What does an engineering manager do? | Engineering manager's responsibilities
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- Hi folks, welcome to Not Only Code!
In this video I'm talking abouet engineering management - who is an engineering manager? What does an engineering manager do? Do engineering managers write code?
After a short walk around Amsterdam I'm going to tell you about different hats that engineering managers need to wear depending on kind of a company they work for.
In the video I mention article by Pat Kua that I highly recommend:
📝 www.patkua.com/blog/5-enginee...
If one day you want to become an engineering mananger you might be interested in following books:
📚 Leading Snowflakes by Oren Ellenbogen - leadingsnowflakes.com/
📚 The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier - / the-manager-s-path
📚Management 3.0 bu Jurgen Appelo - / management-3-0
🎥 Video timeline 🎥
0:00 Intro and walk around Amsterdam
2:00 4 hats engineering managers wear
5:09 What does it mean to manage people
9:25 Where is the engineering in engineering manager?
12:04 Outro
If you enjoy my videos, check out my website 🌏 notonlycode.org, where I publish more in-depth articles about software development.
As always, if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, you can contact me:
✉️ email: gregory@notonlycode.org
🐦 Twitter: @GregoryWitek
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Hi folks, if you have any questions about engineering management, how to become a manager and whether it's actually a good career path for software engineers, let me know!
As a psychology student looking into engineering this was very interesting. Thank you for taking your time and sharing your insight.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video. It summerizes quite well different responsibilities in the job of em !
Great video! Loved your job
Wow, thanks a lot, Gregory! This is exactly what I needed. I have a bunch of small company experience, and I'm interviewing for engineering manager positions at several mid-sized companies. To be honest, I was missing the big picture on what responsibilities the role usually involves, and how big a variety I should expect for the same role at different companies. Your video just answered all my current questions. Thanks a lot! I appreciate that you took the time to record and edit this video.
Thank you, Dávid, I'm happy you liked the video, it's great to see people find it useful.
Thanks Gregory. This was a great video and I really enjoyed the points you were making!
Thank you, I'm happy you enjoyed it!
Clear and on point. Priceless.
Thanks, this is a great brief of the responsibilities of an Engman!
Thanks for sharing! One of the best, down-to-earth videos on the topic.
Any hints how you measure devs productivity would be great
Hey, thanks for your kind words! Measuring productivity is challenging and I don't think one set of metrics will work for everyone, it depends on many things (I should do an episode on it, will try to record one in a few weeks!). A few metrics I find useful on a team level are: average PR lifetime (how many hours/days it takes on average to merge it), number of bugs per week/sprint/month, mean time to repair (how much time it takes to fix a critical bug). When I worked on a SaaS that my team could deploy ourselves, I could measure deployment frequency, now I work on software that's hosted on premises, so that metric is not very helpful, but I can measure how many patches/emergency releases we have to create etc. Also, as a counterbalance I try to measure team happiness - if productivity metrics go up but happiness goes down, it means that maybe people are working overtime etc. so that's not really a win for me. By the way, there's a great article by Martin Fowler about the dangers of trying to measure productivity: martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html - almost 20 years old, but still a great read
@@NotOnlyCode great tips, man! Looking forward to a video on this 👍
Thank you so much for this video!
HI Georgy, thanks for very good description of engineering manager role.
This was awesome - thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks for this, this is a helpful affirmation to myself. Cause most of the stuff you've mentioned I am doing in a position as a manager. Got a question or two for you, how often do you do your 1on1's with the team? I noticed that bi-weekly is more beneficial than every week. Cheers!
Hey, thanks for your comment! Yeah, I also do 1on1s every 2 weeks, I noticed than on weekly basis my team members didn't have much to talk about and they sometimes asked if we can skip the meeting. Now I reserve 45min every 2 weeks and adjust it with some team members if needed.
great video and to the point . subscribed..
Thank you, I appreciate it! :)
Great advices
Good video. I could relate to whatever you are saying . However I would like to hear your take on below questions.
1. We have architects in the team. They are the go to guys for technical clarifications in team, this keeps myself away from technical stuff and I start to feel irrelevant or not being part of the whole cause. How do handle that?
2. What will be your next career move?
3. Have you ever felt that you have to move back to coding or should have taken technical path instead of management? If yes did you try for the transition?
Thanks for the comment and very good questions! Let me start from the last one:
3. I did transition back to IC for a while. I worked as EM for 1.5y, then I moved to lead dev position for around 8 months. It was alright, it wasn't hard to get a job as a dev (although it might have been if I didn't code for 5 years or so), it was quite fun, but at the same time it made me realize that I really enjoyed management work, so after a while I moved to EM again. I also know people who tried management and decided it wasn't for them. There's a great blog post about it by Charity Majors: charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
2. At some point I would like to start managing managers. I imagine taking one of 2 paths: either I will join a startup or a mid-size company as a CTO and hopefully it keeps growing, or I will go to some larger company as EM and over time move to Senior EM / director position. Which one will it be - at this point I have no idea, it depends on opportunities that appear around, and that's impossible to predict.
1. So, the most challenging question - how to stay relevant with the technical stuff? I think the best approach is not to force it. Look, you're not a developer anymore, your job is not to write code, your job is to ensure your team has everything they need to do their best. If you have some spare time, you can pick a small task every now and then, but you need to ask yourself whether this is the thing that your team needs help with the most. In my previous job it was the case from time to time, cause it was a small team and we had a lot of features to deliver. Currently I have larger team and coding is rarely the most important problem I can tackle. Instead I do some technical work on a side, I'm writing a book, making some courses, etc. but that's more of a hobby for me, I don't find it necessary to do it to stay relevant at work. And you know, if you want to go back to IC one day, you'll make it. It's not like you will forget how to code entirely, you'll spend a few weeks refreshing knowledge and you'll pass the interviews. Or you can even try it within your current company, I saw people moving laterally from EM to IC position, because they felt tired by managing others.
By the way, I had this kind of anxiety about my coding skills some time ago, I was talking to a larger company about EM role and we talked about tech stack and I told them I'm not very proficient in the tools they use and they told me: "That's fine. We don't expect you to write code, as long as you know the basics of our stack, you'll learn more over time. We didn't contact you because of your coding skills, but because you know how to build teams, and currently we need someone who will help us build teams". And that helped me gain some confidence.
@@NotOnlyCode Thanks for the detailed answer and the blog is also good.
Hi Gregory! Thanks for your video. I'd like to ask you some questions. I've been in a Team Leader / Delivery Manager (infrastructure) for a few years now, and I'm thinkink in trying to job positions for Engineering Manager. The things you describe in the video, I already do them the most. I only have 2 years of experience with Java. I'm a bit "afraid" to apply to this positions, but I've always been a people person. Do you think that this jump from Technical Team Leader / Delivery "Manager" is possible without knowing the new company product? Thanks for your time!
Hi João!
Is it possible to land EM role in your case? I'm sure it is, though since it'd be a new position for you and a new company, of course it might be tougher to get it (since companies would rather find external candidate with EM experience, or internal candidate with no EM experience, but who knows the company well). Still, it just means you might need to look longer or take a job at a smaller or less known company (since they have harder time finding people).
Whether you should try - I always encourage people to try new roles. If you enjoy working with people this might be a right move for you. And if you don't enjoy it, it's not a one way street (an ex-colleague of mine moved from project manager to engineering manager and then to delivery manager).
Btw I'm planning a video on a related topic (whether one should move to management or not) in a couple of weeks, make sure to check it out when it's there. Take care and good luck!
Very nice 🙏
Hi! Thank you for the video. I have some questions about your academic background. Did you study management engineering master's program? I am asking because Im planning to have a master's degree in it. I hold a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and I don't know anything about programming or code. Do you think I have to know to work as a manager in a company? Or do you know about other sectors where I may have job opportunities?
I did both bachelor and masters in computer science, but I'd say that a few years of work as a software developer made it easier for me to transition to manegement than my degree. If you want to become a software engineering manager, working as a developer is very valuable. Alternatively you can consider other roles in tech, like product management. Unfortunately I don't know other sectors where mechanical engineering is valuable
Hi mate,
This might not be the correct comment section to reach you about my question but let me try :)
I have a new engineering manager lady which gives me the feeling everytime that she is prioritising and trying to enforce her own goals over me and started to get away emotionally from that person. Basically I don't feel anymore to walk an extra mile for my company because of that reason. Because I feel like this selfish behaviour will be satisfied if I go in the direction I am being enforced to. In our last 1:1, I was not prepared enough I accept that but I have been told that "this is a performance based company and those are your responsibilities, I can just help you with those". This sentence pissed me off to be honest.
I would appreciate your insight about this!
Hey! That's a tough situation and with little details it's difficult to provide accurate advice, but a few things worth considering:
* why does your manager behave this way? maybe she's a new manager that doesn't know how to manage people yet? or maybe this is the way her boss pushes her to work? or maybe this reflects personality? understanding her better will allow you to communicate with her
* do you have skip-level meetings? that's a good way to learn more about your manager's boss and see what's their view (without complaining about your manager directly)
* I always follow a "change your job or change your job" rule - if I am in a situation that I don't consider sustainable (like having a manager that I'm unable to work with) I give myself 3-6 months to change the situation. I do my best to explain my view and push for the changes to happen. If it works, I stay, otherwise I move to the 2nd "change your job" and try to move teams or find another company to work for
btw if you want to chat about it, I run free coaching sessions once a week, you can schedule them on Mentoring Club (www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/gregory-witek) if the time works for you
Can a mechanical engineer be Engineering Manager? I need this answer for my immigration file.... plz answer ...
Messi plays football primarily. In his spare time he is also an Engineering Manager.
Now that they lost in Champions League he has more time for his side gig ;)
😂
@@NotOnlyCode haahhahahhahaha. thats funny
Hi Grenory Sorry it I misspelled your name.
I am planning to do Ms in Engineering Management in Europe. What kind of jobs would I be eligible for after graduation?
(I have 3 year work experience as a mechanical design engineer in India but in an American based company)
Hey! My experience is limited to software engineering, since your experience is in mechanical engineering I'm afraid I can't help much.
In general though I would advise to check the schools that you consider in Europe and find some alumni and see what jobs they got after university. You can find graduates on LinkedIn, and surely you can contact the school and see if they have some kind of alumni network and if they can put you in touch with someone that studied engineering management there. I hope that helps!
How long did it take to become an Engineer Manager after 4 years of college??
Around 5 years after graduation, though I worked part-time for 3 years while studying, so right after graduation I already had some working experience.
I appreciate a team but here is my opinion having worked both. Your engineer doesn’t need anyone to deliver a product. That is the honest truth if we are being honest.
Nice work but please, grammar check your thumbnails to increase engagement.
No nonsense channel I found