engineering

Questionable Advice: The Trap of The Premature Senior

mipsytipsy, , , , 14 Comments

I’ve been at my current job for three years, and I am suddenly, accidentally, the most senior engineer on the team. I spend my days handling things like bootcamps, mentoring, architecture, and helping other engineers carve off meaningful work. This has taken a huge toll on the kind of work I want to do as an IC. I still enjoy writing and shipping features, and I am not a manager, but now I feel like I spend my days conducting meetings, interviewing, and unblocking others constantly instead of writing code myself.

What should I do? How can I deal with this situation in an effective manner? How can I keep from getting burned out on zoom? How can I reclaim more of my time to write code for myself, without sacrificing my influence? Should I get a new job? I have thought about going out and getting a new job, but I really like having a say at a high level. Here I get looped into all of the most important decisions and meetings. If I get a new job, how can I avoid starting over at the bottom of the heap and just taking assignments from other people? P.S., this is my first job.

 

Get a new job.

Yes, you will reset your seniority and have to earn it all over again. Yes, it will be uncomfortable and your ego will be cranky over it. Yes, you will be at the bottom of the heap and take assignments from other people for a while. Yes, you should do it anyway.

What you are experiencing now is the alluring comfort of premature seniority. You’re the smartest kid in the room, you know every corner of the system inside and out, you win every argument and anticipate every objection and you are part of every decision and you feel so deeply, pleasingly needed by the people around you.

It’s a trap.

Get the fuck out of there.

There is a world of distance between being expert in this system and being an actual expert in your chosen craft. The second is seniority; the first is merely .. familiarity

Deep down I think you know this, and feel a gnawing insecurity over your position; why else would you have emailed me? You were right. Treasure that uneasy feeling in your gut, that discomfort in the face of supreme comfortable-ness. It will lead you to a long and prosperous career as an engineer if you learn to trust it.

Think of every job like an escalator — a 50-foot high escalator that takes about two years to ride to the top. But once you’ve summited, you stall out. You can either stay and wander on that floor, or you can step to the left and pick another escalator and ride it up another 50 feet. And another.

In my mind, someone becomes a real senior engineer after they’ve done this about three times. 2-3 teams, stacks, languages, and roles, over a 5-8 year period, and then they’re solidly baked. There are insights you can derive from having seen problems solved in a few different ways that you can’t with only a single point of reference.

You don’t become a senior engineer at the 50-foot ascent, no matter how thoroughly you know the landscape. You become a senior engineer somewhere well over 100 feet, with a couple of lane changes under your belt.

The act of learning a new language and/or stack is itself an important skill. Experiencing how different orgs ship code in vastly different ways is how you internalize that there’s no one blessed path, only different sets of tradeoffs, and how you learn to reason about those tradeoffs.

And it is good for us to start over with beginner eyes. It’s humbling, it’s clarifying, it’s a cleanse for the soul. If you get too attached to feeling senior, to feeling necessary, you will undervalue the virtues of fresh eyes and questioning, of influence without authority. It is good for you to practice uncertainty and influencing others without the cheat codes of deep familiarity.

Nobody wants to work with seniors who clutch their authority with a white knuckled grip. We want to work with those who wear it lightly, who remember what it was like in our shoes.

Ultimately, this is a strong argument for building our teams behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance concerning our own place in the pecking order. Starting fresh yourself will help you build teams where it is not miserable to be a beginner, where beginners’ contributions are recognized, where even beginners do not simply “take orders”, as you said. Because literally nobody wants that, including the beginners you are working with on  your teams today.

After you have gotten a new job or two, and proven to yourself that you can level up again and master new stacks and technologies, that fretful inner voice questioning whether you deserve the respect you receive or not will calm down. You will have proven to yourself that your success wasn’t just a one-off, that you can be dropped into any situation, learn the local ropes and succeed. You will be a senior engineer.

Get the fuck out of there. Go. <3

 

 

 

Questionable Advice: The Trap of The Premature Senior

Things to know about engineering levels

mipsytipsy, , , , 11 Comments

This twitter thread seemed to strike a chord with people, rather astonishingly so. I am transcribing parts of it for the sake of longevity and findability.

I keep talking to engineers who are frustrated that they aren’t leveling up faster, aren’t reaching senior levels as quickly as other people they know, feel stuck and don’t know how to get to the next level, etc. And I’ve begun to notice a common blind spot around leveling —

✨ not every opportunity exists ✨
✨ at every company ✨
✨ at every time.✨

Sure, if you’re a junior engineer, you should be able to level up to intermediate pretty much anywhere. But it gets progressively trickier after that. Even the path from intermediate to senior can depend on a number of situational variables:

Is there oxygen?

  • How many other senior engineers do you work with? how many other intermediate engineers around your level? All of these people will be pulling from the same bin of work, looking for promo-worthy, solidly-senior projects.
  • Does your ladder explicitly call for mentorship or leading small teams of lower-leveled engineers? Are there enough of those folks to go around?
  • Have you sufficiently wrapped up your last project well enough to move on? Was it actually completed in a way that demonstrated clear mastery and readiness for bigger and harder work, ordid you leave a mess behind you? That may limit people’s appetite to take a risk on you with mission-critical projects.
  • What are the biggest needs of the business right now? Any process that generates projects ought to begin with this question before proceeding on to carve out a chunk that fits your promo desires, not the other way around. 🙃
  • Do you happen to work in a niche or specialty area of engineering, particularly one crammed with super-senior, world-famous highly leveled people? This can be fantastic when it comes to your ability to soak up knowledge from the world’s best, but it may simultaneously delay your ability to level up.

In short, is there oxygen at the next level? Does the company need more of the type of engineer you want to be, vs more of the type of engineer you are now? If they need more people pounding out code and fewer architects, they’re unlikely to want to promote you to a role that involves mostly architecture..

Literally no company can possibly make use of a top-heavy eng org stuffed with senior+ engineers, if all of them are expected to demonstrate company-wide impact or global impact every review period. There’s only so much high-level work to go around for every fifty engineers writing code and features and executing on those systems.

There is only so much oxygen at each level.

Inflation.

Of course, this is all assuming that your company takes leveling seriously. Most … really … don’t.

It’s tough. It’s tough to hold your ground when a valued engineer is complaining and dropping hints they may leave if they don’t get that promotion soon. It’s much easier to give in, make an exception, argue for rounding up.

This may sound good, but it is not ultimately in your best interests as that engineer. Seriously. </3

There is sooo much title inflation in this industry already. People are given the title “senior engineer” in just 3-5 years, need I say more??

If you let a little inflation into your system by making exceptions, it causes more trouble than it’s worth. Always. The only leverage you have when people try to get you to make exceptions is if you can honestly say, “no exceptions.” Give in just once, and your moral authority evaporates.

Leveling up.

I would urge you not to make most, if any, career decisions based on levels or titles that are offered you. But I do understand how frustrating and infuriating it can be to be in a situation that is clearly unfair (usually because a manager got pressured into making an exception… tsk tsk), or if you don’t understand how to move your career forward.

So, here are a few strategic tips for leveling up.

  1. Generalists level up faster than specialists.
  2. When evaluating roles, choose ones where your specialty is part of their mission, or at least key to its execution. It has a far lower likelihood of getting outsourced, deprioritized, lacking investment in, or just forgotten about if what you do is core to what they do.
  3. Always ask to see the job ladder when interviewing. If they hedge or fumble, don’t take that job.
  4. Talk to your manager about the job ladder. Talk to your skip level about levels too! Managers love this shit. They can talk on and on and on about levels, long past your exhaustion point. It can be annoying, but it’s actually a sign of a good manager who cares and thinks about the edge cases in processes, and their impacts on people and teams.
  5. That said, don’t take the ladder as a checklist to memorize or thing to be pored over and obsessed over. It’s an incomplete attempt at both shaping and reflecting relative impact. Focus on impact.
  6. Is it easier to level up as a manager than as an engineer? Sorta-kinda, I guess so? There are at least two real phenomena at play here.
    1. There are simply more roles to go around in the management track. You need like, what, 1-2 E7/E8 (or principal, or architect?) level engineers per 100-500 engineers, but several managers/directors/etc
    2. Manager effectiveness is grounded in their relationships. It takes managers longer to have impact after they start a new role, but their potential impact grows and grows as their tenure gets longer. So yes, there’s a bit more of an escalator effect if you stay on the manager track at a company for several years. There is no similar escalator on the eng side; you have to be truly exceptional or truly lucky.
    3. But it really depends on the organization.
  7. It is much easier to level up quickly at fast-growing companies. When there is far more work than workers, and everyone is getting dropped in the deep end to sink or swim, you level up fast. Don’t underestimate what a stressful and awful experience this can be, though.
  8. Many engineers get stuck on the bubble getting to senior because they are impatient and want a map. They just want someone to *tell them what to do*. Which is the very opposite of what a senior engineer does. 🙃  Develop your judgment around what needs to be done, and do it.
  9. Your relationship with your manager matters. So does your ability to communicate about the work you are doing, its difficulty, its unexpected challenges and triumphs, etc. This is called “managing up”, and it is an actual skill which I am *terrible* at. So are most of you. 😉
  10. TLDR, if leveling matters to you (and it should matter to everyone, to some extent!), then look curiously and critically around for opportunities, and seek to maximize them. Want to become an E6/E7? Probably don’t join a startup that doesn’t have any very high-level work to do, or already has more than enough people functioning at those levels and many more nipping their heels looking for the same opportunity.This sort of thing is very obvious to us with the manager track (if you want to go from M->Dir, don’t join a startup that already HAS directors and managers who want to level up), but seems less obvious with engineering.

Most reasonable, non-desperate companies with options won’t hire you directly into the next level up which you haven’t done before, on either the manager or the engineer track. (Yellow flag if they do.)

But it is perfectly reasonable to express your career objectives in the interview, and make sure you’re on the same wavelength and seeing the same opportunities. Do you want to become a manager or a tech lead in a few months? Say so.

If it doesn’t exist now, do they think this opportunity may soon open up? Can they see a path forward for you there, if all goes well? Would they be interested in helping you get there? How many people may already be eyeing that same path? Is there enough opportunity for more than one? On what timeframe? Who will decide who gets the role, and how?

Engineers tend to find these conversations uncomfortable, and so they tend to avoid them because they don’t want to make the hiring manager uncomfortable by being pushy.

Relax. Managers don’t find this uncomfortable at all, it’s their bread and butter. (And even fi they do find it uncomfortable, tough beans.. it’s their job.) Ask away. ☺️

Misc notes on leveling.

P.S. Engineers seem to have a very sparse mental model of how leveling works, so here are a few more notes on how levels work at Honeycomb, which is adapted from conventions at Facebook/Google.

  • Each level after senior engineer (E5 for us) gets approx an order of magnitude harder to achieve, and an order of magnitude fewer engineers hold that title.
  • E5 is considered a “terminal level”, which sounds scary, but just means “you do not have to advance beyond this level.” If you never get promoted again, you won’t get fired either.
  • Whereas if you do not advance from E3-> E4 within 2 years, and E4->E5 within 3 years, you are automatically put on a performance improvement plan (at Facebook, I mean, not Honeycomb).
  • We (Honeycomb) hire into E5 as our highest level to start at, both because a) our interview process is not designed to let us parse differences between senior vs super-senior or super-duper senior, and b) we figure nobody is really able to come in the door with >E5 impact for the first 6 months anyway. So we can level them up quickly after they join and we get a feel for their work.

<3 charity.

Things to know about engineering levels

If Management Isn’t A Promotion, Then Engineering Isn’t A Demotion

mipsytipsy, , , , 15 Comments

I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:

(I originally titled this article “Julian Dunn and the Case of the Bad Manager”, lol)

God, YES. This is something that has been on my queue of “topics to write about” for so long, and I haven’t because it’s just too big (and sometimes I tell myself, optimistically, it’s just too obvious?).

Julian’s point is that the reason so many bad managers persist is because it’s perceived as a promotion. Which means going back to engineering after managing is, ipso facto, a demotion. Which is really fucking hard to swallow. For anyone.

I touched on this briefly in an earlier post, the Pendulum or the Ladder, when I wrote,

“If management isn’t a promotion, then returning to hands-on work isn’t a demotion, either.  Right?”

There are a few separate points here which are worth unfurling separately.

  1. Management is widely seen as a promotion
  2. Management really does grant you some formal powers over your peers, which contributes to perceived hierarchy
  3. Humans are hierarchical mammals, exquisitely sensitive to any loss of status — we hates it
  4. But this is a cultural choice, not destiny. And we can change it.

