Eng Managers, start setting expectations, it works like magic if done right

I used to think "mommy blogs" were cringeworthy but then I found out about engineering management blogs.

Cool graphs, reminds me of those ads like, here’s what happened with competitor product: shows nuclear wasteland. But with our patented formula: shows Superman’s palace of fortitude.

Idk though, engineers (or people as we like to be called) don’t grow because their manager did anything. They grow because they work very hard on hard problems (solving hard problems requires more than just coding) and that’s up to them. Maybe they have a family they’d rather work on.

People don’t get promoted because they showed growth in an area and helped John the junior engineer. They get promoted because they know to jump ship every two years and use that 1 moment of leverage.

But like, yeah do whatever works for you.

I'm a new manager. Thanks so much for posting this .. it might be obvious but hits on issues I have faced with my team. I do have a question about the "writing down part". In my org, we do perf evals every 6 months. I do weekly 1-1s with my team members. When I course correct or communicate an expectation during a 1-1, what is an appropriate mechanism to document? Email is a bit byzantine .. most of our comms are on slack.