6 ms·

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit w

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against InfoSec teams stuck in the '80s so the CI/CD toolchain can deploy to production, negotiating freedom with a CTO who wants to specify everything to the level of individual data structures, convincing HR that no, we really do need to pay for a good senior and not hire someone with 2 years experience in a configuration galley because they're cheap. On top of that there's the process battles; in older firms, all those interminable "but can't they just use Waterfall?" meetings that go on for hours and are spawned every time there's a minor project manager reshuffle. In newer ones, the ongoing fight of, "you can't address debt or build foundations for the future, we need features, if it can't be done in less than a week it's not MVP enough" There's a fine balance in that I think a good EM lets their team know this is going on and get involved where they want without dumping all the crap downward. Not least because they should be coaching their team leads in that responsibility, so they can take the career step when they want. Going back to the article, as others mentioned it does read a little bit more like a "why I'm frustrated with my manager" than a "how to be a good EM", but it's easy to misconstrue the meaning of text.

bitbckt 6y ago
All of the managers I’ve worked with on the “great” end of the quality spectrum have excelled at being sh*t umbrellas. Perhaps that speaks also to the quality of the orgs I’ve been in, as well... This is a (the?) differentiating quality between effective management and not.
x87678r 6y ago
I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.
- pkaye 6y ago
  This is why I decided to stopped doing engineering manager roles. Working on the crap stuff all the times is no fun. And the longer you do it the more your technical skills fall behind. I'm fine with the technical roles along with mentoring the new engineers.
- andi999 6y ago
  Maybe it is different in Software engineering than in Hardware, but if you have a team developing hardware and they encounter a problem they cannot solve they have to turn to their manager. So the manager also gets technical crap/difficulties to solve. The 5% he cannot solve goes one level higher, so basically the higher you get, the more distille/purerd crap you get.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Software is more like turd production, than bridge building!
    - brianwawok 6y ago
      You don’t really make turds so much as glue together library turds.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I feel the attempt itself is a little bit like trying to turn a turd into gold.
- pc86 6y ago
  "The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous. The best managers I've ever worked for have all, without fail, worked daily to keep as much nonsense away from the team as possible. The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.
  - balls187 6y ago
    > The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself. It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.
    - hitekker 6y ago
      Yep, a manager can focus on climbing the ladder once they offload their responsibilities onto the people beneath them. If their boss can't detect this abdication, or worse, doesn't want to see it, then the manager's opportunism will naturally be rewarded, and will encourage the opportunism of other managers in the org.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      > It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons. And thus the rain of crap continues.
  - x87678r 6y ago
    Curiously in your opinion who ended up being more successful?
    - pc86 6y ago
      I think in general most companies, especially large ones, reward managers who push crap onto their directs. Anecdotally, the best manager I've ever had viciously protected us from executive nonsense, and he's also the most successful by far (and he was before I started). I don't think that's the norm, though.
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  >> The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly. This is true of "crap work" (i.e. stupid bugs, wading through documentation) but not of the crap external to the team. Your job as the manager is to deal with it all. You can either work to slow it's generation or suck it down, but it's all on you.
drchopchop 6y ago
Agreed. The end goal is usually to make developers as productive as possible, which means a) giving them large contiguous blocks of coding time, and b) removing roadblocks (i.e. crap) The "crap" can be politics, legal, ancient IT practices, useless meetings, constant demands for status/updates, bickering around cost/budgets, hiring, buying time to fight tech debt, and a whole bunch of other things.
peterwoerner 6y ago
The #1 job of a manager (in all fields) is to keep his people working. It doesn't matter if it is engineering, manufacturing or the local burger joint. A managers #1 job is to keep his people working.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  s/his/their/
- pojzon 6y ago
  What to do when people dont deliver ? In my current company mgrs say “we did our best”, when in fact I see ppl slacking as hell (days of doing nothing).
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    I didn't say that it was the only part of the job, just that it was the most important thing. Hopefully you have some knobs you can turn. At my current company if people can't deliver you try to hook them up with more mentors and if they still can't deliver, you stop giving them direct labor to work on and eventual force them out because they don't have any work and they stop getting pay raises (or you fire them usually they push them out).
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Hmm. I think the #1 job of a manager is to hire, motivate and let go of people the right way. It's up to them to keep working, and it's up to the manager to figure out how to do that no more often than required. If you do it right, it's like 90% teambuilding and 10% line management, IMO. When that ratio is inverted is where you see mediocre management.
- aynsof 6y ago
  But you need to take a very long position on this. Someone's beloved cat died? That's your problem, because it's affecting the way they work. You need to help them through it. Someone's working well? That's great, but you can't rest on your laurels. You need to help them grow into a more senior position so they don't get bored or disillusioned.
vlod 6y ago
> I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. One of my first jobs, it was described colourfully (it was in the UK) as being the team umbrella. i.e. Protects the team from the ever circling pigeons from above that like to frequently 'deposit'. :)