Management is seen as a promotion

The notion that management is a promotion is deeply ingrained into our culture. It’s in language, pop culture, business books, any and all sources of career advice. If you became a manager and told your mom about it, she probably congratulated you and told you how proud she was. If you go out on a job interview, you’re expected to reach for the same rung or a higher one — or eyebrows will raise.

That’s a lot of cultural baggage to lean against. But I believe this is an idea whose time has come.

Any technical company should work hard to center and celebrate the work being done to build the product and make customers happy. Management is overhead, to be brutally frank about it, and we should not design organizations that would lead any rational, ambitious person to aspire to be overhead, should we?

The surest path to acclaim and glory (and promotions and raises) should be found through contributing. Not managing. Not being overhead.

… Because it mostly is a promotion, honestly

It is absolutely true that when you become a manager, you acquire new powers. As a tool of the org, you are granted certain powers to act on behalf of the organization, in exchange for being held accountable for certain outcomes.

These explicit powers often include hiring and firing decisions, access to privileged information, and making and meeting budgets.

But most of your powers aren’t formal at all. Most of your power comes from people listening more closely to what you say, giving your opinions more weight, and (consciously or subconsciously) just trying to please you, because they know you hold some influence over their career outcomes. It comes from the fact that so much information flows through managers. And finally, it comes from relationships — the strength of your personal relationships and mutual trust with other people throughout the org.

So how is this not a promotion? Well, it is a promotion at most companies, to be perfectly honest. But it does not have to be a promotion, if you acknowledge that these privileges and powers are accepted only by sacrificing other privileges and powers, and if you structurally allocate power to other roles. For example, you should acquire managerial powers only at the expense of technical decision-making powers.

I believe that the healthiest companies are ones where managerial powers are limited, enumerated, and minimal, with robust powers explicitly reserved for technical ICs. (much like the Constitution provides for Congress and the States, respectively.)

But it shouldn’t be. “Management” is a support role

Here are some of the reasons why we should invert the hierarchy and embrace management as a service role, a support position.

  1. Tech is a creative industry. Hierarchical leadership is a relic, a holdover from the days of manual labor. Hierarchy kills creativity, which leads to worse business outcomes.
  2. Bad managers are a huge problem in tech. Just like Julian says, the wrong people are doing the job, for the wrong reasons, because they can’t to take the hit to the ego (and paycheck) of the demotion. This leads to unhappy teams and ultimately loss of talent.
  3. I firmly believe that the engineer-manager pendulum is the way to build great technical leaders. The great line managers are never more than a few years removed from hands on work themselves, the great tech leads have always done a stint or two as a people manager. The promotion myth therefore both starves us of powerful technical leadership.and leaves us saddled with unhappy managers who have dwindling relevant skills, year after year.
  4. The ladder is a trap. There are an order of magnitude fewer jobs for each rung you ascend. Meanwhile, the higher you climb the farther removed you are from the work most find meaningful (building things, making customers happy). The perception that you are a failure if you do anything but climb higher therefore traps a great many people in a cycle of intense anxiety and unhappiness.
  5. Management is only one of many forms leadership can take. Yes, you have formal powers delegated to you on behalf of the org, but formal authority is the weakest form of power, and you should resort to using it rarely. Good leaders lead by influence and persuasion, weak leaders with “because I said so.”

Most engineers become managers to cope with org fuckery

Many people (like me!) become managers because they want access to the powers it gives them. As I argued in my last article, this is usually because they are frustrated with some organizational fuckery and it seems the only plausible way to fix or work around said fuckery is by becoming a manager.

Earlier this year I was having a 1×1 with one of our engineers, Martin Holman, who has been a manager before and had expressed interest in doing it again. So, I asked him, was he still interested?[1]

He thought for a moment, and replied, “You know, I thought I wanted to be a manager again, I really did. But I think what I actually wanted was a seat at the table — to know what was going on, to have a say in what work I do. But I don’t feel out of the loop here. So it turns out I don’t feel any need to become a manager.”

Not only did that warm my heart, it answered a question I didn’t know I had. I think they would be a good manager, and should they change their mind again in the future, I will completely support them changing their mind again (minds change! it’s what they do!) — but I hope it is never because they feel that technical contributors are left out of the loop, or don’t have a say in what they do.

That’s what I’d call organizational fuckery.

A roadmap for changing your company culture

If “management is not a promotion” is a cultural value you would like to embrace at your company, here are some concrete actions you should take.

  1. Make sure the pay bands for engineers and managers are equal, or even pay engineers more than managers of the same rank. (Slack does this, or used to.)
  2. Have IC (individual contributor) levels for engineers that track management levels, all the way up to VP.
  3. Look for ways to give high-level ICs information and opportunities for company impact that are on par with their people-manager counterparts.
  4. Technical contributors should own and be accountable for technical strategy and decision-making, not managers.
  5. Demystify management. Break it down into its constituent skills (giving feedback, running meetings, planning and budgeting, mentoring, running programs) and encourage everyone to develop those leadership skills.
  6. Offer any management roles that may open up to internal transfers before considering external candidates.
  7. Offer training and support for first-time managers who are undergoing that first career change. Offer engineers the same leadership coaching opportunities as managers.
  8. Explicitly encourage managers to swing back to IC roles after two or three years. Support them through a generous grace period while refreshing their technical skills.
  9. Watch your language. Loaded terms are everywhere, whether hierarchical (referring to people as being “above” others), or authoritarian (talking about bosses, managers). While it’s impossible to strip it from our vocabulary, it’s worth being thoughtful in how you represent reality, and using neutral phrases like “I support two teams” whenever possible.
  10. Be explicit; repeat yourself. Say over and over that management is not a promotion, it is a change of career. Say it internally and externally, in your interview processes and recruiting messages. Educate your recruiting staff too (and be stern about it).

This isn’t a thing you can do once and be done with it; it’s an ongoing effort you must commit to. Managers tend to accrue power over time, like a gravitational force. In order to counterbalance this drift, managers need to consciously push power out to others. They must use their role as “information router” to inform and empower people to own decisions, instead of hoarding it for themselves.

“Management is not a promotion” is my favorite bat signal

“Management is not a promotion, it’s a change of career.” I say this over and over again, even though it’s more aspirational than accurate.

Yet I say it anyway, because it’s a bat signal. It’s how the people I want to work with can find their way to me. And it repels the people I don’t want to work with just as efficiently.

When we recently posted our first-ever job req for an engineering manager, I included this under the list of optional skills:

  • You have worked as an engineering director or higher before, and decided to return to line management. Why? Because we value people who don’t blindly climb hierarchies just because they’re there. We value people who know themselves and what they find fulfilling in work and in life, and who can handle the hit to the ego that it takes to move “down” in pursuit of that fulfillment. Also, it would be interesting to talk about how you have solved org problems at other companies.

I cannot tell you how many amazing candidates zeroed in on that paragraph and came running. People who had been VPs before, been CTO, been director. People who were not only interested in becoming a line manager again, but were hungry to go back, to be closer to the people doing the work.

Something I heard them say again and again was, “People look at me like I’m crazy for wanting this,” “I have never had anyone see this as a strength.”

These were candidates who were acutely attuned to power dynamics, had exceptional self-knowledge, and who had seen and done so much to make organizations successful at multiple levels. What a set of superpowers!

Humans HAAAAAATE losing status.

We hate it. We hate it so bad. Even when we tell ourselves it’s what we wanted, even when we know it’s best for us, even when all the stars align. Something inside of us kicks and screams and feels excruciatingly attuned to the ripple effects of any status loss for a long time.

Like all such powerful irrational feelings, it’s evolution’s fault. Once upon a time it helped us survive and procreate. Now it’s just a nuisance, something to be worked around and minimized.

Where someone sits on the org chart should not determine that person’s ability to drive change, nor should their preference for tech problems or people problems. We need to see the work that engineers, managers, directors, VPs, and CxOs do as equally valuable and equally capable of prestige. We need to flip the org chart upside down, and treat “management” roles like the support systems they should be.

The work done by a database engineer is different from the work done by a VP marketing, or a director of database engineering. It is not inherently better or worse, easier or harder, more or less deserving of praise and admiration. It is simply different.[2]

And we will have the best chance finding the work that brings the most meaning and joy to our lives if we can drain the hierarchical residue out of our perception of these roles, by flattening pay structures, equalizing power dynamics, and making sure everyone has the tools they need to do their job with as little hierarchical bullshit as possible.

charity.

[1] Martin said I could tell this story and use his name. I actually try to avoid talking about people, conversations, or anecdotes from Honeycomb as a more or less blanket rule, because I don’t want people to be perpetually on edge wondering if I am talking about them. (So if you’re wondering if I’m talking about you: I’m not. Unless I asked first.)

[2] Raise your hand if you’ve worked at a company where a DB engineer had a far greater impact on the bottom line some quarters than any of the VPs did. ✋

If Management Isn’t A Promotion, Then Engineering Isn’t A Demotion

Questionable Advice: Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?

mipsytipsy, , , , , , 17 Comments

I follow you on Twitter and read your blog.  I particularly enjoy this post: https://charity.wtf/2019/05/01/friday-deploy-freezes-are-exactly-like-murdering-puppies/ I’m reaching out looking for some guidance.

I work as an engineering manager for a company whose non-technology leadership insists there has to be a way to measure the individual productivity of a software engineer. I have the opposite belief. I don’t believe you can measure the productivity of “professional” careers, or thought workers (ex: how do measure productivity of a doctor, lawyer, or chemist?).

For software engineering in particular, I feel that metrics can be gamed, don’t tell the whole story, or in some cases, are completely arbitrary. Do you measure individual developer productivity? If so, what do you measure, and why do you feel it’s valuable? If you don’t and share similar feelings as mine, how would you recommend I justify that position to non-technology leadership?

Thanks for your time.

Anonymous Engineering Manager

Dear Anon,

Once upon a time I had a job as a sysadmin, 100% remote, where all work was tracked using RT tasks. I soon realized that the owner didn’t have a lot of independent technical judgment, and his main barometer for the caliber of our contributions was the number of tasks we closed each day.

I became a ticket-closing machine. I’d snap up the quick and easy tasks within seconds. I’d pattern match and close in bulk when I found a solution for a group of tasks. I dove deep into the list of stale tickets looking for ones I could close as “did not respond” or “waiting for response”, especially once I realized there was no penalty for closing the same ticket over and over.

My boss worshiped me. I was bored as fuck. Sigh.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I am fully in your camp. I don’t think you can measure the “productivity” of a creative professional by assigning metrics to their behaviors or process markers, and I think that attempting to derive or inflict such metrics can inflict a lot of damage.

In fact, I would say that to the extent you can reduce a job to a set of metrics, that job can be automated away. Metrics are for easy problems — discrete, self-contained, well-understood problems. The more challenging and novel a problem, the less reliable these metrics will be.

Your execs should fucking well know this: how would THEY like to be evaluated based on, like, how many emails they send in a day? Do they believe that would be good for the business? Or would they object that they are tasked with the holistic success of the org, and that their roles are too complex to reduce to a set of metrics without context?

This actually makes my blood boil. It is condescending as fuck for leadership to treat engineers like task-crunching interchangeable cogs. It reveals a deep misunderstanding of how sociotechnical systems are developed and sustained (plus authoritarian tendencies, and usually a big dollop of personal insecurity).

But what is the alternative?

In my experience, the “right” answer, i.e. the best way to run consistently high-performing teams, involves some combination of the following:

  • Outcome-based management that practices focusing on impact, plus
  • Team level health metrics, combined with
  • Engineering ladder and regular lightweight reviews, and
  • Managers who are well calibrated across the org, and encouraged to interrogate their own biases openly & with curiosity.

The right way to look at performance is at the team level. Individual engineers don’t own or maintain code; teams do. The team is the irreducible unit of ownership. So you need to incentivize people to think about work and spending their time cooperatively, optimizing for what is best for the team.

Some of the hardest and most impactful engineering work will be all but invisible on any set of individual metrics. You want people to trust that their manager will have their backs and value their contributions appropriately at review time, if they simply act in the team’s best interest. You do not want them to waste time gaming the metrics or courting personal political favor.

This is one of the reasons that managers need to be technical — so they can cultivate their own independent judgment, instead of basing reviews on hearsay. Because some resources (i.e. your budget for individual bonuses) are unfortunately zero-sum, and you are always going to rely on the good judgment of your engineering leaders when it comes to evaluating the relative impact of individual contributions.

