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I didn’t get asked if I wanted to become a manager. It just happened because my boss moved overseas to head up a new team and I was made team leader amongst my peers. A year later I was given the job title Engineering Manager to acknowledge the work I was doing. I’m now an Engineering Manager at a different company and getting paid more than I would be as an individual contributor.

We call them “Engineering Notebooks” and after 5 years at a company they tell an interesting story of the projects worked on. I’m often reviewing notes from the past couple of months and occasionally have to go back a year or two to dig up some information that I know is there somewhere.

At my workplace we use lots of different tools and systems. No one has access to everything because of licensing costs. SAP Business One is the main ERP but to have part numbers added to the database, engineers use a separate ticket system like Jira to instruct the finance people how to do the data entry in SAP. Code is in Gitlab. Docs are in Sharepoint. Every department has their own kingdom and manages documents in Sharepoint differently with access restrictions frustrating everyone. Some documents are too sensitive to be put in Sharepoint, which makes for even more frustration.

My team of hardware and software engineers is relatively new to Git. I’m trying to get them to commit and push small changes daily to a shared personal branch e.g. james-wip instead of one monster commit every 2 or 3 weeks. I encourage them to rebase their “named” personal branches so they’re easier to review and merge into master when they’re ready.

I fell into management because my boss moved overseas to set up a new team and I was asked to ‘supervise’ the team left behind. No pay rise, no title change but extra reporting responsibilities with a weekly evening phone call. A year later my boss pressured the CEO to give me a title, an office and send me on a 1 day management training course. The pay rise eventually came through another 6 months later.

I enjoy my work and put in extra hours because I want the business to be successful. Sometimes there’s an interesting problem that’s keeping me up at night. Sometimes there’s a deadline for an important customer I don’t want to let down. Sometimes I’m working on a side project to improve tooling that will make my colleagues and me more productive. Sometimes I just want to impress my boss and earn another pay rise or promotion. I’m now working for my third employer, each boss I’ve had have been workaholics and high achieving. I guess I look up to them as mentors and try to emulate them. Also I’ve never been very good at starting my own business on the side. I can never seem to come up with a good enough idea or stop myself from going above and beyond at work to free up time for entrepreneurial activities.

The AU engineers have all the existing product knowledge. The US is hiring for multiple positions to work on new products but US HQ doesn’t want there to be a distinction between the two teams. The plan is for both sites to be involved in all projects.

Two got spooked and were nervous about their future with only 13 months tenure. The third is a senior dev with more than 10 years who’s disgruntled and convinced he’d only be kept on to tidy up loose ends and then discarded. Of the remaining engineers some have 18 months tenure and others 8 years.

Software. It’s not Android, just Linux developed with Buildroot. We do have a web interface with a remote control feature that displays the screen and allows us to trigger buttons. I’m thinking we can use that interface to automate some basic tests but it might need to involve some image pattern recognition to test the output of an operation.

We have a handheld product (custom hardware) that we struggle to test. Currently it’s all manual testing but lately I’ve been wondering how to increase test coverage and automate it too.

Manager Tools have a forum. Not super active but if you’re patient there are some knowledgeable people there that will usually make some good contributions to the discussion.

https://manager-tools.com/forums

I work for a small electronics design and manufacturing company. All our documents are allocated a number with a prefix for the document type: drawings, assembly procedures, manuals, reports, forms, standard operating procedures, job descriptions, etc. Docs are controlled in our custom built ERP which uses Subversion in the backend.

Results and retention. Focus on those and you’ll be fine. I recommend listening to the Manager-Tools.com podcasts. Apparently imposter syndrome is pretty common for managers, so just take all the uncertainty in your stride and keep learning.

HyperCard and Logo on Mac introduced me to computer programming when I was 8 years old.

You can’t be a manager and a team member. To the direct you’ll always be the boss with a big flashing sign on your forehead.

Your direct is professional with the team and I presume still achieves good results?

Through one on ones don’t bother find out why their behavior is the way it is. You’re not a psychologist. Focus on the behaviors. What they say, how they say it, facial expressions, body language, their actions and work product. Constantly give both positive and negative feedback to gently steer your directs in the right direction. “When you make rude comments like that, it makes me think that you don’t respect me and I hesitate to ask for your input on the direction of the team. Could you please change this?”

One other suggestion is that whenever you offer your directs a choice, your must always be prepared to honour their choice. Never overrule them. If you want input to help you make a decision, make sure you are clear that you aren’t asking them to decide, only to provide an opinion. Build trust by giving choices and then honouring them.

My boss is engineering manager at our company of 60 people (he leads 16 engineers) and still finds time to get down in the weeds solving tech problems in addition to managing us. I’m his number 2, based in another country and am responsible for managing/supervising 7 engineers. I too am expected to do development work AND management of the team.

We have 8 engineers with different skills stretched over 6 projects. It is a nightmare because all projects are top priority and late. We will be moving towards tracking tasks per project and per engineer. Currently tasks are only tracked per project which gives no visibility to what other projects an engineer is already working on.

Thanks for your support.

My boss has always been happy with my performance as an engineer. He likes people to take ownership of their projects and always thanks me whenever I step outside of my direct area of responsibility to solve problems that would otherwise fester if left alone.

The main problems at work can really be boiled down to a lack of communication and collaboration between employees. Engineers and managers alike. I'm hopeful that the new PM will be able to help improve things where the other managers have failed.

As for me, I'm hopeful that I can communicate my desire to continue to have a role in technical leadership.

Originally both the engineering manager and project manager were based in our office. The engineering manager moved to the overseas office a few years ago. This year the project manager moved to the same overseas office. I was asked to step up and supervise the other engineers.

I'm not a proper PM, just the senior dev who keeps an eye on the others to make sure they aren't falling down any rabbit holes.

I would much rather be a developer than a manager but I guess I thought I could still be involved in all projects from a technical standpoint.

I turned up one morning to find two of my coworkers in a project meeting conference call with the PM. Later in my weekly "all projects" call with the PM I asked why I wasn't invited. She told me it wasn't my project. She also doesn't think it's necessary for me to continue attending the weekly "all projects" meetings where we discuss progress and priorities on all the engineering projects company wide (across 3 sites).

The engineering manager has been on leave while all this has been happening. I'll be bringing up my concerns when he's back next week. I'm sure he'll be quite understanding. He did reply to one email to point out that there isn't a lot he can do because the new PM reports directly to the CEO, not to him.

Basically the engineers will have multiple bosses. The engineering manager for technical direction and the project managers for task priorities and day to day management.

I think there is still a role for me to play as a senior engineer to mentor and assist the other engineers on their projects but it's harder for me to do this when I'm out of the loop.

In my previous job work was drying up so my boss sent me out contracting at another company. Six months later the company I was contracting at made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve been there for 4 years now. Previous job was nearly 8 years.

My mother introduced me to LOGO at age 8. She was a teacher but could barely program herself. Pretty soon I was teaching myself from books.