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Absolutely. This is especially relevant, these days, when HR departments are basically taking an actively adversarial role towards employees. I used to get crap from HR, if I chose to resolve personnel issues without involving them. The problem was, they had only two speeds: Do Nothing, or KILL ALL THE BABIES. Nothing in between; despite their constant harping about how they were "on our side." Their job was to keep the C-suite happy. It was absolutely amazing how many rules that were "hard and fast," and "applies to everyone here," would suddenly fail to be implemented, when it was a C-suite doing the rulebreaking. There were also companywide policies, meant to appease union employees, that would also apply to the other 90% of the company that wasn't union (and thus, did not have the mitigating benefits), or that were in place to manage hourly employees, but also applied to exempt (from a life) employees. It was my job to try to mask that kind of crap from my employees, and I got called on the carpet a few times, because of it. I would do it all over again, if I had to.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I think in 20 years of working at multiple companies (as an IC), I've never really even had contact with HR besides my first and last days. I don't think I could even name a single HR person I've ever met. They tend to be there to hand me the benefits literature, then at the end I give my badge back to them, and that's it. What on earth is happening in companies where HR is part of the daily life of a standard "3rd engineer from the left" employee?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I was a manager, so I had plenty of interaction with HR. For the most part, they weren't actually bad people, but their job was to be fairly two-faced. I think it caused a lot of issues. HR had the highest turnover in the company.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    The last time I had dealings with HR, it was because I had reported that my boss did something illegal, and I told the head of the company. They tell me to deal with HR, and HR tells me that I should have talked to my boss first. In short, the heads of the company didn't want to hear about the illegal stuff, and HR was their shield for it. My boss actually told me, "I could get fired for what you said." It wasn't what he did that was the problem in his mind, but that I told people about it. I didn't last much longer at the company. They didn't fire me, but they also stopped giving me raises. When I asked for one, I was asked if I could "wait a year". I found a new job for a 40% raise 6 months later.
strig 6y ago
> configuration galley What does this mean?
- dmoy 6y ago
  A galley was a large-ish, primarily oar-powered ship. However it also refers to the kitchen on certain even larger boats. So, it's kind of ambiguous what GP meant - either picking a cook out of a galley-kitchen (who is not the best chef, but rather someone making huge amounts of food for a ship's crew), or picking a slave off of the oars in a galley-ship. I don't know.
- ertemplin 6y ago
  My interpretation of this is a junior SDE position where you mostly update system configuration parameters all day instead of writing code or designing systems. People in these positions still get paid SDE salaries but aren't gaining any useful software development experience.
aprdm 6y ago
Totally. I sometimes made the mistake of "venting downwards" or wanting to be more transparent with the team and it wasn't a good experience. Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company or of someone, it isn't good for anyone. They also lack the context you have and jump to a lot of conclusions that are usually unfair. It's a hard job!
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company They don’t? In my experience IC’s do most of this venting about horrible processes.
  - aprdm 6y ago
    It is very different when it is between ICs and when it is someone who is more of a manager doing the same with the ICs. I like this quote by Jason Cox, - Great leaders are optimistic – They are hopeful, confident, and positive.
JJMcJ 6y ago
> crap shield In Office Space, one thing that makes Lumbergh the manager so distasteful is you just know he would never do one thing to help anyone reporting to him. > configuration galley I like that. "Ramming speed."
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Absolutely! A manager can either be an umbrella to shelter under, or they can be a shit funnel. Great work gets done when you can give your engineers a hard problem (or a long list of easy problems) and let them put their nose to the grindstone to get it done, while deflecting the rabble of inane ideas for new features, shifting deadlines, office politics, customer/supplier relations, etc. etc. etc. If a manager sidesteps all those, and passes them to the engineer, there will be have no time or energy for the actual work. If they are a single point of contact where an engineer can pull in a prioritized task list and push out questions and results, that's an ideal environment to get things done. Unfortunately, other managers which interact with these EMs can sometimes have a hard time telling the former from the latter, and have a hard time evaluating the quality of the work/difficulty of the problems being solved, so the only visible difference is the happiness of the engineering team and the accomplishments that were made.
nogabebop23 6y ago
Additions: * the crap shield is made of Gor-tex so you need to protect the team but also expunge the toxins that build up within. Not all crap is generated outside of the team but you need to get ride of it. * the crap shield is transparent so the team can see what's happening outside without being covered in it * the crap shield is retractable so you can let some into the team's atmosphere. Not enough to cause harm, but keep them grounded in the imperfect world in which their work will live. * the crap shield has a window lock, and you the manager are in control of it. This is for the same reason the driver of a car can lock the windows in the back seat to stop the kids from opening them when you're in the car wash.
Maascamp 6y ago
I wouldn't call that being a crap shield. I'd call that executing on the non-technical aspects of your team's strategy. When teams don't see (and/or frame) those things as key part of achieving their goals the results aren't gonna be great for anyone.
Anka33 6y ago
"but can't they just use Waterfall?" EVERY... FUCKING... TIME!