“I would say that Joe’s contribution this quarter had greater impact than Jane’s. But is that really true? Jane did a LOT of mentoring and other “glue” work, which tends to be under-acknowledged as leadership work, so I just want to make sure I am evaluating this fairly … Does anyone else have a perspective on this? What might I be missing?” — a manager keeping themselves honest in calibrations

I do think every team should be tracking the 4 DORA metrics — time elapsed between merge and deploy, frequency of deploy, time to recover from outages, duration of outages — as well as how often someone is paged outside of business hours. These track pretty closely to engineering productivity and efficiency.

But leadership should do its best to be outcome oriented. The harder the problem, the more senior the contributor, the less business anyone has dictating the details of how or why. Make your agreements, then focus on impact.

This is harder on managers, for sure — it’s easier to count the hours someone spends at their desk or how many lines of code they commit than to develop a nuanced understanding of the quality and timbre of an engineer’s contributions to the product, team and the company over time. It is easier to micromanage the details than to negotiate a mutual understanding of what actually matters, commit to doing your part … and then step away, trusting them to fill in the gaps.

But we should expect this; it’s worth it. It is in those gaps where we feel trusted to act that we find joy and autonomy in our labor, where we do our best work as skilled artisans.

Questionable Advice: Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?

Questionable Advice #2: How Do I Get My Team Into Observability?

mipsytipsy, , , , , , 1 Comment

Welcome to the second installment of my advice column! Last time we talked about the emotional impact of going back to engineering after a stint in management. If you have a question you’d like to ask, please email me or DM it to me on twitter.

Hi Charity! I hope it’s ok to just ask you this… 

I’m trying to get our company more aware of observability and I’m finding it difficult to convince people to look more into it. We currently don’t have the kind of systems that would require it much – but we will in future and I want us to be ahead of the game. 

If you have any tips about how to explain this to developers (who are aware that quality is important but don’t always advocate for it / do it as much as I’d prefer), or have concrete examples of “here’s a situation that we needed observability to solve – and here’s how we solved it”, I’d be super grateful. 

If this is too much to ask, let me know too 🙂 

I’ve been talking to Abby Bangser a lot recently – and I’m “classifying” observability as “exploring in production” in my mental map – if you have philosophical thoughts on that, I’d also love to hear them 🙂

alex_schl

 

Dear Alex,

Everyone’s systems are broken. Not just yours!

Yay, what a GREAT note!  I feel like I get asked some subset or variation of these questions several times a week, and I am delighted for the opportunity to both write up a response for you and post it for others to read.  I bet there are orders of magnitude more people out there with the same questions who *don’t* ask, so I really appreciate those who do. <3

I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of pitching to engineering teams and shepherding technical decisions like this, and I promise I will offer you some links to examples and other materials. But first I want to examine some of the assumptions in your note, because they elegantly illuminate a couple of common myths and misconceptions.

Myth #1: you don’t need observability til you have problems of scale

First of all, there’s this misconception that observability is something you only need when you have really super duper hard problems, or that it’s only justified when you have microservices and large distributed systems or crazy scaling problems.  No, no no nononono. 

There may come a point where you are ABSOLUTELY FUCKED if you don’t have observability, but it is ALWAYS better to develop with it.  It is never not better to be able to see what the fuck you are doing!  The image in my head is of a hiker with one of those little headlamps on that lets them see where they’re putting their feet down.  Most teams are out there shipping opaque, poorly understood code blindly — shipping it out to systems which are themselves crap snowballs of opaque, poorly understood code. This is costly, dangerous, and extremely wasteful of engineering time.


Ever seen an engineering team of 200, and struggled to understand how the product could possibly need more than one or two teams of engineers? They’re all fighting with the crap snowball.

Developing software with observability is better at ANY scale.  It’s better for monoliths, it’s better for tiny one-person teams, it’s better for pre-production services, it’s better for literally everyone always.  The sooner and earlier you adopt it, the more compounding value you will reap over time, and the more of your engineers’ time will be devoted to forward progress and creating value.

Myth #2: observability is harder and more technically advanced than monitoring

Actually, it’s the opposite — it’s much easier.  If you sat a new grad down and asked them to instrument their code and debug a small problem, it would be fairly straightforward with observability. Observability speaks the native language of variables, functions and API endpoints, the mental model maps cleanly to the request path, and you can straightforwardly ask any question you can come up with. (A key tenet of observability is that it gives an engineer the ability to ask any question, without having had to anticipate it in advance.)

With metrics and logging libraries, on the other hand, it’s far more complicated.you have to make a bunch of awkward decisions about where to emit various types of statistics, and it is terrifyingly easy to make poor choices (with terminal performance implications for your code and/or the remote data source).  When asking questions, you are locked in to asking only the questions that you chose to ask a long time ago. You spend a lot of time translating the relationships between code and lowlevel systems resources, and since you can’t break down by users/apps you are blocked from asking the most straightforward and useful questions entirely!  

Doing it the old way Is. Fucking. Hard.  Doing it the newer way is actually much easier, save for the fact that it is, well, newer — and thus harder to google examples for copy-pasta. But if you’re saturated in decades of old school ops tooling, you may have some unlearning to do before observability seems obvious to you.

Myth #3: observability is a purely technical solution

To be clear, you can just add an observability tool to your stack and go on about your business — same old things, same old way, but now with high cardinality!

You can, but you shouldn’t.  

These are sociotechnical systems and they are best improved with sociotechnical solutions.  Tools are an absolutely necessary and inextricable part of it.  But so are on call rotations and the fundamental virtuous feedback loop of you build it, you run it.  So are code reviews, monitoring checks, alerts, escalations, and a blameless culture.  So are managers who allocate enough time away from the product roadmap to truly fix deep technical rifts and explosions, even when it’s inconvenient, so the engineers aren’t in constant monkeypatch mode.

I believe that observability is a prerequisite for any major effort to have saner systems, simply because it’s so powerful being able to see the impact of what you’ve done.  In the hands of a creative, dedicated team, simply wearing a headlamp can be transformational.

Observability is your five senses for production.

You’re right on the money when you ask if it’s about exploring production, but you could also use words that are even more basic, like “understanding” or “inspecting”.  Observability is to software systems as a debugger is to software code.  It shines a light on the black box.  It allows you to move much faster, with more confidence, and catch bugs much sooner in the lifecycle — before users have even noticed.  It rewards you for writing code that is easy to illuminate and understand in production.

So why isn’t everyone already doing it?  Well, making the leap isn’t frictionless.  There’s a minimal amount of instrumentation to learn (easier than people expect, but it’s nonzero) and then you need to learn to see your code through the lens of your own instrumentation.  You might need to refactor your use of older tools, such as metrics libraries, monitoring checks and log lines.  You’ll need to learn another query interface and how it behaves on your systems.  You might find yourself amending your code review and deploy processes a bit.  

Nothing too terrible, but it’s all new.  We hate changing our tool kits until absolutely fucking necessary.  Back at Parse/Facebook, I actually clung to my sed/awk/shell wizardry until I was professionally shamed into learning new ways when others began debugging shit faster than I could.  (I was used to being the debugger of last resort, so this really pissed me off.)  So I super get it!  So let’s talk about how to get your team aligned and hungry for change.

Okay okay okay already, how do I get my team on board?

If we were on the phone right now, I would be peppering you with a bunch of questions about your organization.  Who owns production?  Who is on call?  Who runs the software that devs write?  What is your deploy process, and how often does it get updated, and by who?  Does it have an owner?  What are the personalities of your senior folks, who made the decisions to invest in the current tools (and what are they), what motivates them, who are your most persuasive internal voices?  Etc.  Every team is different.  <3

There’s a virtuous feedback loop you need to hook up and kickstart and tweak here, where the people with the original intent in their heads (software engineers) are also informed and motivated, i.e. empowered to make the changes and personally impacted when things are broken. I recommend starting by putting your software engineers on call for production (if you haven’t).  This has a way of convincing even the toughest cases that they have a strong personal interest in quality and understandability. 

Pay attention to your feedback loop and the alignment of incentives, and make sure your teams are given enough time to actually fix the broken things, and motivation usually isn’t a problem.  (If it is, then perhaps another feedback loop is lacking: your engineers feeling sufficiently aligned with your users and their pain.  But that’s another post.)

Technical ownership over technical outcomes

I appreciate that you want your team to own the technical decisions.  I believe very strongly that this is the right way to go.  But it doesn’t mean you can’t have influence or impact, and particularly in times like this. 

It is literally your job to have your head up, scanning the horizon for opportunities and relevant threats.  It’s their job to be heads down, focusing on creating and delivering excellent work.  So it is absolutely appropriate for you to flag something like observability as both an opportunity and a potential threat, if ignored.

If I were in your situation and wanted my team to check out some technical concept, I might send around a great talk or two and ask folks to watch it, and then maybe schedule a lunchtime discussion.  Or I might invite a tech luminary in to talk with the team, give a presentation and answer their questions.  Or schedule a hack week to apply the concept to a current top problem, or something else of that nature.

But if I really wanted them to take it fucking seriously, I would put my thumb on the scale.  I would find myself a champion, load them up with context, and give them ample time and space to skill up, prototype, and eventually present to the team a set of recommendations.  (And I would stay in close contact with them throughout that period, to make sure they didn’t veer too far off course or lose sight of my goals.)

  1. Get a champion.

    Ideally you want to turn the person who is most invested in the old way of doing things — the person who owns the ELK cluster, say, or who was responsible for selecting the previous monitoring toolkit, or the goto person for ops questions — from your greatest obstacle into your proxy warrior.  This only works if you know that person is open-minded and secure enough to give it a fair shot & publicly change course, has sufficiently good technical judgment to evaluate and project into the future, and has the necessary clout with their peers.  If they don’t, or if they’re too afraid to buck consensus: pick someone else.

  2. Give them context.  

    Take them for a long walk.  Pour your heart and soul out to them.  Tell them what you’ve learned, what you’ve heard, what you hope it can do for you, what you fear will happen if you don’t.  It’s okay to get personal and to admit your uncertainties.  The more context they have, the better the chance they will come out with an outcome you are happy with.  Get them worried about the same things that worry you, get them excited about the same possibilities that excite you.  Give them a sense of the stakes. 

    And don’t forget to tell them why you are picking them — because they are listened to by their peers, because they are already expert in the problem area, because you trust their technical judgment and their ability to evaluate new things — all the reasons for picking them will translate well into the best kind of flattery — the true kind.  

  3. Give them a deadline.

    A week or two should be plenty.  Most likely, the decision is not going to be unilaterally theirs (this also gives you a bit of wiggle room should they come back going “ah no ELK is great forever and ever”), but their recommendations should carry serious weight with the team and technical leadership.  Make it clear what sort of outcome you would be very pleased with (e.g. a trial period for a new service) and what reasons you would find compelling for declining to pursue the project (i.e. your tech is unsupported, cost prohibitive, etc).  Ideally they should use this time to get real production data into the services they are testing out, so they can actually experience and weigh the benefits, not just read the marketing copy.

As a rule of thumb, I always assume that managers can’t convince engineers to do things: only other engineers can.  But what you can do instead is set up an engineer to be your champion.  And then just sit quietly in the corner, nodding, with an interested look on your face.

The nuclear option


if you <3 prod,
prod will <3 you back

You have one final option.  If there is no appropriate champion to be found, or insufficient time, or if you have sufficient trust with the team that you judge it the right thing to do: you can simply order them to do something your way.  This can feel squicky. It’s not a good habit to get into.  It usually results in things being done a bit slower, more reluctantly, more half-assedly. And you sacrifice some of your power every time you lean on your authority to get your team to do something.

But it’s just as bad for a leader to take it off the table entirely.

Sometimes you will see things they can’t.  If you cannot wield your power when circumstances call for it, then you don’t fucking have real power — you have unilaterally disarmed yourself, to the detriment of your org.  You can get away with this maybe twice a year, tops. 

But here’s the thing: if you order something to be done, and it turns out in the end that you were right?  You earn back all the power you expended on it plus interest.  If you were right, unquestionably right in the eyes of the team, they will respect you more for having laid down the law and made sure they did the right thing.

xo

charity

Some useful resources:

 

Questionable Advice #2: How Do I Get My Team Into Observability?

