The Manager's Path

One-on-one meetings (1-1s) with your direct manager are an essential feature of a good working relationship.

1s serve two purposes. First, they create human connection between you and your manager.

The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.

The second purpose of a 1-1 is a regular opportunity for you to speak privately with your manager about whatever needs discussing.

Second thing to expect from your manager is feedback.

Ideally, the feedback you get from your manager will be somewhat public if it’s praise, and private if it’s criticism.

Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.

Don’t hire interns who are not going to graduate in the year after their internship.

Hiring interns is relatively easy compared to hiring full-time graduates.

My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process.

How to Be a Great Tech Lead Great tech leads have a number of characteristics, but these are the most important.

What is your preferred method of communication for serious feedback? Do you prefer to get such feedback in writing so you have time to digest it, or are you comfortable with less formal verbal feedback?

Why did you decide to work here? What are you excited about?

Are there any manager behaviors that you know you hate? If you asked me this question, my answer would be: skipping or rescheduling 1-1s, neglecting to give me feedback, and avoiding difficult conversations.

Do you have any clear career goals that I should know about so I can help you achieve them?

Regular 1-1s are like oil changes; if you skip them, plan to get stranded on the side of the highway at the worst possible time. Marc Hedlund Have Regular 1-1s

The default scheduling for 1-1s is weekly. I encourage you to start with weekly 1-1s and adjust the frequency only if both of you agree that this is more than you need. Weekly means that you talk frequently enough to keep the meetings short and focused, and it gives you room for the occasional missed week.

Upon hearing that someone is underperforming, many companies will have you write the person a document called a performance improvement plan. This is a set of clearly defined objectives that the person must achieve within a fixed period of time. If she manages to achieve them, then she is taken off the plan and all is well;

It turns out that releases can be a point of resource contention. When people are contending for a scarce resource, conflicts and unhappiness among team members are almost inevitable. Making the code-shipping resource far less scarce immediately improved team morale.

Developing customer empathy will also help you figure out which areas of the technology have the greatest direct impact on your customers, and that understanding will guide where you invest engineering effort.

The regular process retrospective has a lot of value for detecting patterns and forcing a reckoning with the outcome of decisions. Is the team feeling good about how they get requirements? Do they feel good about the code quality? This process helps you learn how the decisions you make over time affect the way your team operates in the day-to-day.

The Dos and Don’ts of Managing Conflict Don’t rely exclusively on consensus or voting.

Do set up clear processes to depersonalize decisions.

Don’t turn a blind eye to simmering issues.

Do address issues without courting drama.

Don’t take it out on other teams.

Do remember to be kind. It’s natural and perfectly human to want to be liked by other people.

Don’t be afraid.

Do get curious.

You have 10 productive engineering weeks per engineer per quarter There are 52 weeks in a year, or about 13 per quarter. However, realistically your team will lose a lot of that time.

Budget 20% of time for generic sustaining engineering work across the board By “generic sustaining engineering work,” I mean testing, debugging, cleaning up legacy code, migrating language or platform versions, and doing other work that has to happen.

Use the doubling rule for quick estimates, but push for planning time to estimate longer tasks The popular doubling rule of software estimation is, “Whenever asked for an estimate, take your guess and double it.”

Serve you well no matter what your tactics might be. Managing your time comes down to one important thing: understanding the difference between importance and urgency.

The degree of complexity and the frequency of the task can act as guides to determining whether and how you should delegate.

The popular management book First, Break All the Rules2 discusses several questions you can answer to help predict team productivity and satisfaction. Among them are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

What is a skip-level meeting? Put briefly, it is a meeting with people who report to people who report to you. There are a few different ways that people hold these meetings, but their purpose is to help you get perspective on the health and focus of your teams. However you choose to hold them, keep this purpose in mind.

Any manager you hire should role-play a few 1-1s as part of the interview process.

Importantly, a manager must also be able to debug teams. Ask the manager to describe a time when she ran a project that was behind schedule, and what she did in that scenario. Or ask her to role-play with an employee who is thinking about quitting. Ask the manager to describe how she’s coached employees who were struggling, and helped great employees grow to new levels. Ask her about her management philosophy. If she doesn’t have one at all, that might be a red flag. While a new manager may not be able to answer this question well, an experienced manager who has no clear philosophy is a cause for concern. What does she think the job of a manager is? How does she stay hands-on, and how does she delegate?

Dedicate 20% of your team’s schedule to “sustaining engineering.”

Research and development (R&D) Some companies focus on expanding the cutting edge of technology, and therefore may have a senior leader in the technology organization who is focused on experimentation, research, and new technology generation. This role might own technology strategy, or it might be purely a role for finding new ideas.

So, what does a CTO actually do?

Structure is how we scale, diversify, and take on more complex long-term tasks. We do it to our software, we do it to our teams, and we do it to our processes.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it.

Reinforce your culture by rewarding people for exhibiting its values in positive ways. People can share core value stories at company all-hands meetings.

One of the most important uses of performance reviews is to evaluate the alignment between team members’ values and the company’s values, and therefore what values should be part of your performance review process.

Remind your interviewers of the values of the team, and ask them to look out explicitly for places where the interviewee seems to match or collide with these values.

Writing a Career Ladder Here are some important issues to consider when writing a career ladder for your organization:

So, a software engineer band may go $50–100K, and a senior software engineer band may go $80–150K. That means a strong software engineer may make more than a senior engineer. You need this wiggle room to retain talent who are performing well at their current levels but are not ready to take on the additional responsibility of the next level.

Be clear about code review expectations.

Use a linter for style issues.

Keep an eye on the review backlog.