature I'd use. What you describe as a "Technical EM" is what I'd call a "Tech Lead", who doesn't have people management responsibilities (things like 1:1s, recruiting, growth and success of the team, etc) and focuses solely on the technical execution of a team. In my book an EM is always responsible for those people management things, and I'd use "Technical EM" to describe an EM who secondarily takes on some or all Tech Lead responsibilities, directly contributes code, etc.

I've reported for years to EMs who didn't code, and they were just pointy-haired bosses: coming up with ways to manipulate people to make progress quicker, writing performance reviews mostly based on other people's input (why, then, couldn't those people write the reviews themselves?), not understanding engineering realities like some tasks being unknown, demanding ironclad estimates, judging based on appearance rather than substance (or a mix of substance and appearance), and so on. They were just overhead.

The managers I respected were all TLs who were the most important engineer on the project.

Going back to your point, the TL would be the best person to evaluate the engineers who work under them. 1:1s, growth discussions, etc should all be conducted with someone who knows your work intimately, which means the TL. Which means the TL is a manager.

There's still room for EMs to be more technical or more people/coordination-oriented. A technical EM would take responsibility for a smaller area (backend) and go deep technically into it, having the most impact as an individual contributor, knowing all the code, being able to debug any part of the system, being the go to person for everything in that area. Everyone in the backend would report to him.

An EM can also decide to be focused more on people/coordination. They'd take responsibility for a bigger area (backend, frontend, iOS and Android) and go wide rather than deep. If you ask them how to debug an iOS app that crashes in the background, they may not be the best person for that.

But in both cases, they're managers, not TLs.

Fair point.

My experience is that a manager who is sharp and knowledgeable will be able to perform the non-technical tasks with confidence and ease, while the non-technical manager will be consumed with politics and divide-and-conquering his own team and its perceived adversaries.

"Technical EM"? What about architect? Or is that title no longer in fashion?

You can be managing the engineers (your definition) or managing the engineering (another definition). You could describe both as an ‘engineering manager.’

I am assuming they did actual work alongside management responsibilities, which isn't really sustainable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com