Questionable Advice: “After Being A Manager, Can I Be Happy As A Cog?”

mipsytipsy, , 9 Comments

One of my stretch goals for 2019 was to start writing an advice column.  I get a lot of questions about everything under the sun: observability, databases, career advice, management problems, what the best stack is for a startup, how to hire and interview, etc.  And while I enjoy this, having a high opinion of my own opinions and all, it doesn’t scale as well as writing essays.  I do have a (rather all-consuming) day job.

So I’d like to share some of the (edited and lightly anonymized) questions I get asked and some of the answers I have given.  With permission, of course.  And so, with great appreciation to my anonymous correspondent for letting me publish this, here is one.

Hi Charity,

I’ve been in tech for 25 years.  I don’t have a degree, but I worked my way up from menial jobs to engineering, and since then I have worked on some of the biggest sites in the world.  I have been offered a management role many times, but every time I refused.  Until about two years ago, when I said “fuck it, I’m almost 40; why not try.”

I took the job with boundless enthusiasm and motivation, because the team was honestly a mess.  We were building everything on-prem, and ops was constantly bullying developers over their supposed incompetence.  I had gone to conferences, listened to podcasts, and read enough blog posts that my head was full of “DevOps/CloudNative/ServiceOriented//You-build-it-you-run-it/ServantLeaders” idealism.  I knew I couldn’t make it any worse, and thought maybe, just maybe I could even make it better.softwarenegineeroncall_2 (1)

Soon after I took the job, though, there were company-wide layoffs.   It was not done well, and morale was low and sour.  People started leaving  for happier pastures.  But I stayed.  It was an interesting challenge, and I threw my heart and soul into it.

For two years I have stayed and grinded it out: recruiting (oh that is so hard), hiring, and then starting a migration to a cloud provider, and with the help of more and more people on the new team, slowly shifted the mindset of the whole engineering group to embrace devops best practices.  Now service teams own their code in production and are on-call for them, migrate themselves to the cloud with my team supporting them and building tools for them.  It is almost unrecognizable compared to where we were when I began managing.

A beautiful story isn’t it?  I hope you’re still reading.  🙂

Now I have to say that with my schedule full of 1:1s, budgeting, hiring, firing, publishing papers of mission statements and OKRs, shaping the teams, wielding influence, I realized that I enjoyed none of the above.  I read your 17 reasons not to be a manager, and I check so many boxes.  It is a pain in the ass to constantly listen to people’s egos, talk to them and keep everybody aligned (which obviously never happens).  And of course I am being crushed between top-down on-the-spot business decisions and bottom-up frustration of poorly executed engineering work under deadlines.  I am also destroyed by the mistrust and power games I am witnessing (or involved in, sometimes). while I long for collaboration and trust.  And of course when things go well my team gets all the praise, and when things go wrong I take all the blame.  I honestly don’t know how one can survive without the energy provided by praise and a sense of achievement.

All of the above makes me miss being an IC (Individual Contributor), where I could work for 8 hours straight without talking to anyone, build stuff, say what I wanted when I wanted, switch jobs if I wasn’t happy, and basically be a little shit like the ones you mention in your article.

Now you may say it’s obvious: I should find a new IC job in a healthier company.  You even wrote about it.  Going back to IC after two years of management is actually a good move.

But when I think about doing it, I get stuck.  I don’t know if I would be able to do it again, or if I could still enjoy it.  I’ve seen too many things, I’ve tasted what it’s like to be (sometimes) in control, and I did have a big impact on the company’s direction over time.  I like that.  If I went back to being an IC, I would feel small and meaningless, like just another cog in the machine.  And of course, being 40-ish, I will compete with all those 20-something smartasses who were born with kubernetes.

Thank you for reading.  Could you give me your thoughts on this?  In any case, it was good to get it off my chest.

Cheers,

Cog?

Dear Cog?,

Holy shitballs!  What an amazing story!  That is an incredible achievement in just two years, let alone as a rookie manager.  You deserve huge props for having the vision, the courage, and the tenacity to drive such a massive change through.

Of COURSE you’re feeling bored and restless.  You didn’t set out on a glorious quest for a life of updating mission statements and OKRs, balancing budgets, tending to people’s egos and fluffing their feelings, tweaking job descriptions, endless 1x1s and meetings meetings meetings, and the rest of the corporate middle manager’s portfolio.  You wanted something much bigger.  You wanted to change the world.  And you did!

But now you’ve done it.  What’s next?testinprod_3

First of all, YOUR COMPANY SUCKS.  You don’t once mention your leadership — where are they in all this?  If you had a good manager, they would be encouraging you and eagerly lining up a new and bigger role to keep you challenged and engaged at work.  They are not, so they don’t deserve you.  Fuck em.  Please leave.

Another thing I am hearing from you is, you harbor no secret desire to climb the managerial ranks at this time.  You don’t love the daily rhythms of management (believe it or not, some do); you crave novelty and mastery and advancement.  It sounds like you are willing to endure being a manager, so long as that is useful or required in order to tackle bigger and harder problems.  Nothing wrong with that!  But when the music stops, it’s time to move on.  Nobody should be saddled with a manager whose heart isn’t in the work.

You’re at the two year mark.  This is a pivotal moment, because it’s the beginning of the end of the time when you can easily slip back into technical work.  It will get harder and harder over the next 2-3 years, and at some point you will no longer have the option.

Picking up another technical role is the most strategic option, the one that maximizes your future opportunities as a technical leader.  But you do not seem excited by this option; instead you feel many complex and uncomfortable things.  It feels like going backwards.  It feels like losing ground.  It feels like ceding status and power.

“Management isn’t a promotion, it’s a career change.”

But if management is not a promotion, then going back to an engineering role should not feel like a demotion!  What the fuck?!

Imeplusprodt’s one thing to say that.  Whether it’s true or not is another question entirely, a question of policy and org dynamics.  The fact is that in most places, most of the power does go to the managers, and management IS a promotion.  Power flows naturally away from engineers and towards managers unless the org actively and vigorously pushes back on this tendency by explicitly allocating certain powers and responsibilities to other roles.

I’m betting your org doesn’t do this.  So yeah, going back to being an IC WILL be a step down in terms of your power and influence and ability to set the agenda.  That’s going to feel crappy, no question. We humans hate that.

Three points.

      1. You cannot go back to doing exactly what you did before, for the very simple reason that you are not the same person.  You are going to be attuned to power dynamics and ways of influencing that you never were before — and remember, leadership is primarily exercised through influence, not explicit authority.Senior ICs who have been managers are supremely powerful beings, who tend to wield outsize influence.  Smart managers will lean on them extensively for everything from shadow management and mentorship to advice, strategy, etc.  (Dumb managers don’t.  So find a smart manager who isn’t threatened by your experience.)
      2. You’re a short-timer here, remember?  Your company sucks.  You’re just renewing your technical skills and pulling a paycheck while finding a company that will treat you better, that is more aligned with your values.
      3. Lastly (and most importantly), I have a question.  Why did you need to become a manager in order to drive sweeping technical change over the past two years?  WHY couldn’t you have done it as a senior IC?  Shouldn’t technical people be responsible for technical decisions, and people managers responsible for people decisions?
        Could this be your next challenge, or part of it?  Could you go back to being an engineer, equipped with your shiny new powers of influence and mystical aura of recent management experience, and use it to organize the other senior ICs to assert their rightful ownership over technical decisions?  Could you use your newfound clout with leadership and upper management to convince them that this will help them recruit and retain better talent, and is a better way to run a technical org — for everyone?

     

I believe this is a better way, but I have only ever seen these changes happen when agitated for and demanded by the senior ICs.  If the senior ICs don’t assert their leadership, managers are unlikely to give it to them.  If managers try, but senior ICs don’t inhabit their power, eventually the managers just shrug and go back to making all the decisions.  That is why ultimately this is a change that must be driven and owned — at a minimum co-owned — by the senior individual contributors.Shared Joys, Kittens

I hope you can push back against that fear of being small and meaningless as an individual contributor.  The fact that it very often is this way, especially in strongly hierarchical organizations, does not mean that it has to be this way; and in healthy organizations it is not this way.  Command-and-control systems are not conducive to creative flourishing.  We have to fight the baggage of the authoritarian structures we inherited in order to make better ones.

Organizations are created afresh each and every day — not created for us, but by us.  Help create the organization you want to work at, where senior people are respected equally and have domains of ownership whether they manage people or technology.  If your current gig won’t value that labor, find one that will..

They exist.  And they want to hire you.

Lots of companies are DYING to hire this kind of senior IC, someone who is still hands on yet feels responsibility for the team as a whole, who knows the business side, who knows how to mentor and craft a culture and can herd cats when nec

There are companies that know how to use ICs at the strategic level, even executive level.  There are bosses who will see you not as a threat, but as a *huge asset* they can entrust with monumental work.

As a senior contributor who moves fluidly between roles, you are especially well-equipped to help shape a sociotechnical organization.  Could you make it your mission to model the kind of relationship you want to see between management and ICs, whichever side you happen to be on?  We need more people figuring out how to build organizations where management is not a promotion, just a change of career, and where going back and forth carries no baggage about promotions and demotions.  Help us.

And when you figure it out, please don’t keep it to yourself.  Expand your influence and share your findings by writing your experiences in blog posts, in articles, in talks.  Tell stories.  Show people people how much better it is this way.  Be so magnificently effective and mysteriously influential as a senior IC that all the baby engineers you work with want to grow up to be just like you.

Hope this helps.


charity

P.S. — Oh and stop fretting about “competing” with the 20-somethings kuberneteheads, you dork. You have been learning shit your whole career and you’ll learn this shit too.  The tech is the easy part.  The tech will always be the easy part.  🙂

Questionable Advice: “After Being A Manager, Can I Be Happy As A Cog?”

A Manager’s Bill of Responsibilities (and Rights)

mipsytipsy, , , 7 Comments

Over a year and a half ago, I wrote up a post about the rights and responsibilities due any engineer at Honeycomb.  At the time we were in the middle of a growth spurt, had just hired several new engineers, and I was in the process of turning over day-to-day engmeme2engineering management over to Emily.  Writing things down helped me codify what I actually cared about, and helped keep us true to our principles as we grew.

Tacked on to the end of the post was a list of manager responsibilities, almost as an afterthought. Many people protested, “don’t managers get any rights??” (and naturally I snapped “NO!  hahahahahha”)

I always intended to circle back and write a followup post with the rights and responsibilities for managers.  But it wasn’t til recently, as we are gearing up for another hiring spurt and have expanded our managerial ranks, that it really felt like its time had come.

The time has come, the time is now, as marvin k. mooney once said.  Added the bill of rights, and updated and expanded the list of responsibilities.  Thanks Emily Nakashima for co-writing it with me.

 

Manager’s Bill of Rights

  1. You shall receive honest, courageous, timely feedback about yourself and your team, from your reports, your peers, and your leaders.  (No one is exempt from feeding the hungry hungry feedback hippo!  NOO ONNEEEE!)  🦛🦛🦛🦛🦛🦛🦛
  2. Management will be treated with the same respect and importance as individual work.  reviewmeme
  3. You have the final say over hiring, firing, and leveling decisions for your team.  It is expected that you solicit feedback from your team and peers and drive consensus where possible.  But in the end, the say is yours.
  4. Management can be draining, difficult work, even at places that do it well.  You will get tactical, strategic, and emotional support from other managers.
  5. You cannot take care of others unless you first practice self-care.  You damn well better take vacations.  (Real ones.)
  6. You have the right to personal development, career progression, and professional support.  We will retain a leadership coach for you.
  7. You do not have to be a manager if you do not want to.  No one will ever pressure you.

Manager’s Responsibilities

  • Recruit and hire and train your team. Foster a sense of solidarity and “teaminess” as well as real emotional safety.
  • Cultivate an inclusive culture and redistribute opportunity.  Fuck a pedigree.  Resist monoculture.
  • Care for the people on your team. Support them in their career trajectory, personal goals, work/life balance, and inter- and intra-team dynamics.
  • Keep an eye out for people on other teams who aren’t getting the support they need, and work with your leadership and manager peers to fix the situation. catplays
  • Give feedback early and often. Receive feedback gracefully. Always say the hard things, but say them with love.
  • Move us relentlessly forward, staying alert for rabbit-holing and work that doesn’t contribute to our goals. Ensure redundancy/coverage of critical areas.
  • Own the planning process for your team, be accountable for the goals you set. Allocate resources by communicating priorities and requesting support. Add focus or urgency where needed.
  • Own your time and attention. Be accessible. Actively manage your calendar. Try not to make your emotions everyone else’s problems (but do lean on your own manager and your peers for support).
  • Make your own personal growth and self-care a priority. Model the values and traits we want employees to pattern themselves after.
  • Stay vulnerable.

