What a engaged engineer looks like
medium.com
medium.com
Find out what the problem is, use your 1:1s to understand what makes people tick, and build a system that helps empower those who thrive with autonomy while simultaneously developing strategies to help those who are still struggling.
Don’t punish everybody because of the missteps of few.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a manager that really gave a fuck enough to “understand what makes people tick” much less build a system that helps empower them… and it makes sense- the mid-level SWE who’s been stuck at mid-level for 10 years got “promoted” to manager… and you think that sort of person is going to perform that job with distinction???
Middle managements are usually not your brightest employees, they are kept at these roles to take shit from the employees instead of the executives while they are used as a power proxy by those executives. During covid their roles got minimized and executives had to meet the engineers/employees directly and for one actually do some work, which is probably one of the reasons why the push back to the office just bring back the old ways.