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biceps crimes posted:What type of roles are you applying for with this resume? Not clear to me if you’re trying for IC or another management position I'm applying for senior software engineer and software engineering manager roles. Guess it's time to maintain two different versions 
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Jul 18, 2023 14:50
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I would rather retire than manage people.
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Jul 18, 2023 14:53
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spiritual bypass posted:I'm applying for senior software engineer and software engineering manager roles. Guess it's time to maintain two different versions Yeah, I did this in a similar position. Hit rate improved noticably with the 2 more focused versions.
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Jul 18, 2023 14:53
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Pollyanna posted:I would rather retire than manage people. Managing people was great for me. I hired good people and gave them opportunities to grow. My whole former team contacted me in distress after I was laid off. Definitely not for everybody, though.
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Jul 18, 2023 14:56
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Pollyanna posted:I would rather retire than manage people. I manage 3 people. It's honestly very easy and for the pay bump I'm happy to do it. If/when it gets to 5 I might feel different.
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Jul 18, 2023 15:09
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Mega Comrade posted:I manage 3 people. It's honestly very easy and for the pay bump I'm happy to do it. It's afforded me a lot more time/energy to enjoy programming as a neat bonus
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Jul 18, 2023 15:16
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my current manager vaguely talks about career growth and growth opportunities and “coaching” with me and I suffer through thirty minutes of it once every two weeks. not sure what else he does but I guess I’m feeling… “empowered”?
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Jul 18, 2023 15:19
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Mega Comrade posted:I manage 3 people. It's honestly very easy and for the pay bump I'm happy to do it. My first management job threw me in the deep end with a team of 10. This was the largest team at the company, but funnily enough my title was only Lead even though I was reporting directly to the CEO for a while and then directly to the CTO. I was the only lead at the company, everyone else in a leadership position was a manager or even senior manager, even if some of them didn't actually have any reports. That company didn't do so well for some reason, but even this clusterfuck didn't knock me off the management path.
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Jul 18, 2023 15:24
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spiritual bypass posted:I'm applying for senior software engineer and software engineering manager roles. Guess it's time to maintain two different versions Yeah definitely, I thought you were going for management roles from the resume.
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Jul 18, 2023 15:25
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spiritual bypass posted:I'm applying for senior software engineer and software engineering manager roles. Guess it's time to maintain two different versions I’d reduce the amount of space given to manager/leader stuff and emphasize your technical skills and achievements for the ic roles. The manager skills are nice but the resume feels a bit split in its focus. For an IC role, I want it to fit a narrative you bring into an interview about how you’re really itching to get back into IC work. The current resume feels a little generic/untailored and like an any port in a storm resume for a software IC role if I’m feeling really critical. Which may be true, but you don’t need to communicate that. Indulge in the kayfabe and tailor your presentation, including the resume, to the role imo. The substance is there in your experience, just needs presentation and focus on the resume I don’t really have opinions for applying to manager roles since I rarely interview those and am usually just in one round for those biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 15:30
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spiritual bypass posted:Managing people was great for me. I hired good people and gave them opportunities to grow. My whole former team contacted me in distress after I was laid off. Definitely not for everybody, though. Mega Comrade posted:I manage 3 people. It's honestly very easy and for the pay bump I'm happy to do it. Ensign Expendable posted:My first management job threw me in the deep end with a team of 10. This was the largest team at the company, but funnily enough my title was only Lead even though I was reporting directly to the CEO for a while and then directly to the CTO. I was the only lead at the company, everyone else in a leadership position was a manager or even senior manager, even if some of them didn't actually have any reports. Maybe my definition of “manager” is different from everyone else’s. To me, a manager is the midpoint between an individual employee’s well-being and direction, an organization’s priorities and stressors, and corporate’s constraints and areas of efficiency. To be a manager is to play a game of balance between the other three participants, whereby you make compromises, push on the important parts and delay the rest, and clearly communicate what actions will have what costs while being prepared to make suboptimal (and sometimes actively harmful) decisions for everyone involved. Management is a game of people, or diplomacy, of hard choices, of licking boot and doing not what is right but what keeps the boat afloat for another ten seconds. Computers are assholes by accident. People are assholes on purpose. So maybe I just…don’t do people. Or the kinds of people I’ve met, I guess? I can’t wait to leave this job - this poo poo is poisoning me.