(Easier said than done, huh?)

<3 charity

Screen Shot 2019-10-30 at 8.04.07 AM

A Manager’s Bill of Responsibilities (and Rights)

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

mipsytipsy, , , , 40 Comments

Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin.  We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.

One interesting question that came up repeatedly was: “what are some reasons that someone might not want to be a manager?”

Fascinatingly, I heard it asked over the full range of tones from extremely positive (“what kind of nutter wouldn’t want to manage a team?!”) to extremely negative (“who would ever want to manage a team?!”).  So I said I would write a piece and list some reasons.

Point of order: I am going to focus on intrinsic reasons, not external ones.  There are lots of toxic orgs where you wouldn’t want to be a manager for many reasons — but that list is too long and overwhelming, and I would argue you probably don’t want to work there in ANY capacity.  Please assume the surroundings of a functional, healthy org (I know, I know — whopping assumption).

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169675819716763649

1. You love what you do.

Never underestimate this one, and never take it for granted.  If you look forward to work and even miss it on vacation; if you occasionally leave work whistling with delight and/or triumph; if your brain has figured out how to wring out regular doses of dopamine and serotonin while delivering ever-increasing value; if you look back with pride at what you have learned and built and achieved, if you regularly tap into your creative happy place … hell, your life is already better than 99.99% of all the humans who have ever labored and lived.  Don’t underestimate the magnitude of your achievement, and don’t assume it will always be there waiting for you to just pick it right back up again.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169780841532276736

2. It is easy to get a new engineering job.  Really, really easy.

Getting your first gig as an engineer can be a challenge, but after that?  It is possibly easier for an experienced engineer to find a new job than anyone else on the planet. There is so much demand this skill set that we actually complain about how annoying it is being constantly recruited!  Amazing.

It is typically harder to find a new job as a manager.  If you think interview processes for engineers are terrible (and they are, honey), they are even weirder and less predictable (and more prone to implicit bias) for managers.  So much of manager hiring is about intangibles like “culture fit” and “do I like you” — things you can’t practice or study or know if you’ve answered correctly.  And soooo much of your skill set is inevitably bound up in navigating the personalities and bureaucracies of particular teams and a particular company.  A manager’s effectiveness is grounded in trust and relationships, which makes it much less transferrable than engineering skills.

3. There are fewer management jobs.

I am not claiming it is equally trivial for everyone to get a new job; it can be hard if you live in an out-of-the-way place, or have an unusual skill, etc.  But in almost every case, it becomes harder if you’re a manager.  Besides — given that the ratio of engineers to line managers is roughly 7 to one — there will be almost an order of magnitude fewer eng manager jobs than engineering jobs.

4. Manager jobs are the first to get cut.

Engineers (in theory) add value directly to the bottom line.  Management is, to be brutally frank, overhead.  Middle management is often the first to be cut during layoffs

Remember how I said that creation is the engineering superpower?  That’s a nicer way of saying that managers don’t directly create any value.  They may indirectly contribute to increased value over time — the good ones do — but only by working through other people as a force multiplier, mentor etc.  When times get tough, you don’t cut the people who build the product, you cut the ones whose value-added is contingent or harder to measure.

Another way this plays out is when companies are getting acquired.  As a baseline for acquihires, the acquiring company will estimate a value of $1 million per engineer, then deduct $500k for every other role being acquired.  Ouch.

5. Managers can’t really job hop.

Where it’s completely normal for an engineer to hop jobs every 1-3 years, a manager who does this will not get points for learning a wide range of skills, they’ll be seen as “probably difficult to work with”.  I have no data to support this, but I suspect the job tenure of a successful manager is at least 2-3x as long as that of a successful IC.  It takes a year or two just to gain the trust of everyone on your team and the adjacent teams, and to learn the personalities involved in navigating the organization.  At a large company, it may take a few times that long.  I was a manager at Facebook for 2.5 years and I still learned some critical new detail about managing teams there on a weekly basis.  Your value to the org really kicks in after a few years have gone by, once a significant part of the way things get done resides in your cranium.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169698084240031744

6. Engineers can be little shits.

You know the type.  Sneering about how managers don’t do any “real work”, looking down on them for being “less technical”.  Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird.  Hilariously, we had a great conversation about whether a great manager needs to be technical or not — many people sheepishly admitted that the best managers they had ever had knew absolutely nothing about technology, and yet they gave managers coding interviews and expected them to be technical.  Why?  Mostly because the engineers wouldn’t respect them otherwise.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169685458340573184

7.  As a manager, you will need to have some hard conversations.  Really, really hard ones.

Do you shy away from confrontation?  Does it seriously stress you out to give people feedback they don’t want to hear?  Manager life may not be for you.  There hopefully won’t be too many of these moments, but when they do happen, they are likely to be of outsized importance.  Having a manager who avoids giving critical feedback can be  really damaging, because it deprives you of the information you need to make course corrections before the problem becomes really big and hard.

8.  A manager’s toolset is smaller than you think.

As an engineer, if you really feel strongly about something, you just go off and do it yourself.  As a manager, you have to lead through influence and persuasion and inspiring other people to do things.  It can be quite frustrating.  “But can’t I just tell people what to do?” you might be thinking.  And the answer is no.  Any time you have to tell someone what to do using your formal authority, you have failed in some way and your actual influence and power will decrease.  Formal authority is a blunt, fragile instrument.

9. You will get none of the credit, and all of the blame.

When something goes well, it’s your job to push all the credit off onto the people who did the work.  But if you failed to ship, or and, or hire, or whatever?  The responsibility is all on you, honey.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169828158566125569

10.  Use your position as an IC to bring balance to the Force.

I LOVE working in orgs where ICs have power and use their voices.  I love having senior ICs around who model that, who walk around confidently assuming that their voice is wanted and needed in the decision-making process.  If your org is not like that, do you know who is best positioned to shift the balance of power back?  Senior ICs, with some behind-the-scenes support from managers.  For this reason, I am always a little sad when a vocal, powerful IC who models this behavior transitions to management.  If ALL of the ICs who act this way become managers, it sends a very dismaying message to the ranks — that you only speak up if you’re in the process of converting to management.

11.  Management is just a collection of skills, and you should be able to do all the fun ones as an IC.

Do you love mentoring?  Interviewing, constructing hiring loops, defining the career ladder?  Do you love technical leadership and teaching other people, or running meetings and running projects?  Any reasonably healthy org should encourage all senior ICs to participate and have leadership roles in these areas.  Management can be unbundled into a lot of different skills and roles, and the only ones that are necessarily confined to management are the shitty ones, like performance reviews and firing people.  I LOVE it when an engineer expresses the desire to start learning more management skills, and will happily brainstorm with them on next steps — get an intern? run team meetings?  there are so many things to choose from!  When I say that all engineers should try management at some point in their career, what I really mean is these are skills that every senior engineer should develop.  Or as Jill says:

12. Joy is much harder to come by.

That dopamine drip in your brain from fixing problems and learning things goes away, and it’s … real tough.  This is why I say you need to commit to a two year stint if you’re going to try management: that, plus it takes that long to start to get your feet under you and is hard on your team if they’re switching managers all the time.  It usually takes a year or two to rewire your brain to look for the longer timeline, less intense rewards you get from coaching other people to do great things.  For some of us, it never does kick in.  It’s genuinely hard to know whether you’ve done anything worth doing.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169826158751338497

13. It will take up emotional space at the expense of your personal life.

When I was an IC, I would work late and then go out and see friends or meet up at the pub almost every night.  It was great for my dating life and social life in general.  As a manager, I feel like curling up in a fetal position and rolling home around 4 pm.  I’m an introvert, and while my capacity has increased a LOT over the past several years, I am still sapped every single day by the emotional needs of my team.

14. Your time doesn’t belong to you.

It’s hard to describe just how much your life becomes not your own.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169804763933753345

15. Meetings.

16. If technical leadership is what your heart loves most, you should NOT be a manager.

If you are a strong tech lead and you convert to management, it is your job to begin slowly taking yourself out of the loop as tech lead and promoting others in your place.  Your technical skills will stop growing at the point that you switch careers, and will slowly decay after that.  Moreover, if you stay on as tech lead/manager you will slowly suck all the oxygen from the room.  It is your job to train up and hand over to your replacements and gradually step out of the way, period.

17. It will always be there for you later.

In conclusion

Given all this, why should ANYONE ever be a manager?  Shrug.  I don’t think there’s any one good or bad answer.  I used to think a bad answer would be “to gain power and influence” or “to route around shitty communication systems”, but in retrospect those were my reasons and I think things turned out fine.  It’s a complex calculation.  If you want to try it and the opportunity arises, try it!  Just commit to the full two year experiment, and pour yourself into learning it like you’re learning a new career — since, you know, you are.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169641930713645057

But please do be honest with yourself.  One thing I hate is when someone wants to be a manager, and I ask why, and they rattle off a list of reasons they’ve heard that people SHOULD want to become managers (“to have a greater impact than I can with just myself, because I love helping other people learn and grow, etc”) but I am damn sure they are lying to themselves and/or me.

Introspection and self-knowledge are absolutely key to being a decent manager, and lord knows we need more of those.  So don’t kick off your grand experiment by lying to yourself, ok?

 

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder

mipsytipsy, , , , , 63 Comments

Last night I was out with a dear friend who has been an engineering manager for a year now, and by two drinks in I was rattling off a long list things I always say to newer engineering managers.

Then I remembered: I should write a post! It’s one of my goals this year to write more long form instead of just twittering off into the abyss.Buffy Jaguar 3.5x5

There’s a piece I wrote two years ago, The Engineer/Manager Pendulum,  which is probably my all time favorite.  It was a love letter to a friend who I desperately wanted to see go back to engineering, for his own happiness and mental health.  Well, this piece is a sequel to that one.

It’s primarily aimed at new managers, who aren’t sure what their career options look like or how to evaluate the opportunities that come their way, or how it may expand or shrink their future opportunities.

The first fork in the manager’s path

Every manager reaches a point where they need to choose: do they want to manage engineers (a “line manager”), or do they want to try to climb the org chart? — manage managers, managers of other managers, even other divisions; while Does Not Kill Us Puppy UPDATEDbeing “promoted” from manager to senior manager, director to senior director, all the way up to VP and so forth.   Almost everyone’s instinct is to say “climb the org chart”, but we’ll talk about why you should be critical of this instinct.

They also face a closely related question: how technical do they wish to stay, and how badly do they care?

Are you an “engineering MANAGER” or an “ENGINEERING manager”?

These are not unlike the decisions every engineer ends up making about whether to go deep or go broad, whether to specialize or be a generalist.  The problem is that both engineers and managers often make these career choices with very little information — or even awareness that they are doing it.

And managers in particular then have a tendency to look up ten years later and realize that those choices, witting or unwitting, have made them a) less employable  and b) deeply unhappy.

Lots of people have the mindset that once they become an engineering manager, they should just go from gig to gig as an engineering manager who manages other engineers: that’s who they are now.  But this is actually a very fragile place to sit long-term, as we’ll discuss further on in this piece.

But let’s start at to the beginning, so I can speak to those of you who are considering management for the very first time.

“So you want to try engineering management.”

COOL! I think lots of senior engineers should try management, maybe even most senior engineers.  It’s so good for you, it makes you better at your job. (If you aren’t a senior engineer, and by that I mean at least 7+ years of engineering experience, be very wary; know this isn’t usually in your best interest.)

Hopefully you have already gathered that management is a career change, not a promotion, and you’re aware that nobody is very good at it when they first start.

That’s okay! It takes a solid year or two to find new rhythms and reward mechanisms before you can even begin to find your own voice or trust your judgment. Management problems look easy, deceptively so.  Reasons this is hard include:

  1. Most tech companies are absolutely abysmal at providing any sort of training or structure to help you learn the ropes and find your feet.
  2. Even if they do, you still have to own your own career development.  If learning to be a good engineer was sort of like getting your bachelor’s, learning to be a good manager is like getting your PhD — much more custom to who you are.
  3. It will exhaust you mentally and emotionally in the weirdest ways for much longer than you think it should.  You’ll be tired a lot, and you’ll miss feeling like you’re good at something (anything).

This is because you need to change your habits and practices, which in turn will actually change who you are.  This takes time.  Which is why …

The minimum tour of duty as a new manager is two years.

