How to better organize your time as a new engineering manager
leaddev.com
leaddev.com
The hardest part that I had to learn as an EM was how to identify ways to be effective with small blocks of time, safeguarding my energy, and making sure I (and my team) were working on the most important things.
There are a fair number of considerations for productivity. I wrote about this a few weeks back ( https://www.ebiester.com/productivity/2022/12/14/lego-blocks... ) but these are the factors to consider:
* Time management - How do I organize my day?
* Activity management - What are the right things to work on?
* Capacity management - How many things can I plan at once?
* Project management - How do I break down my tasks into manageable sizes?
* Task management - How do I focus on an individual task, and what do I do with them?
* Energy management: How do I use my most productive time for the valuable things, and how do I make sure I don’t overextend myself?
* Knowledge management: How do I organize what I’ve learned so that I don’t lose time to trying to search for it in complex projects?
* Habit management -how do I stay on track with the habits I want to adopt or have adopted?
* Vision/goal management - what is my north star? What am I working toward and how do I get there?
I'd love to read its sequel. Can we subscribe to your blog?
My solution? Hire senior engineers with lead dev experience. Convince management to pay them well. Then delegate.
In a team of 10, I had two awesome senior dev of this caliber. When the company hired more devs, I told them it was time to restructure the team. You can't realistically have 1 on 1 with 20 people.
I've lost track of what stage I've left all my important and creative tasks, on account of all the contrived "Urgent action required" emails and "PartyTime" deadlines.
PS: PartyTime is when the party starts at 8, so you tell everyone to come at six, to make sure they're there by seven. Which makes the diligent people come at 5 because they don't want to be late for the 6pm deadline; meanwhile the usual suspects arrive late at 10pm anyway.
Exciting times for EMs!
managers are expected to have 20+ person teams and spend at least 20% of their time coding
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-at-twitter/...
There's a lot of other things a manager can do outside management but engineering requires too much focus.
There is a push for managers to return to engineering full time in some companies and that's reasonable if there's an imbalance but asking managers to spend 20% of their time keeping their development environment up to date (the only thing you'll get done with the amount of context switching) is immature.
They created a schedule, and they call it an "event loop", which is probably the farthest to what an event loop actually is.
The real trick is at the end of the article when he talks about shifting from bi-weekly to tri-weekly: stop attending meetings you don’t need to attend, be ruthless with your priorities to focus on what really matters, delegate a lot.