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Jul 18, 2023 15:48
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Ensign Expendable posted:My first management job threw me in the deep end with a team of 10. This was the largest team at the company, but funnily enough my title was only Lead even though I was reporting directly to the CEO for a while and then directly to the CTO. I was the only lead at the company, everyone else in a leadership position was a manager or even senior manager, even if some of them didn't actually have any reports. Same thing happened to me. It was my second year as a developer - the project we were working on was scrapped and everyone above me left or got fired, my new boss was the CEO of the company, and I had fourteen offshore developers working under me on a new project. Let's just say it was a learning experience.
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Jul 18, 2023 15:56
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biceps crimes posted:The current resume feels a little generic/untailored and like an any port in a storm resume for a software IC role It's that obvious? Pollyanna posted:Management is a game of people, or diplomacy, of hard choices, of licking boot and doing not what is right but what keeps the boat afloat for another ten seconds. Come to think of it, I was targeted for layoff after refusing to be an rear end in a top hat to my staff. More food for thought...
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Jul 18, 2023 15:57
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Pollyanna posted:I would rather retire
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Jul 18, 2023 16:44
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Important distinction that there are personnel managers who are, say, head of the development team, in charge of making sure the company has the people they need, and those people are generally happy and productive. Project management is there to make sure the project itself meets requirements. There's a big tradition in tech for personnel and project management to be the same overworked person, which is pretty bad because it is a very different set of skills. I prefer project management, but personnel management with a good team is super easy and fulfilling. People who just say they want to work in "management" without specifying what type are often people who just want money, respect, and an office with a door. biceps crimes posted:my current manager vaguely talks about career growth and growth opportunities and “coaching” with me and I suffer through thirty minutes of it once every two weeks. not sure what else he does but I guess I’m feeling… “empowered”? In general, I'm curious if anyone has really had a good personnel manager, especially one who's helped with development or education. Telling people to go take a class doesn't seem to be doing the trick.
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Jul 18, 2023 16:57
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StumblyWumbly posted:Important distinction that there are personnel managers who are, say, head of the development team, in charge of making I've had a good manager once, but needed to leave the job because it was severely underpaying and [for their business, correctly] valued a PhD over building functioning product. I've known a few others, but never reported to them. Having ever had a good manager and seeing how rare they are was one of the key insights to pushing me toward management. It's way easier to outperform your peers.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:16
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StumblyWumbly posted:In general, I'm curious if anyone has really had a good personnel manager, especially one who's helped with development or education. Telling people to go take a class doesn't seem to be doing the trick. I’ve had a couple good ones. They’ve helped me build relationships across the organization, helped me play politics, given me their honest perspective about how business, myself, the team, and our projects are going. How to contextualize and prioritize my work to best move the business goals along. Things that can often be clouded to ICs, either intentionally or not. My good managers have also frequently checked in on career ladder growth and opportunities and worked with me to identify and close gaps and identifying the right time to push for promotions. These managers have been real personnel managers, not technical leaders. I agree that is often confused in this industry, and at many companies people managers are also technical leaders and project managers - and that’s too many roles for one individual. In my current company and most of my experience project manager has either been a full time IC role or is filled in by senior+ engineers on a project-by-project basis.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:24
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The reason I couldn't ever be a manager was something I ran into when I was a team lead (sort of) at a previous gig. I had two guys working for me. The first guy, John (fake name obvs) was the sort of dude to show up 10 minutes early, friendly, easy to work with, and hardworking. He also absolutely did not get it. I've only like, flipped out and yelled at someone at work a few times in my career, and one of those times was at 6am when John called the head architect for our product (who was oncall that day) to let him know that we were having problems in Region X, when Region Y directly next to X and containing many major dependencies for X was currently on fire. I apologized later, to be clear: it was a super lovely move on my part. But yeah, this was the sort of dude who you'd tell what to do, and then you'd have to walk him through it each and every time. I'd fight to the death to let that guy keep his job though because despite all that, he was a fantastic coworker, and if you kept him on lower level stuff he was great and could do a good chunk of the overall work; he just couldn't work alone. The second guy, Jake? New to the industry, no real role experience, and he absolutely loving nailed it. You could tell him what you wanted done and thirty minutes later he'd be back with the output. He just got it. Being a manager means that it would be my job to make John more productive and to be rewarded for Jake being a good employee, but I had no input on the second and no idea how to improve the first.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:34
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Falcon2001 posted:But yeah, this was the sort of dude who you'd tell what to do, and then you'd have to walk him through it each and every time. I'd fight to the death to let that guy keep his job though because despite all that, he was a fantastic coworker, and if you kept him on lower level stuff he was great and could do a good chunk of the overall work; he just couldn't work alone. I mean, this also depends heavily on the work to be done itself, plus the organization you work for and the development support you get. You can be a perfectly good engineer and still have trouble delivering in a particular domain if you happen to work in a black hole of sanity and brain cells. Sometimes something sucks to work on and doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you just don’t gel with the subject. It’s a stone soup like everything else.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:50
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Pollyanna posted:I mean, this also depends heavily on the work to be done itself, plus the organization you work for and the development support you get. You can be a perfectly good engineer and still have trouble delivering in a particular domain if you happen to work in a black hole of sanity and brain cells. Sometimes something sucks to work on and doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you just don’t gel with the subject. It’s a stone soup like everything else. Yeah, I want to be clear that I'm trying to not make a...human value judgment there. That dude was fantastic. I loved having him around. He is no less of a valuable human being than Jake was; but in terms of the altar of capitalism, there was a value discrepancy, and managers are expected to help fix those things. I know because when I left the team a guy I know ended up being a manager there and got three other dudes, all less effective than John, to manage, and he hated it. Edit: the other part of it is that being a manager means that your success is based on other people's work, and as someone with pretty intense imposter syndrome and work anxiety already sometimes, boy that sounds like just ulcers waiting to happen.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:58
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Falcon2001 posted:Being a manager means that it would be my job to make John more productive and to be rewarded for Jake being a good employee, but I had no input on the second and no idea how to improve the first. Well, hiring and retaining top talent (e.g. Jake) is something you'd have input in generally. If you gave Jake all the crappy work or let him get bored or allowed the work environment to be crappy for him in some way then he'd leave. For John, while some people will always have trouble seeing the big picture, there are some coaching strategies that can work to make them less bad at it. I've drawn decision trees on the whiteboard before when talking through this sort of problem and pointed out that they were heading down one branch when they didn't meet the criteria for making that decision (e.g. is there a higher priority interrupt that this person is already dealing with?). But that's part of the creative art of management. Falcon2001 posted:Edit: the other part of it is that being a manager means that your success is based on other people's work, and as someone with pretty intense imposter syndrome and work anxiety already sometimes, boy that sounds like just ulcers waiting to happen. Yeah, that part is harder to get used to.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:15
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High level IC is dependent on other people's work, too. There's no escape from having to deal with other people of varying capacity to solve problems
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Jul 18, 2023 19:34
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you can try to become richard hipp and work away in a corner on software that gets installed hundreds of billions of times and therefore that everyone understands that you wont listen to them
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Jul 18, 2023 19:42
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leper khan posted:High level IC is dependent on other people's work, too. There's no escape from having to deal with other people of varying capacity to solve problems
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Jul 18, 2023 19:49
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I’ve had one great manager. She was very technical, and by the time she moved into management the company had a solid management training course and a separate IC v Manager career tracks. Both of those are required for a company that wants good management.
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Jul 18, 2023 20:22
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I was in a team with a good (far from perfect, but functional) "tripod" of a skillful and involved manager, PM, and technical lead exactly once. Other times either one of the "legs" was either absent and their duties were done by one of the other two with various degrees of competence or present but just straight up refusing to do their job or let anyone else pick up their slack. It probably influenced me to develop even the tiniest spark of technical leadership in my devs.
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Jul 18, 2023 20:38
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StumblyWumbly posted:Your manager probably knows these meetings are useless and would appreciate any helpful direction you can give. Having useless meetings like this is not great, but better than never talking to your manager and getting forgotten. I want my manager to remove obstacles and get things out of my way, alert me when there’s bs leadership is cooking up, and plug me into the right conversations. I don’t want my manager to paternalistically life coach me. The review cycles will continue until morale improves though
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Jul 18, 2023 21:01
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biceps crimes posted:I want my manager to remove obstacles and get things out of my way, alert me when there’s bs leadership is cooking up, and plug me into the right conversations. I don’t want my manager to paternalistically life coach me. The review cycles will continue until morale improves though Sounds like someone needs another manager above them in the org chart.
