How to keep solid engineering skills as an Engineering Manager [update]

How can you keep your engineering craftsmanship in good shape while being a manager?

You took a new career track, deciding to focus your energy and passion on leading a team by being a manager. It's been a year now. You feel that you need to be at least 30% hands-on but cannot find the time. You're worried that you won't be able to provide value to your teammates.

What can you do? How should you think about your engineering skills as you move forward on the management career track? In this session, you'll learn a few frameworks that served me well and helped frame my view. You'll be exposed to the material you can learn and how to invest your time differently.

Join me if you care about your teammates enough to serve them well as a manager without feeling it has to be only by writing code.

Transcript

1. Oren Ellenbogen How to keep solid engineering skills as an Engineering Manager?
2. My name is Oren Ellenbogen 👋 aka Ear Elbow Like you, I’m an Engineering Manager
3. You’re exhausted (FOMO is real) … and looking for an answer This talk is applicable to all levels of Engineering Management
4. Where should we start? With the devil we know
5. While (?) { Write code }
6. While (?) { Write code } “Invest X% of your time writing code”
7. While (?) { Write code } Wrong assumption: All features are of equal value to you
8. While (?) { Write code } Only write code that produces meaningful insights Investments: Expertise, Tools, Dependencies, etc. Never in the critical path.
9. While (?) { Write code } Only write code that produces meaningful insights Investments: Expertise, Tools, Dependencies, etc. Never in the critical path.
10. While (?) { Complete IC tasks } Only complete IC tasks that produces meaningful insights Also: OnCall, Observability, Docs, etc.
11. Trigger: “I don’t have enough time to learn by writing code” What now?
12. Invest your time elsewhere 80% in How X works (+Why) 20% in How to do X
13. Look at your team’s stack, e.g. - Nodejs - Vue - Elastic Search - MySQL - Kafka - GraphQL - … - [CI, CD, Monitoring, Alerts, etc.]
14. How to do X < How X works (and why was it invented) Seek to understand how things work Invest in fundamentals
15. How X works (+why is it needed) e.g. - How event-loop works? What not to do with it? - What append-only data structures good for? - Why Virtual DOM was invented? - How ACID works? When is it good? When to avoid?
16. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/blmoregon/28674598606 Be an archaeologist Tell a story
17. template
18. “Sure! But when?”
19. 😱
20. You’re always Free in 2 weeks
21. Future Thinking Explicit investments
22. Invest your time to fight inertia 70% in the present 30% in the future
23. Present 1. Design requirements, trade-offs, risks, know-how 2. Operate sustainability, quality of service, focus Future 3. Hire puzzle, pitch & close 4. Envision alignment (tech/biz), roadmap, growth
24. 70% in the present: Practice in areas you’ll gain insights and feel pains → Level up your Design & Operate
25. 70% in the present: Level up Design & Operate - Execute insightful IC tasks ✅ - Take Design Reviews by other teams and do your own - Analyze operational burden (e.g. tickets, alerts, etc.)
26. 30% in the future: Research what knowledge your team is lacking → Level up Envision & Hire
27. 30% in the future: Level up Envision & Hire - Research the competition - Analyze & present missing expertise in the team - Write a doc: “Why should you join us? Why now?”
28. Seek deeper knowledge & inspiration by building your library, e.g. → 30% in the future
30. 70% in the present 30% in the future Hours will fluctuate, keep the ratios consistent over time
31. “How do I know that it’s good enough”?
32. To continuously improve you need to be consistently calm & optimistic * 90% of the time, we’re human
33. The EM’s technical skills time The team’s technical skills Common result Desired result
34. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar
35. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar ❏ Notice bottlenecks in my team’s Products/Systems (tech or socio-tech)
36. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar ❏ Notice bottlenecks in my team’s Products/Systems (tech or socio-tech) ❏ Offer alternatives to product requirements & technical design decisions
37. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar ❏ Notice bottlenecks in my team’s Products/Systems (tech or socio-tech) ❏ Offer alternatives to product requirements & technical design decisions ❏ Unblock Technical Roadmap creation for my team’s systems
38. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar ❏ Notice bottlenecks in my team’s Products/Systems (tech or socio-tech) ❏ Offer alternatives to product requirements & technical design decisions ❏ Unblock Technical Roadmap creation for my team’s systems ❏ Grow, challenge and inspire my teammates to retain them
39. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar ❏ Notice bottlenecks in my team’s Products/Systems (tech or socio-tech) ❏ Offer alternatives to product requirements & technical design decisions ❏ Unblock Technical Roadmap creation for my team’s systems ❏ Grow, challenge and inspire my teammates to retain them ❏ Harvest context to connect technical needs to product & business needs
40. “I have good ENOUGH engineering skills to:” ❏ Entice experienced engineers to join my team to raise the bar ❏ Notice bottlenecks in my team’s Products/Systems (tech or socio-tech) ❏ Offer alternatives to product requirements & technical design decisions ❏ Unblock Technical Roadmap creation for my team’s systems ❏ Grow, challenge and inspire my teammates to retain them ❏ Harvest context to connect technical needs to product & business needs Feel good enough to ✔ the above?
41. Execute insightful IC Tasks I’m good enough to improve present future
42. Got anything to share? I’m all ears oren.ellenbogen@gmail.com or oren@forter.com We’re hiring, come say hello 👋
43. Design Great talks & posts: - Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball - Silence is Golden: Coordination-Avoiding Systems Design - The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction - Dan North - Decisions, Decisions - How to Outperform a 10x Developer - Turning the database inside out
44. Operate Great talks & posts: - How to Write Documentation for People that Don't Read - Practicalities of Productionizing Distributed Systems - How NOT to Measure Latency - Stability Patterns & Antipatterns
45. Hire Great talks, posts & websites: - There is no talent shortage - The Accidental Diminisher - https://staffeng.com
46. Envision Great talks, posts and websites: - How to Move Beyond Gamification - https://boringtechnology.club/ - https://www.useronboard.com/
47. Share fears, tactics, resources, failures, and success stories with other humans Get out of your head