Intro to Eng Management

Lara wrote up the advice she received from Etsy's CTO / CEO, Chad Dickerson, on how to perform well as a VP of Engineering, which covers 9 sections: • Find/create a peer support group • Partner absurdly closely with product and make sure you understand priorities and the head of product understands tradeoffs • Focus on delivery of the roadmap and everything else will follow • Ask your executive peers regularly what you can do to make their jobs easier – particularly the CEO • Take a stand when you need to • Always have a story • Read widely – offline! – about management and Leadership • Realize the impact your mood and demeanor has on people • Develop the right relationship with members of your company’s board

This guide is written for engineering managers, but can also be helpful for managers in other domains. It covers topics including managing your team, peers, and boss, and determining if managing people is right for you.

After individual engineer capability frameworks gained popularity for the purpose of leveling and Career Development, Juan Pablo realized that a capability framework could also be written at the team level. He defines what "capable" and "not capable" look like for 17 capabilities: • Navigating ambiguity • Setting goals • Asking For Help • Broadcasting state • Negotiating dependencies • Escalating appropriately • Managing team capacity • Onboarding team members • Understanding its users • Understanding its levers • Telling the team’s story • Defining operating agreements • Adopting an operational cadence • Anticipating problems • Responding to incidents • Improving its processes • Tackling increasing complexity

Brad covers 8 traps to avoid as a new engineering manager: 1. Keep coding. 2. Focusing only on the work, not the people. 3. Measuring your value by your output 4. Expecting without expressing 5. Leaving the team out of commitments 6. Mistaking directing for leading 7. Avoiding hard conversations 8. Stop learning your craft

Sarah covers 4 mistakes for new engineering managers: • Thinking people give feedback the way they want to receive it • Trying to do everything yourself as a manager • Communicating something (only) one time • You have to have everything together all the time

Rod names and shares some anti-patterns learned from his own experience as an engineering manager: the cloner, the decider, the buddy, the asshole, the joker, the wolf-cryer and the shit umbrella.

Sean describes three sub-roles of management and explains how they can have conflicting goals and incentives, making the manager's role very difficult. He then gives strategies for effectively balancing these conflicting incentives.

Camille steps through increasing levels of management complexity, from how to be managed and what to expect from a manager, to senior Leadership.

Will shares his view of engineering management as a series of elegant, rewarding, and important puzzles, and advice for how to solve them.

This book provides very practical advice across skills including One On One Meetings, hiring, performance management & reviews, letting people go, contributing to team motivation, Project Management, and more.

Lara covers: 1. Meet Your Team 2. Grow Your Teammates 3. Set Clear Expectations 4. Communicate Effectively 5. Build Resiliency

Michael (also known as @rands) covers: • How to handle conflict • How to hire well • How to motivate employees • How to manage your boss • How to say no • How to handle stressed people freaking out • How to improve your social IQ • How to run a meeting well

The Gitlab team shares a training resource and operational guide for current and future managers.

Jessica discusses what it means to support a team day-to-day and year-to-year, technical and management growth tracks, and the inflection point for a manager from focusing on coding to empowering others with trust and the right tools and processes.

Gergely summarizes what worked well for him as he transitioned from Senior Engineer to engineering manager: the importance of mentors, understanding the new role's priorities, deciding on a time and task management strategy, goal-setting, and taking the time to learn, experiment and reflect.

Karl outlines some key differences between IC and management contributions and provides suggestions for new managers to frame the way they think about their new role. • Why is the transition to management so hard? • What engineers give up by becoming managers • What if you don’t like the tradeoffs you made?