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Jul 18, 2023 21:04
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wash bucket posted:Sounds like someone needs another manager above them in the org chart. I keep getting layered by new managers five years into their career who want to coach me through growth and it’s driving me nuts. It’s happened twice in the past 18 months
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Jul 18, 2023 21:09
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biceps crimes posted:I keep getting layered by new managers five years into their career who want to coach me through growth and it’s driving me nuts. It’s happened twice in the past 18 months I hear you and that is completely valid. How about we try a little exercise? Ever hear of a Myers–Briggs exam? Jokes aside, I've worked places where the only path for advancement is through management and that just gets you a bunch of managers who don't actually want to be managers. Nobody's happy. wash bucket fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 21:18
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biceps crimes posted:I keep getting layered by new managers five years into their career who want to coach me through growth and it’s driving me nuts. It’s happened twice in the past 18 months Just proactively tell them what you want them to do and what their goals are or things you want diverted away from you. If you're principal and they're line manager, you have a lot more organizational weight than they do and their job is likely to proactively help you succeed at whatever your initiative is. Kind of weird for an org-level IC to get placed under a first tier manager to begin with though.
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Jul 18, 2023 21:31
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leper khan posted:Kind of weird for an org-level IC to get placed under a first tier manager to begin with though. i used to be outside and reported to a director and still kind of do. Some turnover happened and some even higher ups wanted to enforce a stricter hierarchy, etc. its a long story and I have a lot of bosses, but also none of them really have authority over me. There’s a lot of theater and these 1:1s dont really matter, but I do love to complain biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 21:52
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spiritual bypass posted:I'm applying for senior software engineer and software engineering manager roles. Guess it's time to maintain two different versions yeah I would not use this resume if you were looking for an IC position. You look like an extreme flight risk for a better higher paying management position as soon as you find one.
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Jul 18, 2023 22:28
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biceps crimes posted:I keep getting layered by new managers five years into their career who want to coach me through growth and it’s driving me nuts. It’s happened twice in the past 18 months My new director read an article and then "streamlined" my interview process that was specifically crafted to reduce the bias of any particular interviewer into three non-overlapping numerical ratings of the candidate with no other commentary being mandatory.
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Jul 19, 2023 01:53
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Oh wow, I just discovered what my last interviewer was getting at re. architecture vs prototyper roles. He pitched it as mostly meetings and working on cross-functional stuff, vs. working in a small team and "actually building prototypes". And I was specifically angling for an IC EE role, and designing prototypes for future tech did sound really great. When I got home, I looked up the actual roles, because I don't know what they mean by "prototyper". That guy was pushing me towards a non-engineering, hourly technician role. I would have phased my answers a lot differently if he had used the industry-standard terms for those roles: engineer vs. technician.
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Jul 19, 2023 02:28
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ryanrs posted:Oh wow, I just discovered what my last interviewer was getting at re. architecture vs prototyper roles. He pitched it as mostly meetings and working on cross-functional stuff, vs. working in a small team and "actually building prototypes". And I was specifically angling for an IC EE role, and designing prototypes for future tech did sound really great. I'm a 15 year-ish EE that's been across different companies and industries. I would've interpreted that question like you did. I've never heard of prototyper used in place of technician before, that's wild. And silly.
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Jul 19, 2023 04:11
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StumblyWumbly posted:Sure, but managers are responsible for making sure other people do good work, and IC literally stands for Individual Contributor I hate that this has become a thing, because I have long since internalized that it means "In Command", which is like the opposite.
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Jul 19, 2023 07:14
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biceps crimes posted:I keep getting layered by new managers five years into their career who want to coach me through growth and it’s driving me nuts. It’s happened twice in the past 18 months My manager is cool and gets it, but we still had one of these this year. I ended up just putting weaknesses and goals for the teams in my area and department that I can influence. That way they’re easy to agree to, are proactively impacting the teams in a way I can use for raises, and I can call back to them if I need political support later. “We can agree I could be better at CSS, but surely a better focus for me would be reducing the bus factor on the infrastructure team?”
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Jul 19, 2023 10:21
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StumblyWumbly posted:Sure, but managers are responsible for making sure other people do good work, and IC literally stands for Individual Contributor The higher up you get the more your contributions are focused around enabling your teams to do high quality work. It’s very similar to management in a lot of ways except without the hiring/firing/development/etc.
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Jul 19, 2023 12:26
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It's a funny thing, but the better you get at making products, the worse of an idea it is to have you spend your time directly making products.
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