bitbckt 6y ago

All of the managers I’ve worked with on the “great” end of the quality spectrum have excelled at being sh*t umbrellas. Perhaps that speaks also to the quality of the orgs I’ve been in, as well... This is a (the?) differentiating quality between effective management and not.

x87678r 6y ago

I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

pkaye 6y ago
This is why I decided to stopped doing engineering manager roles. Working on the crap stuff all the times is no fun. And the longer you do it the more your technical skills fall behind. I'm fine with the technical roles along with mentoring the new engineers.
andi999 6y ago
Maybe it is different in Software engineering than in Hardware, but if you have a team developing hardware and they encounter a problem they cannot solve they have to turn to their manager. So the manager also gets technical crap/difficulties to solve. The 5% he cannot solve goes one level higher, so basically the higher you get, the more distille/purerd crap you get.
- loopz 6y ago
  Software is more like turd production, than bridge building!
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    You don’t really make turds so much as glue together library turds.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I feel the attempt itself is a little bit like trying to turn a turd into gold.
pc86 6y ago
"The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous. The best managers I've ever worked for have all, without fail, worked daily to keep as much nonsense away from the team as possible. The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.
- balls187 6y ago
  > The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself. It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.
  - hitekker 6y ago
    Yep, a manager can focus on climbing the ladder once they offload their responsibilities onto the people beneath them. If their boss can't detect this abdication, or worse, doesn't want to see it, then the manager's opportunism will naturally be rewarded, and will encourage the opportunism of other managers in the org.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons. And thus the rain of crap continues.
- x87678r 6y ago
  Curiously in your opinion who ended up being more successful?
  - pc86 6y ago
    I think in general most companies, especially large ones, reward managers who push crap onto their directs. Anecdotally, the best manager I've ever had viciously protected us from executive nonsense, and he's also the most successful by far (and he was before I started). I don't think that's the norm, though.
nogabebop23 6y ago
>> The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly. This is true of "crap work" (i.e. stupid bugs, wading through documentation) but not of the crap external to the team. Your job as the manager is to deal with it all. You can either work to slow it's generation or suck it down, but it's all on you.

drchopchop 6y ago

Agreed. The end goal is usually to make developers as productive as possible, which means a) giving them large contiguous blocks of coding time, and b) removing roadblocks (i.e. crap) The "crap" can be politics, legal, ancient IT practices, useless meetings, constant demands for status/updates, bickering around cost/budgets, hiring, buying time to fight tech debt, and a whole bunch of other things.

peterwoerner 6y ago

The #1 job of a manager (in all fields) is to keep his people working. It doesn't matter if it is engineering, manufacturing or the local burger joint. A managers #1 job is to keep his people working.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
s/his/their/
pojzon 6y ago
What to do when people dont deliver ? In my current company mgrs say “we did our best”, when in fact I see ppl slacking as hell (days of doing nothing).
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  I didn't say that it was the only part of the job, just that it was the most important thing. Hopefully you have some knobs you can turn. At my current company if people can't deliver you try to hook them up with more mentors and if they still can't deliver, you stop giving them direct labor to work on and eventual force them out because they don't have any work and they stop getting pay raises (or you fire them usually they push them out).
yowlingcat 6y ago
Hmm. I think the #1 job of a manager is to hire, motivate and let go of people the right way. It's up to them to keep working, and it's up to the manager to figure out how to do that no more often than required. If you do it right, it's like 90% teambuilding and 10% line management, IMO. When that ratio is inverted is where you see mediocre management.
aynsof 6y ago
But you need to take a very long position on this. Someone's beloved cat died? That's your problem, because it's affecting the way they work. You need to help them through it. Someone's working well? That's great, but you can't rest on your laurels. You need to help them grow into a more senior position so they don't get bored or disillusioned.

vlod 6y ago

> I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. One of my first jobs, it was described colourfully (it was in the UK) as being the team umbrella. i.e. Protects the team from the ever circling pigeons from above that like to frequently 'deposit'. :)

