Trailer for the talk
Here's a sneak peek of the talk: Senior Engineering Manager, Anand, will share his career journey, highlight the trade-offs, and help you find your motivation to become an engineering manager.
About the talk
A lot of developers aim to become Engineering Managers one day for higher compensations and more deciding power. However, these are not good reasons to become an Engineering Manager. This talk focuses on finding out your WHY for pursuing an Engineering Manager role and understanding the intricacies and trade-offs that come with it.
This talk will cover
- Finding your WHY
- Understanding trade-offs
- Learning the importance of career ladders
- Practicing self-leadership
We’ll use Zoom meeting to hold and record the event. Register to the event to access recordings afterwards.
About the speaker
Anand is a Senior Engineering Leader currently working at Mark43, a public safety SaaS company. Over the past decade, Anand has progressed from starting as an SDET to Engineering Leader and Distinguished Mentor.
Highlights of the talk
What is the path to engineering management?
There are two primary paths to engineering management, primarily tenure based and interest based. The tenure based path refers to a senior engineer with 3-5+ years of experience. Either the engineer or the team feels they are ready to get a direct report or two and become an engineering manager. On the other hand, an interest based path often involves a senior engineer with a natural knack for people management and interest in fostering engineering culture and 1:1s. In either of these scenarios, you’ll arrive at a critical juncture to take on a form of engineering leadership role, but this can be used in multiple forms. Some teams still call this a tech lead, or a formal engineering manager title. Many companies use tech lead and engineering manager interchangeably. While it can work in some scenarios, it is not the best practice. Here are the main responsibilities of tech leads and engineering managers and their differences:
| Tech Lead (System) | Engineering Manager (People) |
|---|---|
| Technical excellence and innovation | Career planning, promotions, and coaching |
| Architecture and system integration | Headcount planning and hiring |
| Tech mentoring, adoption, and alignment | Team planning and delivery |
| Technical spikes and experiments | Objectives, performance, and feedback |
| System design presentations | Participation in technical decisions |
| Hands-on coding 30% to 70% of the time | Hands-on coding 0% to 30% of the time |
What are the reasons why you might want to become an Engineering Manager?
You might have some misconceptions that when you become an engineering manager, you’ll have more compensation, more power and authority, and more say in hiring and firing people in your company. People also think that this is one of the only ways to get a promotion and that engineering managers are able to just spend time on delegating most work.
Instead, your motivational factors and your why’s should be answers for these key signals:
Heads down time vs. constant collaboration
Two sets of questions to ask yourself include:
- Do you prefer coding around 60-80% of the time (IC) or 0-30% of the time (EM)
- Do you prefer more maker’s time (IC) or having 50% of your calendar be meetings only (EM)
More implementation focus vs. planning and strategy
Would you like to continue to focus more on implementing features and technical solutions or (1) drafting and reviewing multiple technical strategy docs and (2) more technical product/project management?
Comfort with routine 1:1s, hiring, coaching, and conflict resolution
Are you okay with spending time each week on:
- One on one with direct reports
- One on ones with your manager
- One on one with senior leadership team
- One on ones with other key stakeholders (product, design, QA, etc.)
- Hiring and recruiting efforts (sporadic or routinely)
- One-offs: unblocking the team, conflict resposion, career coaching, performance reviews
Success becoming more abstract
Success will be in the form of:
- Team success vs. individual performance
- Growth and morale of direct reports vs. amount of implementation contribution
- Project deadlines and quality vs. individual work skillset
- Metrics around process, productivity, goals, deadlines, happiness
Creator vs. enabler
As an individual contributor, you are more of a creator, whereas when you’re an engineering manager, you’re more of an enabler.
| Creator (Individual contributor) | Enabler (Engineering manager) |
|---|---|
| Technical implementation focus | Enabling the tem to do their creator work effectively |
| Ability to work on putting an idea to practice and roll out | Resolving any blockers |
| Ability to innovate and try new technologies in a direct manner | Guiding towards a solution vs. diving into it |
| Coding and architecture as primary focus |
What are the core pillars of being an Engineering Manager?
These are the core pillars according to Google’s Research on Project Oxygen:
To summarize, here are the core pillars of being an engineering manager:
- While technical skills are important, soft skills (coaching & communication) are absolutely essential
- Traditional companies are based on lining promotions with higher levels of managerial responsibilities
- Delivering well-balanced, actionable, and constructive feedback
- Knowing how to distinguish the line between coaching and micromanaging