Part 3, It's your manager stupid!
Pick your manager carefully, that individual can have a significant impact on your career.
When I first started working I had no clue how important this position would be in terms of impact on your current work and influence on your career going forward. It is something a lot of folks realize very late. I can trace back to where my career stalled and I can also tell you where it propelled and both times a manager played a significant role.
A quick side on managers:
The position of engineering manager seems to swing in and out of favor. What I mean by this when I jumped into the startup scene managers were quickly being disposed of. Organizations were striving to be flat, engineers would tell company executives they would quit on the spot if a "manager" was brought in. Many aspiring managers quickly decided to put their management track dreams on hold and decided to remain on the tech track a while longer. As one can imagine, not having someone perpetually engaged in making sure the engineering team does not go off the rails, end up with engineering organizations that were way out of whack when it came to the company mission. Suddenly, engineering managers were back in style.
Which manager do you have?
Engineering managers come in various shapes and sizes but generally the fall into one of the buckets I will highlight below. Once more there are no hard and fast rules but I am hoping to give you some pattern-recognition skills here so that you can orient yourself in case you find yourself with with a manager-type that I describe below.
Absent Manager
So let's start here. This does not literally mean an "absent" manager, but what I mean by this is absent for you. A better way to put it would be the indifferent- to-you manager. Let us add some more paint to this picture and you will then begin seeing what I am talking about.
Say you are one of three engineers on a team with a Manager that you all report into. The situation I am describing here is when the manager spends a ton of time with the other two engineers and not you. Your calendar has 1 on 1 meetings scheduled but they are often cancelled. Your work is not really being analyzed and you are not receiving critical feedback. Receiving critical feedback might be painful, but this is a positive signal . A huge portion of your growth comes from this action. Instead, the manager is making sure you show up, your lunch breaks are not crazy long and your vacations are being approved. You get the "good morning" and some banter about the weekend, but that is all.
A lot of newcomers to the field think is this a (#chillsitch ) and want to stay in this zone for a long time but beware this situation is a bad one. Especially if the other 2 engineers are getting deeper feedback on their work, they are being given important context on why things are taking the shape they are and you are not. Why is this happening? Let's ignore the fact that the person might be just plain incompetent. You might not be important enough. Sorry. Your project is likely dying or will not move the needle forward for the company. You should plan an exit. Lobbying for more face time, will get you are few more useless meetings ultimately being stuck in a rut this way does not have a simple fix.
Engineer First Manager
We all know this person well. They were a great engineer and therefore they are promoted to be manager ( #amiright ). The person can do huge amounts of damage especially if they had no interest in being a manager but that was the only path to a promotion. This individual despises talking to people, loves the terminal console and always seems extremely irritated when you walk up and ask a question ( even when it is an emergency ). The individual insists on taking large features/tasks and uses the development workload as an excuse to get out of cross departmental meetings ( where they might announce things like the business is going to pivot into B2B, etc ). If and when the individual does attend meetings they will likely put their foot in their mouth and make their boss look bad, and worse make the engineering team as a whole look bad.
Generally, the Engineer-Manager goes back to being an engineer when they realize that the politics in the organization is too rich for their blood. These folks are computer-smart but not people-smart and usually the get out maneuvered by savvier folks on the business side. That might be bad for the manager but it is even worse of you, the direct reports. You do not want to be on the losing side of this war. Generally if this individual has poor bed side manner and begins stepping on toes, for example he pisses off the VP of Finance - it is likely that the engineering team will be starved to death and eventually will fail.
Control Freak
This is your classic micro-manager however there is some nuance to how this may unfold. A couple of examples of the person that might be…
- New to the role and wants to do everything in their power to make sure the project is a success. Includes chiming in our every single code review, carefully reading every commit message (yeah man) etc.
- Is an experienced manager and will stand to make a bundle ( spot bonus on delivery ) if the project is delivered on time in good quality. The promise of a huge pay off can turn any Zen manager into a control freak. If the person is seasoned then they will likely perform deeply invasive investigations to get an accurate read of the progress. This is the situation where daily stand ups are no longer enough. Think daily demo's, nightly code walk throughs, multiple daily mini check-ins, and my favorite public shaming for anyone that slips ( #leadership ).
Both items above are context specific, I have been in the situation above and it is a important to ask yourself if you are growing and learning. You can simply be tied to a post and whipped on a daily basis and not get anything out it. If you have a manager that fits 1 or more of the categories above, I would recommend you begin making a exit plan for yourself.
What to look for in manager
Given your skillset is in demand and you are in decent financial shape. I would say you should not be enamored by the company or industry you are joining but focus in on your soon-to-be manager or lead.
I have friends who have worked at the FAANG companies who suffered huge setbacks because of the way their manager dealt with them. When I have discussions with them they agree that it would have been better to join a less sexy company but work under a manager that would have grown and developed them so that they could get to the next level.
The above is much easier said then done, but having a good coach/mentor be rolled up as a manager above you can truly unlock your potential and you should be aggressively looking for that early in your career.