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Absolutely. This is especially relevant, these days, when HR departments are basically taking an actively adversarial role towards employees. I used to get crap from HR, if I chose to resolve personnel issues without involving them. The problem was, they had only two speeds: Do Nothing, or KILL ALL THE BABIES. Nothing in between; despite their constant harping about how they were "on our side." Their job was to keep the C-suite happy. It was absolutely amazing how many rules that were "hard and fast," and "applies to everyone here," would suddenly fail to be implemented, when it was a C-suite doing the rulebreaking. There were also companywide policies, meant to appease union employees, that would also apply to the other 90% of the company that wasn't union (and thus, did not have the mitigating benefits), or that were in place to manage hourly employees, but also applied to exempt (from a life) employees. It was my job to try to mask that kind of crap from my employees, and I got called on the carpet a few times, because of it. I would do it all over again, if I had to.

ryandrake 6y ago
Maybe I'm just extremely lucky, but I think in 20 years of working at multiple companies (as an IC), I've never really even had contact with HR besides my first and last days. I don't think I could even name a single HR person I've ever met. They tend to be there to hand me the benefits literature, then at the end I give my badge back to them, and that's it. What on earth is happening in companies where HR is part of the daily life of a standard "3rd engineer from the left" employee?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I was a manager, so I had plenty of interaction with HR. For the most part, they weren't actually bad people, but their job was to be fairly two-faced. I think it caused a lot of issues. HR had the highest turnover in the company.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  The last time I had dealings with HR, it was because I had reported that my boss did something illegal, and I told the head of the company. They tell me to deal with HR, and HR tells me that I should have talked to my boss first. In short, the heads of the company didn't want to hear about the illegal stuff, and HR was their shield for it. My boss actually told me, "I could get fired for what you said." It wasn't what he did that was the problem in his mind, but that I told people about it. I didn't last much longer at the company. They didn't fire me, but they also stopped giving me raises. When I asked for one, I was asked if I could "wait a year". I found a new job for a 40% raise 6 months later.

strig 6y ago

> configuration galley What does this mean?

dmoy 6y ago
A galley was a large-ish, primarily oar-powered ship. However it also refers to the kitchen on certain even larger boats. So, it's kind of ambiguous what GP meant - either picking a cook out of a galley-kitchen (who is not the best chef, but rather someone making huge amounts of food for a ship's crew), or picking a slave off of the oars in a galley-ship. I don't know.
ertemplin 6y ago
My interpretation of this is a junior SDE position where you mostly update system configuration parameters all day instead of writing code or designing systems. People in these positions still get paid SDE salaries but aren't gaining any useful software development experience.

aprdm 6y ago

Totally. I sometimes made the mistake of "venting downwards" or wanting to be more transparent with the team and it wasn't a good experience. Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company or of someone, it isn't good for anyone. They also lack the context you have and jump to a lot of conclusions that are usually unfair. It's a hard job!

Aeolun 6y ago
> Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company They don’t? In my experience IC’s do most of this venting about horrible processes.
- aprdm 6y ago
  It is very different when it is between ICs and when it is someone who is more of a manager doing the same with the ICs. I like this quote by Jason Cox, - Great leaders are optimistic – They are hopeful, confident, and positive.

JJMcJ 6y ago

> crap shield In Office Space, one thing that makes Lumbergh the manager so distasteful is you just know he would never do one thing to help anyone reporting to him. > configuration galley I like that. "Ramming speed."

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

Absolutely! A manager can either be an umbrella to shelter under, or they can be a shit funnel. Great work gets done when you can give your engineers a hard problem (or a long list of easy problems) and let them put their nose to the grindstone to get it done, while deflecting the rabble of inane ideas for new features, shifting deadlines, office politics, customer/supplier relations, etc. etc. etc. If a manager sidesteps all those, and passes them to the engineer, there will be have no time or energy for the actual work. If they are a single point of contact where an engineer can pull in a prioritized task list and push out questions and results, that's an ideal environment to get things done. Unfortunately, other managers which interact with these EMs can sometimes have a hard time telling the former from the latter, and have a hard time evaluating the quality of the work/difficulty of the problems being solved, so the only visible difference is the happiness of the engineering team and the accomplishments that were made.

nogabebop23 6y ago

Additions: * the crap shield is made of Gor-tex so you need to protect the team but also expunge the toxins that build up within. Not all crap is generated outside of the team but you need to get ride of it. * the crap shield is transparent so the team can see what's happening outside without being covered in it * the crap shield is retractable so you can let some into the team's atmosphere. Not enough to cause harm, but keep them grounded in the imperfect world in which their work will live. * the crap shield has a window lock, and you the manager are in control of it. This is for the same reason the driver of a car can lock the windows in the back seat to stop the kids from opening them when you're in the car wash.

Maascamp 6y ago

I wouldn't call that being a crap shield. I'd call that executing on the non-technical aspects of your team's strategy. When teams don't see (and/or frame) those things as key part of achieving their goals the results aren't gonna be great for anyone.

Anka33 6y ago

"but can't they just use Waterfall?" EVERY... FUCKING... TIME!