As an engineer who becomes a leader – what is your number one challenge? | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer who becomes a leader – what is your number one challenge?

7 pointsmparkola11 comments

Hello HN,

as an Engineering Manager I frequently find myself supporting engineers who become leaders of one kind or another.

If you're an engineer who has recently become a leader or if you're thinking about such a move:

what is your number one challenge?

As an aside, let's not pollute the language with corporate newspeak such as "leader", when we're speaking about merely managers [1]. A Leader was chosen by people who follow him and helps them achieve a common goal. Whereas a manager was selected by company's owners (often by proxy, i.e. other managers) to oversee their interests. There is no voluntary component present - manager's reports have no choice but to obey him/her or else they lose the job. Also, their goals are not common, but are often rather at odds - e.g. employees want maximum paycheck, managers want to pay as little as possible. Managers and leaders are two completely different creatures.

[1] This one seems fairly recent and I suppose it was coined because the term "manager" was creating a bad taste in the mouths of increasing numbers of people.

I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience with managers. I can assure you it looks much different in my neck of the woods.

My number one challenge is increasing my consistency as a leader. When I was writing software, it was OK/anticipated to "crunch" sometimes. In these scenarios, I'd overwork myself, but, in exchange, a lot of code would get written and the project would come in on-time. My personality/emotional state would suffer a bit from it, but then I'd take some time to recoup/prevent burn-out and all is good.

Now, I feel like the game is played differently. Good leaders are healthy and consistent because that provides a psychological safe space for others to work within. A good leader keeps themselves available enough to act as a shield for their reports. That takes energy. If one fails to budget energy effectively, or generally lacks energy, the veil will become pierced and reports become disenchanted with their leader. Rebuilding that trust costs more energy than it did to lose it - which sparks a vicious cycle.

This has been a pretty tough mental shift for me. My default response whenever a problem gets tough is to "gear down," settle in for a long-haul, and push myself to carry us to the finish line. That's no longer the way to succeed.

That's super interesting. How do you go about increasing that consistency?

When I faced that transition, I had to realize that my role had shifted. Rather than doing things myself (which I was good at), I had to help others do things. This let us get more done. I also had to insulate them from the BS of the business - this was my job to participate and filter as appropriate. This took a little while, and I ended up preferring doing the work myself - so I reverted elsewhere.

I’m building a new department to scale out services that I solely did under another department. Coming from a small company in a specialized field this means that my attention is split between managing the few under me, still actually doing the work and other admin BS. As a former doer and control freak the hardest thing has been getting out of my peoples’ ways and untangling myself from the work.

A close second is, as previously pointed out, eliminating as much additional business BS as possible. Our current director likes to really have communal discussions on business direction and development, which I’m not opposed to, but the number of meetings is too much. I’ve been clawing back my time ever since the transition.

That's indeed challenging. Is there anything specific that helped you do the untangling?

And on the company front - how do you stay in touch with the overall direction while minimising those meetings?

For me, it's getting some devs to become team players. Many of them are good at what they do but sometimes they become big blockers to the progress of others in the team.

I try my best to unblock people but you just can't unblock someone's attitude to working. Maybe they just need time to understand, but time is also a luxury our projects do not have.

I've encountered my fair share of such people and I probably was one of them for at least some portion of my own career :(

Is there anything in particular that worked for you?

Getting out of your own way.

Hi, what do you mean by that?

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