If you really want to try being a manager, and the opportunity presents itself, do it!  But only if you are prepared to fully commit to a two year long experiment.

Root Causes DolphinCommit to it like a proper career change. Seek out new peers, find new heroes. Bring fresh eyes and a beginner’s mindset. Ask lots of questions. Re-examine every one of your patterns and habits and priorities: do they still serve you? your team?

Don’t even bother thinking about in terms of whether you “enjoy managing” for a while, or trying to figure out if you are are any good at it. Of course you aren’t any good at it yet.  And even if you are, you don’t know how to recognize when you’ve succeeded at something, and you haven’t yet connected your brain’s reward systems to your successes.  A long stretch of time without satisfying brain drugs is just the price of admission if you want to earn these experiences, sadly.

It takes more than one year to learn management skills and wire up your brain to like it.  If you are waffling over the two year commitment, maybe now is not the time.  Switching managers too frequently is disruptive to the team, and it’s not fair to make them report to someone who would rather be doing something else or isn’t trying their ass off.

It takes about 3-5 years for your skills to deteriorate.

So you’ve been managing a team for a couple years, and it’s starting to feel … comfortable?  Hey, you’re pretty good at this!  Yay!

With a couple of years under your belt as a line manager, you now have TWO powerful skill sets.  You can build things, AND you can organize people into teams to build even bigger things. Right now, both sets are sharp.  You could return to engineering pretty easily, or keep on as a manager — your choice.

But this state of grace doesn’t last very long. Your technical skills stop advancing when you become a manager, and instead begin eroding.  Two years in, you aren’t the effective tech lead you once were; your information is out of date and full of gaps, the hard parts are led by other people these days.

More critically, your patterns of mind and habits shift over time, and become those of a manager, not an engineer.  Consider how excited an engineer becomes at the prospect of a justifiable greenfield project; now compare to her manager’s glum reaction as she instinctively winces at having to plan for something so reprehensibly unpredictable and difficult to estimate.  It takes time to rewire yourself back.

If you like engineering management, your tendency is to go “cool, now I’m a manager”, and move from job to job as an engineering manager, managing team after team of engineers.  But this is a trap.  It is not a sound long term plan.  It leads too many people off to a place they never wanted to end up: technically sidelined.

Sunglasses Tiger Debugger 3.3x5

Why can’t I just make a career out of being a combo tech lead+line manager?

One of the most common paths to management is this: you’re a tech lead, you’re directing ever larger chunks of technical work, doing 1x1s and picking up some of the people stuff, when your boss asks if you’d like to manage the team.  “Sure!”, you say, and voila — you are an engineering manager with deep domain expertise.

But if you are doing your job, you begin the process of divesting yourself of technical leadership responsibilities starting immediately.  Your own technical development should screech to a halt once you become a manager, because you have a whole new career to focus on learning.

Your job is to leverage that technical expertise to grow your engineers into great senior engineers and tech leads themselves.  Your job is not to hog the glory and squat on the hard problems yourself, it’s to empower and challenge and guide your team.  Don’t suck up all the oxygen: you’ll stunt the growth of your team.

But your technical knowledge gets dated, and your skills atrophy..  The longer it’s been since you worked as an engineer, the harder it will be to switch back.  It gets real hard around three years, and five years seems like a tipping point.[1]

And because so much of your credibility and effectiveness as an engineering leader comes from your expertise in the technology that your team uses every day, ultimately you will be no longer capable of technical leadership, only people management.

On being an “engineering manager” who only does people management

I mean, there’s a reason we don’t lure good people managers away from Starbucks to run engineering teams.  It’s the intersection and juxtaposition of skill sets that gives engineering managers such outsize impact.

The great ones can make a large team thrum with energy.  The great ones can break down a massive project into projects that challenge (but do not overwhelm) a dozen or more engineers, from new grads to grizzled veterans, pushing everyone to grow.  The great ones can look ahead and guess which rocks you are going to die on if you don’t work to avoid them right now.

The great ones are a treasure: and they are rare.  And in order to stay great, they regularly need to go back to the well to refresh their own hands-on technical abilities.

Pointless Ice Cream 3x2.5There is an enormous demand for technical engineering leaders — far more demand than supply.  The most common hackaround is to pair a people manager (who can speak the language and knows the concepts, but stopped engineering ages ago) with a tech lead, and make them collaborate to co-lead the team.  This unwieldy setup often works pretty well.

But most of those people managers didn’t want or expect to end up sidelined in this way when they were told to stop engineering.

If you want to be a pure people manager and not do engineering work, and don’t want to climb the ladder or can’t find a ladder to climb, more power to you.  I don’t know that I’ve met many of these people in my life.  I have met a lot of people in this situation by accident, and they are always kinda angsty and unhappy about it.  Don’t let yourself become this person by accident.  Please.

Which brings me to my next point.

You will be advised to stop writing code or engineering.

✨

Fuck

That.

 ✨

Everybody’s favorite hobby is hassling new managers about whether or not they’ve stopped writing code yet, and not letting up until they say that they have.  This is a terrible, horrible, no-good VERY bad idea that seems like it must originally have been a botched repeating of the correct advice, which is:

Stop writing code and engineering

in the critical path

Can you spot the difference?  It’s very subtle.  Let’s run a quick test:

  • Authoring a feature?  ⛔️
  • Covering on-call when someone needs a break?  ✅
  • Diving on the biggest project after a post mortem?  ⛔️
  • Code reviews?  ✅
  • Picking up a p2 bug that’s annoying but never seems to become top priority?  ✅
  • Insisting that all commits be gated on their approval?  ⛔️
  • Cleaning up the monitoring checks and writing a library to generate coverage?  ✅

The more you can keep your hands warm, the more effective you will be as a coach and a leader.  You’ll have a richer instinct for what people need and want from you and each other, which will help you keep a light touch.  You will write better reviews and resolve technical disputes with more authority.  You will also slow the erosion and geriatric creep of your own technical chops.

I firmly believe every line manager should either be in the on call rotation or pinch hit liberally and regularly, but that’s a different post.

Technical Leadership track

If you  love technology and want to remain a subject-matter expert in designing, building and shipping cutting-edge technical products and systems, you cannot afford to let yourself drift too far or too long away from hands-on engineering work.  You need to consciously cultivate your path , probably by practicing some form of the engineer/manager pendulum.

If you love managing engineers — if being a technical leader is a part of your identity that you take great pride in, then you must keep up your technical skills and periodically DIstrust Kittens 2.5x3invest in your practice and renew your education.  Again: this is simply the price of admission.  You need to renew your technical abilities, your habits of mind, and your visceral senses around creating and maintaining systems.  There is no way to do this besides doing it.  If management isn’t a promotion, then returning to hands-on work isn’t a demotion, either.  Right?

One warning: Your company may be great, but it doesn’t exist for your benefit.  You and only you can decide what your needs are and advocate for them.  Remember that next time your boss tries to guilt you into staying on as manager because you’re so badly needed, when you can feel your skills getting rusty and your effectiveness dwindling.  You owe it to yourself to figure out what makes you happy and build a portfolio of experiences that liberate you to do what you love.  Don’t sacrifice your happiness at the altar of any company.  There are always other companies.

Honestly, I would try not to think of yourself as a manager at all: you are an “engineering leader” performing a tour of duty in management.  You’re pursuing a long term strategy towards being a well-respected technologist, someone who can sling code, give informed technical guidance and explain in detail customized for to anyone at any level of sophistication.

Organizational Leadership Track

Most managers assume they want to climb the ladder.  Leveling up feels like an achievement, and that can feel impossible to resist.

Resist it.  Or at least, resist doing it unthinkingly.  Don’t do it because the ladder is there and must be climbed.  Know as much as you can about what you’re in for before you decide it’s what you want.

Here are a few reasons to think critically about climbing the ladder to director and executive roles.

  1. Your choices shrink. There are fewer jobs, with more competition, mostly at bigger companies.  (Do you even like big companies?)
  2. You basically need to do real time at a big company where they teach effective management skills, or you’ll start from a disadvantage.
  3. Bureaucracies are highly idiosyncratic, skills and relationships may or may not transfer with you between companies. As an engineer you could skip every year or two for greener pastures if you landed a crap gig.  An engineer has … about 2-3x more leeway in this regard than an exec does.  A string of short director/exec gigs is a career ender or a coach seat straight to consultant life.
  4. You are going to become less employable overall.  The ever-higher continuous climb almost never happens, usually for reasons you have no control over.  This can be a very bitter pill.
  5. Your employability becomes more about your “likability” and other problematic things.  Your company’s success determines the shape of your career much more than your own performance.  (Actually, this probably begins the day you start managing people.)
  6. Your time is not your own. Your flaws are no longer cute. You will see your worst failings ripple outward and be magnified and reflected.  (Ditto, applies to all leaders but intensifies as you rise.)
  7. You may never feel the dopamine hit of “i learned something, i fixed something, i did something” that comes so freely as an I.C.  Some people learn to feel satisfaction from managery things, others never do.  Most describe it as a very subdued version of the thrill you get from building things.
  8. You will go home tired every night, unable to articulate what you did that day. You cannot compartmentalize or push it aside. If the project failed for reasons outside your control, you will be identified with the failure anyway.
  9. Nobody really thinks of you as a person anymore, you turn into a totem for them to project shit on. (Things will only get worse if you hit back.)  Can you handle that?  Are you sure?
  10. It’s pretty much a one-way trip.

Sure, there are compensating rewards.  Money, power, impact.  But I’m pointing out the negatives because most people don’t stop to consider them when they start saying they want to try managing managers.  Every manager says that.

The mere existence of a ladder compels us all to climb.

I know people who have climbed, gotten stuck, and wished they hadn’t. I know people who never realized how hard it would be for them to go back to something they loved doing after 5+ years climbing the ladder farther and farther away from tech.  I know some who are struggling their way back, others who have no idea how or where to start.  For those who try, it is hard.  

You can’t go back and forth from engineering to executive, or even director to manager, in the way you can traverse freely between management and engineering as a technologist.

I just want more of you entering management with eyes wide open.  That’s all I’m saying.

If you don’t know what you want, act to maximize your options.

Engineering is a creative act. Managing engineers will require your full attentive and authentic self. You will be more successful if you figure out what that self is, and honor its needs.  Try to resist the default narratives about promotions and titles and roles, they have nothing to do with what satisfies your soul.  If you have influence, use it to lean hard against things like paying managers more than ICs of the same level.[2]

It’s totally normal not to know who you want to be, or have some passionate end goal.  It’s great to live your life and work your work and keep an eye out for interesting opportunities, and see what resonates.  It’s awesome when you get asked to step up and opportunistically build on your successes.

If you want a sustainable career in tech, you are going to need to keep learning your whole life. The world is changing much faster than humans evolved to naturally adapt, so you need to stay a little bit restless and unnaturally hungry to succeed in this industry.

The best way to do that is to make sure you a) know yourself and what makes you happy, b) spend your time mostly in alignment with that. Doing things that make you happy give you energy. Doing things that drain you are antithetical to your success. Find out what those things are, and don’t do them. 

Don’t be a martyr, don’t let your spending habits shackle you, and don’t build things that trouble your conscience.

And have fun.

Yours in inverting $(allthehierarchies),
charity.

img_5680

 

[1] Important point: I am not saying you can’t pick up the skills and patience to practice engineering again.  You probably can!  But employers are extremely reluctant to pay you a salary as an engineer if you haven’t been paid to ship code recently.  The tipping point for hireability comes long before the tipping point for learning ability, in my experience.

[2] It is in no one’s best interest for money to factor into the decision of whether to be a manager or not.  Slack pays their managers LESS than engineers of the same level, and I think this is incredibly smart: sends a strong signal of servant leadership.

 

Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder

Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency

mipsytipsy, , , , , , , , , 28 Comments

gplanis

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The company is growing like crazy, your engineering team keeps rising to the challenge, and you are ferociously proud of them. But some cracks are beginning to show, and frankly you’re a little worried. You have always advocated for engineers to have broad latitude in technical decisions, including choosing languages and tools. This autonomy and culture of ownership is part of how you have successfully hired and retained top talent despite the siren song of the Faceboogles.

But recently you saw something terrifying that you cannot unsee: your company is using all the languages, all the environments, all the databases, all the build tools. Shit!!! Your ops team is in full revolt and you can’t really blame them. It’s grown into an unsupportable nightmare and something MUST be done, but you don’t know what or how — let alone how to solve it while retaining the autonomy and personal agency that you all value so highly.