Below I am going to begin giving you some qualities to look for in your current situation, plus some interview questions you can ask your manger ( #reverse-interview ) to qualify them as a worthy lead or manger in the future.
Builds a Safe Environment
You want to be in a culture where problems and bad news are addressed head on. Fixing this issue solves a ton of other problems, being in an environment where all the staff is constantly sweeping things under the rug leads to a perpetually toxic culture. Look for a manager what will be handle bad news gracefully and calmly. Look for a manager that does not blame you, other teams or anyone else when something goes wrong. Person in charge should lead the way in solving problems. Finger pointing and calculating who is to blame should remain out of the picture. This does not mean lack of accountability, this means intense amounts of accountability but without the baggage that comes with blame planning and finger-pointing.
Engineering at an internet startup is a full contact sport, in my opinion this work is characterized by how you manage and deal with failure. One thing is certain, there will be bad news, maybe daily and if you have a lead or manager that only makes matters worse…run or plan an exit.
Learning is the center piece
Many times a noob manager will constantly and consistently reward the "firefighter" on the team. Or even worse, they will reward the "long hours" person. Firefighting and long hours do not move the needle, long term the engineering team will fail if they double down on such behavior.
Look to see if the people that are being rewarded are the folks that are constantly learning and bringing in new techniques and capabilities to the team. These will 100% not be the firefighters, firefighters love the old system that allows them to be the center of attention and be rewarded each time something goes wrong. Unlike 10 years ago, there are tons of infrastructure options now that can remove pain for an engineering organization, but you have to have folks on the team that are willing to learn this stuff and transfer that knowledge. The manager in charge should be actively encouraging folks to:
If they have a budget:
- Attend conferences
- Arrange for on-site corporate training
- Have access to paid for online knowledge bases ( safari books etc)
- Send team to weekend bootcamp
If they have a small (or no) budget:
- Allocate time for attending one day/half day training workshops ( vendors put these on for free).
- Pay for online courses ( Udemy, Udacity etc ) these can be super cheap.
- Allocate time for attending local meetups and tech community meetings.
Provides Feedback
You may have a manager that avoids confrontation and difficult conversations. You may have a manager that is deep in the weeds and needs to ship features vs having a discussions around improving your skills and development. You may have a manager with some other issues…but ultimately not getting regular feedback creates problems.
You might think you are doing something absolutely right, when in fact you might be moving against the companies best interest. You might think you helped someone understand a confusing technical issue when in fact you simply annoyed them. If you do not get rapid feedback on such things, regardless of how smart you are, you will definitely damage your career.
Folks smarter than me have already written a ton about feedback so I will not dive deeper into that but make sure this part of your communication with your manager is intact.
Connections
As I write this portion of the post I imagine it might irritate several engineering minded folks…it definitely hit nerves when I discussed this point with colleagues. I urge you to let this point sit for a while and take a longer and broader view.
Your manager should already be or is working on being well connected…pause here if feel your anger rising. Early in my career I would notice a manger ( let's call him Tom…not his real name) kissing up to the executives, being overly agreeable with vendors, taking up useless sales people up on coffee and beer engagements - I would scream inside my head "Why the F is Tom doing this". The engineers in his team broke down into 2 groups:
Engineers that loved the guy and did not really care that he was taking a long lunch with a vendor, or stroking the CEOs ego .
Engineers that were growing increasingly annoyed by this behavior and could not understand why Tom was not strictly focused on engineering day to day: stand ups, code reviews, metrics. Everything else was a waste of time and space.
I fell into camp #2 and let me tell you I was an idiot for doing so. I was playing tic-tac-toe and Tom was playing chess. Tom was essentially building a giant database and I had no idea what he was doing. As an Engineering Manager he understood the power and access he had to all kinds of resources and services. A noob manager or someone that wants to strictly continue coding will have no such vision.
With time I realized that Tom had a huge network that he can reach into to get trustworthy advice on architectural choices, tool choices, vendor choices etc . This very simple insight alluded me forever! For a startup having a manager like this is game changer, a force multiplier. If we had an intractable problem (something way beyond "googling or stackoverflowing for an answer ") Tom would jump into his network (if he did not know the answer) and come back with options, trade offs etc. A lot of times the suggestions he would come back with included new technology or a new process and that ties back into learning and developing as an engineer. Man it took me forever to see this for what it was.
Another thing I noticed is that some Engineers had stuck by Tom for years going from company to company a good number of them never really facing a stupid tech interview. WTF??? Yes indeed, Tom had a small bank of engineers he had vetted over a period of time that he would call up and install at a company based on what the company needed. I met and spoke to some of these folks and they had not interviewed for a tech job in a decade or more ( they were simply connected ).
There you have it. It is your manager stupid. If you have a manager now you have a framework to understand where you stand and where they stand. Good luck.
I truly hope these posts help you on your path to having an awesome career.
This is the last post in my series. If you want to read them all please check them out here: