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bob dobbs is dead posted:cto of 15 peep team usually translates to line eng manager or staff eng in bigger company land 
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Apr 25, 2023 18:15
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leper khan posted:How desperate are you? Not very. Like, I'm still to the point where I'm passing over job listings for ethical reasons. Guess we'll see how long that lasts.
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Apr 25, 2023 18:15
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bob dobbs is dead posted:cto of 15 peep team usually translates to line eng manager or staff eng in bigger company land That's cool, maybe I have some imposter syndrome because it's higher than I would have guessed. Edit: also feeling imposter syndrome for writing so many words SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 25, 2023 |
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Apr 25, 2023 18:17
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It was a bit ago now but I really appreciated all that advice from folks several pages ago, ty 
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Apr 25, 2023 18:25
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I started up writing a whole post here about feeling unsure about where to go with my career (more tech or more management?) but honestly, the only realistic response would be "figure out what you want and go do it" which is correct but I've never been able to do that very well. I think especially for the people management part though it's almost impossible to figure out how much I'd like it without trying it out, and I can't do that without changing employers which I really don't want to do if it turns out to be a bad idea for all parties. If only one could look at the other leg in the trousers of time 
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Apr 25, 2023 19:11
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Osmosisch posted:I started up writing a whole post here about feeling unsure about where to go with my career (more tech or more management?) but honestly, the only realistic response would be "figure out what you want and go do it" which is correct but I've never been able to do that very well. Both legs have spiders hth
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Apr 25, 2023 20:31
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Did a 2-5 hour takehome for an EM job and of course I decided to use it as an excuse to play around with my backlog of tools/frameworks I've been wanting to use. Actual coding time: ~2 hours Time spent debugging Hasura, test mocks, Docker, etc: 8+ hours Why do I do this to myself?
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Apr 25, 2023 23:03
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Osmosisch posted:I started up writing a whole post here about feeling unsure about where to go with my career (more tech or more management?) but honestly, the only realistic response would be "figure out what you want and go do it" which is correct but I've never been able to do that very well. The best way to get a feel for people management is to cling to a manager and beg for their work. They'll give you the worst of it.
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Apr 25, 2023 23:12
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Osmosisch posted:I started up writing a whole post here about feeling unsure about where to go with my career (more tech or more management?) but honestly, the only realistic response would be "figure out what you want and go do it" which is correct but I've never been able to do that very well. Think about all the weird personal and professional problems your co-workers have. Now imagine some of them report to you and now those problems are your problems. That's management. Someone didn't show up for work? Someone got caught doing something illegal on the clock? Someone's ex is lurking in the parking lot? All your problem now. Others can disagree but "people problems" always end up eating me alive.
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Apr 25, 2023 23:15
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Vulture Culture posted:Bad news: if you're not currently managing people, you're not likely to get a people management job by changing employers either. they put a dealio about how they got 15 reports
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Apr 25, 2023 23:17
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Vulture Culture posted:Bad news: if you're not currently managing people, you're not likely to get a people management job by changing employers either. This is especially true in the current market. There are a lot less open EM jobs than EM's looking for those roles. Buuut, you may have to swap to a new or growing company where you can grow into a role. Internal promotions are the easiest way to become an EM.
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Apr 25, 2023 23:38
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basically all management job markets everywhere are less liquid at basically all times compared to ic jobs
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Apr 25, 2023 23:41
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Interesting, every company I worked for was incredibly hesitant to promote anyone to an EM internally even if they were very willing to promote ICs up to tech lead inclusive. That being said, this leg has its share of spiders and you have to be prepared to give up writing any code even if your immediate job description doesn't explicitly call for it. McCracAttack posted:Others can disagree but "people problems" always end up eating me alive. That being said, I live for this poo poo. Seeing someone solve an engineering problem and knowing I empowered them to do it makes it all worth it.
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Apr 25, 2023 23:43
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Ensign Expendable posted:That being said, I live for this poo poo. Seeing someone solve an engineering problem and knowing I empowered them to do it makes it all worth it. In my experience (and I'm not judging anyone here for this) "I'd like to be in management" is toxic to my ears because it sounds like "I'd like to tell people what to do". "I'd like to be in project management" tells me you enjoy seeing projects executed well and thoroughly, and you like thinking about the big picture from architecture to tests. "I'd like to be in personnel management or manage an engineering team" is cool because it says you like working with people generally, helping them develop and giving them feedback. It is a huge problem that project and personnel management gets mixed together, because they use some very different skills. The only similar parts about the two roles is they see other people's salaries, so they almost always end up making more money, and that's a whole separate rant.
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Apr 26, 2023 00:41
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I've been very lucky in my management career to be able to build my own teams for the most part. That makes most of the usual management headaches a lot easier/less frequent if you're decent at hiring. I've generally spent a lot of my time on making sure there are good processes in place, developing people, and doing air cover. All of that stuff is way more fun than the HR stuff that happens with bad employees.
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Apr 26, 2023 01:23
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wins32767 posted:I've been very lucky in my management career to be able to build my own teams for the most part. That makes most of the usual management headaches a lot easier/less frequent if you're decent at hiring. I've generally spent a lot of my time on making sure there are good processes in place, developing people, and doing air cover. All of that stuff is way more fun than the HR stuff that happens with bad employees. Managing the right people makes all the difference. I've had friends who talked about how they loved managing and were naturally great at it, and then they move to a new team with a problem employee or two and every moment is a waking nightmare. I went the opposite direction.
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Apr 26, 2023 02:50
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I thought I was a poo poo manager because I inherited a team that was a mess. I had high hopes going into it and they were crushed within a year. HR was no help, upper management even less so. I couldn’t get rid of the worst one because he had known the CTO for years. I was totally powerless and unable to affect change and everyone knew it. Finally I just found a new job as an IC. A few years after that I was asked if I could help out and manage a few people since the current manager was overloaded. I was hesitant because I didn’t think of myself as a good manager, but I reluctantly agreed since it was needed and it was a great experience. I helped grow the team, we got a lot done, I was effective at shielding them from BS, I was able to get everyone promotions, and everyone just gelled. I still went back to IC because other people on the team wanted to try their hand at management and I didn’t want to stand in their way, especially when it wasn’t something I felt called to do.
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Apr 26, 2023 03:42
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I don't want to manage or be managed. I just want to work directly with product people and designers to make good stuff. I guess that basically means early stage startups or small lifestyle companies forever.
prom candy fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 07:24
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You're always "being managed" unless you're a one-man shop, the only difference is whether the person doing it actually knows what they're doing.
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Apr 26, 2023 07:53
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Thanks a lot for the responses everyone. One of the main reasons I'm angsting about this at the moment is that I'm interviewing for a much more management-oriented position than I currently have, and it's prompting some overdue soul-searching. I think the point about wanting to deal with other people's problems is a really important one. Especially wanting to help people you don't particularly care for. I think I would be ok at this, and team operations are just another puzzle in a lot of ways. I've mentored plenty of people successfully, but that's going to be only a part of it. In the end there's a lot less direct control possible than with tech, and that could be too frustrating.
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Apr 26, 2023 09:05
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Got past the most basic screening interview for a position, and the next step is a two-hour takehome test that, I've been warned, will require some knowledge of using Numpy to do linear algebra. My Numpy is like seven years out of date at this point, and this is not the kind of thing that your average leetcode test is going to cover. Bleh! There's this thing called ChatGPT now.
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Apr 26, 2023 12:41
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StumblyWumbly posted:Managing the right people makes all the difference. I've had friends who talked about how they loved managing and were naturally great at it, and then they move to a new team with a problem employee or two and every moment is a waking nightmare. I went the opposite direction. I've been crazy lucky with who I've gotten to manage so far in my career. First team's issues were largely defined by issues with the parent company (2-3 years without raises will do that). One dev had some struggles, but he was pleasant to work with at least and we were able to improve his output enough that he was at least contributing. Second stop, the team I inherited was incredible and the one person I was able to add fit right in. I was given an internal transfer of one additional dev who was unhappy in her current team. She never really was happy on our team either, but again, pleasant to work with and I feel like we turned a corner right before she bounced. When we had layoffs, my team was the only group of engineers not impacted (which probably means they all hit that fantastic cost/value ratio more than anything). Aside from myself, obviously...
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Apr 26, 2023 13:55
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I never understood the eagerness to herd cats, and I’ve been avoiding push to EM for years. But… by the looks of it, I might be forced into it soon. At least I’ll be able to build the team myself and ruin their lives by figuring things in-flight.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:20
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Ensign Expendable posted:Interesting, every company I worked for was incredibly hesitant to promote anyone to an EM internally even if they were very willing to promote ICs up to tech lead inclusive.
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Apr 26, 2023 15:23
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Vulture Culture posted:The takeaway here is that most companies are very careful about who they have as managers. There's a lot of politics around "who is senior leadership going to get along with" long before it ever gets to the dynamics of how someone works with their team. Absolutely this. The previous place was so increasingly toxic as you went up the ladder than it alienated a bunch of us from even considering management, on top of us not even being considered due to "being too vocal about stuff."
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Apr 26, 2023 15:48
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Toxicity comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. But it's crucial to remember that it's often the interactions or habits that are toxic, rather than the people. I've seen toxic separations emerge between entire layers of good VPs/directors and good line managers when upper management decided they didn't want to be a burden to the line managers by constantly asking for updates, information, and status inputs. Then they didn't want to get caught unprepared in high-level conversations with other senior engineering leaders, so they either made up plausible but incorrect roadmap summaries, or gave vague answers that didn't create confidence in platform team roadmaps within the business lines. The end result was that smart people elsewhere in the business started building their own competing stuff, and a lot of people's time got wasted. (This was mid-pandemic, when the whole business was new to remote work, everyone was on edge in every interaction with every person, and nobody's commitments held much water anyway because every person was one bad day away from a three-month breakdown.)
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Apr 26, 2023 15:56
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So that two-hour online test I mentioned? It was hosted by HackerRank, which must have had some kind of outage halfway through the test, because the unit tests started taking 5+ minutes to resolve. Makes it kinda hard to debug your code! I took a screen recording as soon as I realized what was happening, so at least I have proof. Still sucks.
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Apr 26, 2023 22:23
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StumblyWumbly posted:That's definitely a high point. The issue is that, much like engineers spend most of their time on the broken parts of a system, managers spend Isn't that what work is? We want reality to be in our ideal state configuration but it's not and human effort is needed to arrange it into a state closer to what we want. We just endlessly take that state which is not ideal and try to transform it into something closer. That sounds like what I'd expect from the management version of this endless process. Protecting your team from poo poo that may roll downhill. Protecting your team from poo poo they may fling at each other. Protecting your team from rolling in poo poo individually if they are so inclined. I imagine Sisyphus endlessly pushing a boulder of poo poo away from the team. If there wasn't poo poo to deal with and everyone just did what they needed at all times without obstacles then I'm not sure managers would exist tbh. Maybe TLs, but not managers.
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Apr 28, 2023 16:57
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A large part of a manager's job is to keep people doing what the project needs rather than what they think they need. That sort of coordination is essential to successfully getting things done and it's not something that would ever arise naturally.
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Apr 28, 2023 17:34
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Tell me you never met any of my managers without telling me you never met any of my managers.
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Apr 29, 2023 17:54
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ultrafilter posted:A large part of a manager's job is to keep people doing what the project needs rather than what they think they need. I wanted to argue against this but there have been a bunch of times where my lead insists on me doing extra work for a thing that doesn't seem strictly necessary for our deliverable and then my manager comes in and says it's unnecessary and let's not spend time on it.
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Apr 30, 2023 20:28
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No comment.
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May 1, 2023 17:39
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oliveoil posted:If there wasn't poo poo to deal with and everyone just did what they needed at all times without obstacles then I'm not sure managers would exist tbh. Maybe TLs, but not managers. This always makes me curious about companies like Valve or other places that have extremely horizontal setups; like how the gently caress does anything get done? It's either paradise or a nightmare. I also am very curious about the stuff that isn't...'fun' for another word, like incident management or security or compliance.
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May 1, 2023 19:28
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valve literally had a decade long period where they sat on the steam monopoly and didnt do poo poo
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May 1, 2023 19:31
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SurgicalOntologist posted:That's cool, maybe I have some imposter syndrome because it's higher than I would have guessed. As other said, you could probably swing line manager for devs/sres if that’s what you wanted but if you’re hired into somewhere with that role it would be less hands on keyboard work (which it seems like you’re used to). Your other option would be as an IC like you described, maybe in an SRE/k8s role. You should think about whether you would be happier inheriting a team of SREs and dealing with business priorities vs their vision for the tech, implementing processes and generally working to develop a high performing team; or joining as someone on a team like that getting your hands dirty in kubernetes and working to enable the teams your team supports, making technical recommendations etc etc. Both paths have the the landmines of who could end up being in the team, but they can both be fulfilling depending on what you want.
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May 1, 2023 19:34
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Falcon2001 posted:This always makes me curious about companies like Valve or other places that have extremely horizontal setups; like how the gently caress does anything get done? It's either paradise or a nightmare. I also am very curious about the stuff that isn't...'fun' for another word, like incident management or security or compliance. It's a far more political environment with implicit power dynamics. There are more issues with things that aren't seen as directly valuable to people in positions of entrenched power, like diversity initiatives. Compliance is usually a function of legal, which at valve notably doesn't conform to their no bosses rule.
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May 1, 2023 19:53
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https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
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May 1, 2023 19:54
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leper khan posted:It's a far more political environment with implicit power dynamics. There are more issues with things that aren't seen as directly valuable to people in positions of entrenched power, like diversity initiatives. The double-edged sword of horizontal environments is that nobody cares what anyone else is doing. You get high autonomy to make business impact whether it's in your job description or not, so if you fit the shape of an extremely high-performing senior engineer, you'll thrive. However, if you're more collaborative, on staff or principal track, be prepared to fight for every crumb of attention when you need to make something happen that's bigger than yourself. You'll have to rely on virality and slow, organic uptake because nobody in leadership is going to mandate, champion or even amplify anything you're saying until they're really sure they've got a winner on their hands.
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May 1, 2023 20:31
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Got fired Monday April 10, just got my first offer on Friday. Contract to hire at a large financial firm at $75 an hour. Basically lateral money-wise. I need to take what I can get, it's a tough market. If something better comes along during the 2 week in-between time I should take it instead, right?
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May 1, 2023 21:47
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Comb Your Beard posted:Got fired Monday April 10, just got my first offer on Friday. Contract to hire at a large financial firm at $75 an hour. Basically lateral money-wise. I need to take what I can get, it's a tough market. If something better comes along during the 2 week in-between time I should take it instead, right? There's nothing preventing you from doing so. Could get a no-rehire flag at the company you bail on, but if there's a very large pay disparity it's easy enough to explain away.
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May 1, 2023 21:54
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