I hear a version of this everywhere I’ve gone for the past year or two. It’s crazy how often I’ve seen it. I’ve been meaning to write my answer up for ages, and here it (finally) is.

First of all: you aren’t alone. This is extremely common among high-performing teams, so congratulations. Really!

There actually seems to be a direct link between teams that give engineers lots of leeway to own their technical decisions and that team’s ability to hire and retain top-tier talent, particularly senior talent. Everything is a tradeoff, obviously, but accepting somewhat more chaos in exchange for a stronger sense of individual ownership is usually the right one, and leads to higher-performing teams in the long run.

Second, there is actually already a well-trod path out of this hole to a better place, and it doesn’t involve sacrificing developer agency. It’s fairly simple! Just five short steps, which I will describe to you now.

How to build a golden path and reverse software sprawl

  1. Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers.
  2. Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
  3. Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.
  4. Work with team leads to draw up an umbrella plan for adopting the Golden Path for their current projects as well as older production services, as much as is reasonable or possible or desirable. Come up with a timeline for the whole eng org to deprecate as many other tools as possible. Allocate real engineering time to the effort. Hell, make a party out of it!
  5. After the cutoff date (and once things have stabilized), establish a regular process for reviewing and incorporating feedback about the blessed Path and considering any proposed changes, additions or removals.

There you go. That’s it. Easy, right??

(It’s not easy. I never said it was easy, I said it was simple. 👼🏼)

Your engineers are currently used to picking the best tool for the job by optimizing locally. gpjonWhat data store has a data model that is easiest for them to fit to their needs? Which language is fastest for I/O throughput? What are they already proficient in? What you need to do is start building your muscles for optimizing globally. Not in isolation of other considerations, but in conjunction with them. It will always be a balancing act between optimizing locally for the problem at hand and optimizing globally for operability and general sanity.

(Oh, incidentally, requiring an engineer to write up a proposal any time they want to use a non-standard component, and then defend their case while the council grills them in person — this will be nothing but good for them, guaran-fucking-teed.)

Let’s go into a bit more detail on each of the five points. But quick disclaimer: this is not a prescription. I don’t know your system, your team, your cultural land mines or technical interdependencies or anything else about your situation. I am just telling stories here.

1. Assemble your council

Three is a good number for a council. More than that gets unwieldy, and may have trouble reaching consensus. Less than three and you run into SPOFs. You never want to have a single person making unilateral decisions because a) the decision-making process will be weaker, b) it sets that person up for too much interpersonal friction, and c) it denies your other engineers the opportunity to practice making these kinds of decisions.

  • Your council members need technical breadth more than depth, and should be widely respected by engineers.
  • At least one member should have a long history with the company so they know lots of stupid little details about what’s been tried before and why it failed.
  • At least one member should be deeply versed in practical data and operability concerns.
  • They should all have enough patience and political skill to drive consensus for their decisions. Absolutely no bombthrowers.

If you’re super lucky, you just tap the three senior technologists who immediately come to mind … your mind and everyone else’s. If you don’t have this kind of automatic consensus, you may want to let teams or orgs nominate their own representative so they feel they have some say.

 

2. Task the council with defining a Golden Path

Your council cannot vanish for a week and then descend from the mountain lugging lists engraved on stone tablets. The process of discovery and consensus is what validates the result.

The process must include talking to and gathering feedback from your engineers, talking to experts outside the company, talking to teams at other companies who are farther along using that technology, coming up with detailed pro/con lists and reasons for their choices. Maybe sometimes it includes prototyping something or investigating the technical depths … but yeah no mostly it’s just the talking.

You need your council members to have enough political skill to handle these conversations deftly, building support and driving consensus through the process. Everybody doesn’t have to love the outcome, but it shouldn’t be a *surprise* to anyone by the end.

3. Know where you’re going

Your council should create a detailed written plan describing which technologies are going to be supported … and a stab at what “supported” means. (Ask the experts in each component what the best practices are for backups, versioning, dependency management, etc.)

You might start with something like this:

* Backend lang: Go 1.11           ## we will no longer be supporting
backend scripting languages
* Frontend lang: ReactJS v 16.5
* Primary db: Aurora v 2.0        ## Yes, we know postgres is "better", 
but we have many mysql experts and 0 pg experts except the one guy 
who is going to complain about this.  You know who you are.
* Deploy pipeline: github -> jenkins + docker -> S3 -> custom k8s 
deploy tooling
* Message broker: kafka v 2.10, confluent build
* Mail: SES
* .... etc

Circulate the draft regularly for feedback, especially with eng managers. Some team reorganization will probably be necessary to bear the new weight of your support specifications, and managers will need some lead time to wrangle this.

This is also a great time to reconceive of the way on call works at your company. But I am not going to go into all that here.

4. Set a date, draft a plan: go!

Get approval from leadership to devote a certain amount of time to consolidating your stack and paying down a lump sum of tech debt. It depends on your stage of decay, but a reasonable amount of time might be “25% of engineering time for three months“. Whatever you agree to, make sure it’s enough to make the world demonstrably better for the humans who run it; you don’t want to leave them with a tire fire or you’ll blow your credibility.

The council and team leads should come up with a rough outer estimate for how long itgpjava would take to rewrite everything and move the whole stack on to the Golden Stack. (It’s probably impossible and/or would take years, but that’s okay.) Next, look for the quick wins or swollen, inflamed pain points.

  • If you are running two pieces of functionally similar software, like postgres and mysql, can you eliminate one?
  • If you are managing something yourself that AWS could manage for you (e.g. postfix instead of SES, or kafka instead of kinesis), can you migrate that?
  • If you are managing anything yourself that is not core to your business value, in fact, you should try to not manage it.
  • If you are running any services by hand on an AWS instance somewhere, could you try using a service?
  • If you are running your own monitoring software, etc … can you not?
  • If you have multiple versions of a piece of software, can you upgrade or consolidate on one version?

The hardest parts are always going to be the ones around migrating data or rewriting components. Not everything is worth doing or can afford to be done in the time span of your project time, and that’s okay.

Next, brainstorm up some carrots. Can you write templates so that anybody who writes a service using your approved library, magically gets monitoring checks without having to configure anything? Can you write a wrapper so they get a bunch of end-to-end tests for free? Anything you can do to delight people or save them time and effort by using your preferred components is worth considering.

(By the way, if you don’t have any engineers devoted to internal tooling, you’re probably way overdue at this point.)

Pay down as much debt as you can, but be pragmatic: it’s better to get rid of five small things than one large thing, from a support perspective. Your main goal is to shrink the number of types of software your team has to support, particularly databases.

Do look for ways to make it fun, like … running a competition to see who can move the most tools to AWS in a week, or throwing a hack week party, or giving dorky prizes like trophies that entitle you to put your manager on call instead of you for a day, etc.

gpcersei

5. Make the process sustainable

After your target date has come and gone, you probably want to hold a post mortem retrospective and do lots of listening. (Well — first might I recommend a bubble bath and a bottle of champagne? But then a post mortem.)

Nothing is ever fixed forever. The company’s needs are going to expand and contract, gpdiedand people will come and go, because change is the only constant. So you need to bake some flex into your system. How are you going to handle the need for changes to the Golden Path? Monthly discussions? An email list? Quarterly meetings with a formal agenda? I’ve seen people do all of these and more, it doesn’t really matter afaict.

Nobody likes a cabal, though, so the original council should gradually rotate out. I recommend replacing one person at a time, one per quarter, and rotating in another senior engineer in their place. This provides continuity while giving others a chance to learn these technical and political skills.

In the end, engineers are still free to use any tool or component at any time, just like before, only now they are solely responsible for it, which puts pressure on them not to do it unless REALLY necessary. So if someone wants to propose adding a new tool to the default golden path, they can always add it themselves and gain some experience in it before bringing it to the council to discuss a formal place for it.

That’s all folks

See, wasn’t that simple?

(It’s never simple.)

I dearly wish more people would write up their experiences with this sort of thing in detail. I think engineering teams are too reluctant to show their warts and struggles to the world — or maybe it’s their executives who are afraid? Dunno.

Regardless, I think it’s actually a highly effective recruiting tool when teams aren’t afraid to share their struggles. The companies that brag about how awesome they are are the ones who come off looking weak and fragile. Whereas you can always trust the ones who are willing to laugh about all the ways they screwed up. Right?

In conclusion, don’t feel like an asshole for insisting on some process here. There should be friction around adding new components to your stack. (Add in haste, repent at leisure, as they say.) Anybody who argues with you probably needs to be exposed to way, way more of the support load for that software. That’s my professional opinion.

Anyway. You win or you die. Good luck with your sprawl.

charity

 

 

Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency

Ten Platform Commandments

mipsytipsy, , 3 Comments

On Monday I gave a talk at DOES18 called “All the World’s a Platform”, where I talked about a bunch of the lessons learned by using and abusing and running and building platforms at scale.

I promised to do a blog post with the takeaways, so here they are.

Platform Commandment #1: Any time you have to think about one particular user, you have failed in some way.  It doesn’t scale.  Just a few one-offs a day will drag you down and drown your forward momentum.

Corollary: you will always have to do this every day.  Solution: turn one-offs into a support problem, not an engineering problem.

Platform Commandment #2: keep your critical path as small and independent as possible.  Have explicit tiers of importance.  You cannot care about everything equally, sacrifices must be made.

Example: at Parse the core API was tier 1, push was tier 2, website was somewhere down around tier 10.  We always knew what to bring up and care about first.

Platform Commandment #3: It is the job of the platform to protect itself at all costs, including at the expense of your app.

Platform Commandment #4: Remember that your platform is a magical black box to your users.  You can’t expect them to behave reasonably without feedback loops and a rich mental model.  Help them out — esp your super-users.  It will save you time if you can help them help themselves.

Platform Commandment #5: Always expose a visible request id, shard id, uuid, trace id, any other relevant diagnostic information in user-visible errors.  Up to the point where it reveals too much exploitable information about your service, which is probably much farther than you think.  Poorly obfuscated infrastructure decisions are usually less of a threat to your business than befuddled users are.

Platform Commandment #6: Your observability must center your users’ perspective, not your own.  The health of the system doesn’t matter.  The health of every request, and every high-cardinality grouping of requests — those are what matter.

You must be able to care about and inspect the perf and quality from the perspective of every single application and/or user and their users, as richly as though theirs was the *only* application.  In real-time. 

Dashboards are practically useless unless you can drill down into them.  Top-10 lists are useless — your biggest customers may not be your most important customers.

Solution: Invest in tooling (like Honeycomb) that lets you slice and dice on dimensions of arbitrary cardinality, so you can do things like a) break down by one uuid out of millions, b) break down by endpoint, latency percentile, raw query, data store, etc — to see what the experience actually looks like for that user, not for a high level aggregate like a dashboard.

Platform Commandment #7: Use end-to-end checks to traverse all the key code paths and architecture paths.

You will be tempted to disable them because they seem flappy and flaky and need to be fixed.  But this is actually what your users are suffering through every day they use your platform.  Don’t disable them, fix them.

Platform Commandment #8: Invest early in every kind of throttle, blacklist, velvet rope, in-flight rewrite, custom url/error responder, content inspection, etc … both partial and total, for every slice of events or users.  You will need all these fine-grained controls to keep your platform alive for 99.9% of users while you debug the .1% who are outliers and bad actors.

Platform Commandment #9: And use a multi-threaded language ffs.

Platform Commandment #10: USE YOUR OWN PLATFORM.  For work, if possible.  Feel the pain that you inflict on others.

Bonus Commandment: all cotenancy isolation guarantees are bullshit**

**from a perf standpoint, not security

Ten Platform Commandments

On Engineers and Influence

mipsytipsy, , , , , , 5 Comments

(Based on yesterday’s tweetstorm and the ensuing conversation, https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy/status/1029608573217587201)

Let’s talk about influence. As an engineer, how do you get influence? What does influence look like, what is it rooted in, how do you wield it or lose it? How is it different from the power and influence you might have as a manager?[0]

This often comes up in the context of ICs who desperately want to become managers in order to have more access to information and influence over decisions. This is a bad signal, though it’s sadly very common.

When that happens, you need to do some soul-searching. Does your org make space for senior ICs to lead and own decisions? Do you have an IC track that runs parallel to the manager track at least as high as director level? Are they compensated equally? Do you  have a career ladder? Are your decision-making processes mysterious to anyone who isn’t a manager? Don’t assume what’s obvious to you is obvious to others; you have to ask around.

