Is your manager pulling their weight, or just a waste of space? Should they exist just to protect the people doing the *actual work* from ignorant execs? Truthfully, managing any human is a science and an art, and managing engineers certainly isn't easier! A good manager is a leader, architect, consiglieri, and career coach… and yes, sometimes the person who moves JIRA tickets around a kanban board! In this talk, we'll address some common hot takes about engineering management and talk about the transition from engineer to manager. Whether you want to become a manager or continue as an individual contributor, you'll leave with a better sense of what your manager actually does!

1. Droidcon London - October 27, 2023
Hot Take: Engineering
Managers are actually useful!
Parth Padgaonkar
jvmname@androiddev.social 🌐 jvmname.dev

2. According to the
internet, EMs are
useless 😬

3. Caveat/Disclaimers
All management
(and eng management in particular!)
is ½ art + ½ science
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/does-evidence-support-the-artistic-vs-
scienti
fi
c-mind-stereotype

4. Nobody can give
you a 100% clear
path to success
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/best-way-to-become-android-developer-a-complete-roadmap/#

5. Meeting notes
Part I
The Duality of Eng Leadership
Part II
Things Nobody Told You (about being an Eng Manager)
Part III:
Q&A

6. The Duality of Eng Leadership
Part I

7. External Leadership
Part I — The Duality of Eng Leadership

8. Managing Up (and sideways!)
=
wants vs needs
External Leadership

9. Managing Up — wants vs needs
• What the team…
• can do / wants to do / needs to do
• Di
ff
ers for type of team: product vs platform
• Need to de
fi
ne business impact for that team
•

10. Managing Up — a list of people who need things
• Manager / exec
• Peers
• The team

11. What the team needs the EM to do
• Create a plan (aka a roadmap!), socialize it, and advocate for the team
• Every team needs a narrative — why this plan is the right plan
• Say “no”… just often enough

12. Bonus: BusinessImpact
• Things that aren’t business impact
• story points, team size, crash rate (usually)
• Understand your company’s path to
• Mercury | Slack | Facebook | Dell
• Business impact is the only thing that matters to exec
https://app.croneri.co.uk/feature-articles/covid-19-secure-business-impact-
analysis

13. Internal Leadership
(aka Communicating Downward)
Part 1.5 — The Duality of Eng
Leadership

14. The West Wing - S5E8 “Shutdown”
Internal Leadership

15. Internal Leadership
• Context
• Mentorship
• Course-correcting

16. Internal Leadership
Context
• Engineers want to understand things!
• “Why does this matter?”
• Visibility/transparency**

17. “good” transparency answers
more questions than it raises;
“bad” transparency does the
opposite

18. Internal Leadership
• Context
• Mentorship
• Course-correcting

19. Internal Leadership
Mentorship
• Coaching
• soft skills, perspective
• Career development
• leveling, promotion, compensation
• Leveling up the team
• junior ICs vs senior ICs

20. Internal Leadership
• Context
• Mentorship
• Course-correcting

21. Internal Leadership
Course-correcting
• Giving feedback is an obligation (+ growth!)
• Manager Feedback doesn’t have to be an o
ffi
cial
performance conversation — nuance is important!
• …but sometimes it’s an O
ffi
cial Performance
Conversation
• Operate from a place of care ❤

22. Internal Leadership
Hiring (bonus section!)
Hiring managers are responsible for building and maintaining diverse,
equitable, and inclusive teams.
Non-contributing factors: “the pipeline”, “lowering the hiring bar”, the sun
was in your eyes, etc.

23. Internal Leadership
=
Psych Safety

24. Things Nobody Told You
(about being an EM)
Part II

25. Things Nobody Told You
• You always have a choice!
• You’re not an engineer (anymore)
• 3 quotes on being an engineering leader

26. You always
have a choice
https://medium.com/tuitech/we-built-a-dual-track-engineering-career-ladder-heres-why-cc41c72e30ed
＾
*should

28. You have a choice, cont.
• Recognize leadership is a skill, just like writing code
• “What got you here won’t get you there”
~Marshall Goldsmith

29. You ain’t an engineer anymore

30. “But I still want to write code!”
Manager-Parth
Engineer-Parth

31. 3 quotes on Eng Leadership

32. ~ Patty McCord + Reed Hastings
[YouTube clip]
We’re not a family,
we’re a pro-sports
team

33. ~ Kirk Kaiser paraphrasing Peter Drucker (“The E
ff
ective Executive”)
A manager’s job is to prepare people to
perform, and to give them tools and
freedom to do so.”

34. ~ Brian, my former manager
Your job is to disappoint people

35. • Humans are humans, not “resources”
• External:
• Needs vs wants
• Business impact
• Internal
• ICs want to understand why their work is important
• Feedback, coaching, mentorship
• Becoming an EM
• We’re lucky we have a split path; choice
• We aren’t a family
Recap

36. Q&A
(And thank you!)
Stuff I Read
• An Elegant Puzzle — Will Larsen
• Engineering Management For the Rest of Us — Sarah Drasner
• Jacobin — Book Review: Powerful (link)
• MakeArtWithPython — Is Engineering Management Bullshit (link)
• Reddit — Is Engineering Management Bullshit (link)
• Stackover
fl
ow — What you give up when you move to eng management (link)
• HBR — Your company is not a family (link)
• LinkedIn — Do Engineering Managers Add Value (link)
• Square Blog — Eng Manager Philosophies (link)