If so, it’s probably their own personal baggage speaking. Maybe they don’t believe you. Maybe they’ve only worked in orgs where managers had all the power. Maybe they’ve even worked in lots of places that said the exact same things as you are saying about how ICs can have great impact, but it was all a lie and now they’re burned. Maybe they aren’t used to feeling powerful for all kinds of reasons.

Regardless, people who want to be managers in order to perpetuate a bad power structure are the last people you want to be managers.[1]

But what does engineering influence look like?  How do your powers manifest?

I am going to avoid discussing the overlapping and interconnected issues of gender, race and class, let’s just acknowledge that it’s much more structurally difficult for some to wield power than for others, ok?

The power to create

Doing is the engineering superpower. We create things with just a laptop and our brain! It’s incredible! We don’t have to constantly convince and cajole and coerce others into building on our behalf, we can just build.

This may seem basic, but it matters. Creation is the ur-power from which all our forms of power flow. Nothing gets built unless we agree to build it (which makes this an ethical issue, too).

Facebook had a poster that said “CODE WINS ARGUMENTS”. Problematic in many ways, absolutely. But how many times have you seen a technical dispute resolved by who was willing to do the work? Or “resolved” one way.. then reversed by doing? Doing ends debates. Doing proves theories. Doing is powerful. (And “doing” doesn’t only mean “write code”.)

Furthermore, building software is a creative activity, and doing it at scale is an intensely communal one. As a creative act, we are better builders when we are motivated and inspired and passionate about our work (as compared to say, chopping wood). And as a collaborative act, we do better work when we have high trust and social cohesion.

Engineering ability and judgment, autonomy and sense of purpose, social trust and cooperative behaviors: this is the raw stuff of great engineering. Everybody has a mode or two that they feel most comfortable and authoritative operating from: we can group these roughly into archetypes.

(Examples drawn from some of the stupendously awesome senior engineers I’ve gotten to work with over the years, as well as the ways I loved to fling my weight around as an engineer.)

Archetypes of influence

  • “Doing the work that is desperately hard and desperately needed — and often desperately dull.” SOC2 compliance, backups and restores, terrifying refactors, any auth integration ever: if it’s moving the business forward, they don’t give a shit how dull the work is. If you are this engineer, you have a deep well of respect and gratitude.
  • “Debugger of last resort.” Often the engineer who has been there the longest or originally built the system. If you are helpful and cheerful with your history and context, this is a huge asset. (People tend to wildly overestimate this person’s indispensability, actually; please don’t encourage this.)Image result for engineer software meme manager
  • The “expert” archetype is closely related. If you are the deep subject matter expert in some technology component, you have a shit ton of influence over anything that uses or touches that component. (You should stay up on impending changes to retain your edge.)
  • There are people who deliver a bafflingly powerful firehose of sustained output, sometimes making headway on multiple fronts at once. Some work long hours, others just have an unerring instinct for how to maximize impact (this sometimes maps to junior/senior manifestations). Nobody wants to piss off those people. Their consent is critical for … everything. Their participation will often turbo charge a project or pull a foundering effort over the finish line.

Not all influence is rooted in raw technical strength or output.  Just a few of the wide variety of creative/collaborative/interpersonal strengths:

  • Some engineers are infinitely curious, and have a way of consistently sniffing a few steps ahead of the pack. They might seem to be playing around with something pointless, and you want to scold them; then they save your ass from total catastrophe. You learn to value their playing around.
  • Some engineers solve problems socially, by making friends and trading tips and fixes and favors in the industry. Don’t underestimate social debugging, it’s often the quickest path to the right answer.
  • Some are dazzlingly lazy and blow your mind with their elegant shortcuts and corners correctly cut.
  • Some are recruiting magnets, and it’s worth paying their salary just for all the people who want to work with them again.
  • Some are skilled at driving consensus among stakeholders.
  • Some are killer explainers and educators and storytellers.
  • Some are the senior engineer everyone silently wants to grow up to be.
  • Some can tell such an inspiring story of tomorrow that everyone will run off to make it so.
  • Some teach by turning code reviews into a pedagogical art form.
  • Some make everyone around them somehow more productive and effective. Some create relentless forward momentum. Some are good at saying no.

And there are a few special wells of power that bear calling out as such.

  • Engineers who have been managers are worth their weight in gold.  They can translate business goals for junior engineers in their native language with impeccable credibility (something managers never really have, esp in junior engineers’ eyes.). They make strong tech leads, they can carve up projects into components that challenge but do not overwhelm each contributor while hitting deadlines.
  • Some engineers are a royal pain in the ass because they question and challenge every system and hierarchy. But these are sharp, powerful rocks that can polish great teams. Though they do require a strong manager, to channel their energy towards productive dialogue and improvement and keep them from pissing off the whole team.
  • And let’s not forget engineers who are on call. If you have a healthy on call culture, your ownership over production creates a deep, deep well of power and moral authority — to make demands, drive change, to prioritize. On call should not be a shit salad served up to those who can’t refuse, it should be a badge of honor and seriousness shouldered by every engineer who ships code. (And it should not be miserable or regularly life-impacting.)

… I could go on all day. Engineering is such a powerful role and skill set. It’s definitely worth unpacking where your own influence comes from, and understanding how others perceive your strengths.

Most forms of power boil down to “influence, wielded”.

But just banging out code is not enough. You may have credibility, but having it is not the same as using it. To transform influence into power you have to use it.  And the way you use it is by communicating.

What’s locked up in your head has no impact on the rest of us.  You have to get it out.

You can do this in lots of ways: by writing, in 1x1s, conversations with small groups, openly recruiting allies, convincing someone with explicit authority, broadcasting inpublic, etc.

Because engineering is a creative activity, authoritarian power is actually quite brittle and damaging. The only sustainable forms of power are so-called “soft powers” like influencing and inspiring, which is why good managers use their soft power freely and hard power sparingly/with great reluctance. If your leadership invokes authority on the regular, that’s an antipattern.[2]

If you don’t speak up, you don’t have the right to sit and fume over your lack of influence. And speaking up does mean being vulnerable — and sometimes wrong — in front of other people.

This is not a zero-sum game.

Most of you have far more latent power than you realize or are used to wielding, because you don’t feel powerful or don’t recognize what you do in those terms.

Managers may have hard power and authority, but the real meaty decisions about technical delivery and excellence are more properly made by the engineers closest to them. These belong properly to the doers, in large part because they are the ones who have to support the consequences of these decisions.

Power tends to flow towards managers because they are privy to more information. That makes it important to hire managers who are aware of this and lean against it to push power back to others.

In the same way that submissives have ultimate power in healthy BDSM relationships, engineers actually have the ultimate power in healthy teams. You have the ultimate veto: you can refuse to create.  Demand is high for your skills.  You can usually afford to look for better conditions. Many of you probably should.

And when technical and managerial priorities collide, who wins? Ideally you work together to find the best solution for the business and the people. The teams that feel 🔥on fire🔥 always have tight alignment between the two.

Pick your battles.

One final thought. You can have a lot of say in what gets built and how it gets built, if you cultivate your influence and spend it wisely. But you can’t have a say in everything. It doesn’t work that way.

Think of it like @mcfunley’s famous “innovation tokens”, but for attention and fucks given.
Image result for engineer software meme
The more you use your influence for good outcomes, the more you build up over time, yes … but it’s a precision tool, not background noise. Imagine someone trying to give you a massage by laying down on your whole back instead of pushing their elbow or hand into knots and trigger points. A too-broad target will diffuse your force and limit your potential impact.

Spend your attention tokens wisely.

And once you have influence, don’t forget to use it on behalf of others. Pay attention to those who aren’t being heard, and amplify their voices. Give your time, lend your patronage and credibility, and most of all teach the skills that have made you powerful to others who need them.

charity

P.S. I owe a huge debt to all the awesome senior engineers i’ve gotten to work with.  Mad love to you all.  <3

  • [0] I successfully answered one (1) of these questions before running out of steam.  Later. 
  • [1] Sheepish confession: this is why I became a manager.
  • [2] It’s also a bad sign if they won’t grant any explicit authority to the people they hold responsible for outcomes. I’m talking about relatively healthy orgs here, not pathological ones where people (often women) are told they don’t need promotions or explicit authority, they should just use their “soft power” — esp when the hard forms of power aligned against with them. That’s setting you up for failure.
  • [3] Some people seem caught off guard by my use of “power” to signal anything other than explicit granted powers by the org. This doesn’t make any sense to me. I find it too depressing and disempowering to think of power as merely granted authority. It doesn’t map to how I experience the world, either. Individual clout is a thing that waxes and wanes and only exists in relation to others’. I’ve seen plenty of weak managers pushed around by strong personalities (which is terrible too).
On Engineers and Influence

An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities)

mipsytipsy, , , 15 Comments

Power has a way of flowing towards people managers over time, no matter how many times you repeat “management is not a promotion, it’s a career change.”

It’s natural, like water flowing downhill.  Managers are privy to performance reviews and other personal information that they need to do their jobs, and they tend to be more practiced communicators.  Managers facilitate a lot of decision-making and routing of people and data and things, and it’s very easy to slip into making the all decisions rather than empowering people to make them.  Sometimes you want to just hand out assignments and order everyone to do as told.  (er, just me??)

izengBut if you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer.  Now you have people becoming managers for all the wrong reasons, or everyone saying they want to be a manager, or engineers just tuning out and turning in their homework (or quitting).  We all want autonomy and impact, we all crave a seat at the table.  You need to work harder to save those seats for non-managers.

So, in the spirit of the enumerated rights and responsibilities of our musty Constitution, here are some of the commitments we make to our engineers at Honeycomb — and some of the expectations we have for managering and engineering roles.  Some of them mirror each other, and others are very different.

(Incidentally, I find it helpful to practice visualizing the org chart hierarchies upside down — placing managers below their teams as support structure rather than perched atop.)

Engineer’s Bill of Rights

  1. You should be free to go heads down and focus, and trust that your manager will tap you when you are needed (or would want to be included).
  2. We will invest in you as a leader, just like we invest in managers.  Everybody will have opportunities to develop their leadership and interpersonal skills.
  3. Technical decisions must remain the provenance of engineers, not managers.
  4. You deserve to know how well you are performing, and to hear it early and often if you aren’t meeting expectations.
  5. On call should not substantially impact your life, sleep, or health (other than carrying your devices around).  If it does, we will fix it.
  6. Your code reviews should be turned around in 24 hours or less, under ordinary circumstances.
  7. You should have a career path that challenges you and contributes to your personal life goals, with the coaching and support you need to get there.
  8. You should substantially choose your own work, in consultation with your manager and based on our business goals.  This is not a democracy, but you will have a voice in our planning process.
  9. You should be able to do your work whether in or out of the office. When you’re working remotely, your team will loop you in and have your back.

Engineer’s responsibilities

  • Make forward progress on your projects every week. Be transparent.
  • Make forward progress on your career every quarter.  Push your limits.
  • Build a relationship of trust and mutual vulnerability with your manager andcateng team, and invest in those relationships.
  • Know where you stand: how well are you performing, how quickly are you growing?
  • Develop your technical judgment and leadership skills.  Own and be accountable for engineering outcomes.  Ask for help when you need it, give help when asked.
  • Give feedback early and often, receive feedback gracefully.  Practice both saying no and hearing no.  Let people retract and try again if it doesn’t come out quite right.
  • Own your time and actively manage your calendar.  Spend your attention tokens mindfully.

Manager’s responsibilities

  • Recruit and hire and train your team.  Foster a sense of solidarity and “teaminess” as well as real emotional safety.
  • Care for every engineer on your team.  Support them in their career trajectory, personal goals, work/life balance, and inter- and intra-team dynamics.
  • Give feedback early and often. Receive feedback gracefully. Always say the hard things, but say them with love.
  • Move us relentlessly forward, watching out for overengineering and work that doeasshatsn’t contribute to our goals.  Ensure redundancy/coverage of critical areas.
  • Own the quarterly planning process for your team, be accountable for the goals you set.  Allocate resources by communicating priorities and recruiting eng leads.  Add focus or urgency where needed.
  • Own your time and attention. Be accessible. Actively manage your calendar.  Try not to make your emotions everyone else’s problems (but do lean on your own manager and your peers for support).
  • Make your own personal growth and self-care a priority. Model the values and traits we want our engineers to pattern themselves after.
  • Stay vulnerable.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who has a list like this.

charity.

 

 

 

An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities)