Engineering Managers: An Important Conversation

Theo - t3․gg

Core Role of Engineering Management

Management crucial in all fields, especially engineering
Unique position between engineers (who live in code) and stakeholders (CEO, product, design, users)
Primary role: smooth out roughness between different groups
Most important: set up engineers for success
Many engineering managers don't think cohesively about management or engineer growth

Trust is most important thing managers can build
Every management decision should help build trust across company
Ensure entire team is bought in, understands what's happening
Team members must feel trusted in their work and contributions
If anyone has reservations about how something's being built, team should discuss

Embrace "strong opinions, weakly held" approach
Anyone on team can strongly commit to ideas regardless of seniority
- Doesn't matter if principal tech lead from Amazon (8 years) or brand new intern
If someone has strong belief backed up with reasoning, everyone should listen and learn
Three possible outcomes:
- They're right and everyone learns
- They're wrong and team can teach them
- Team knows they're wrong but lets them fail (underrated option)

One of best things engineering managers can do: let engineers fail when you know they will
Conditions: know failure will happen early and consequences aren't very big
If engineer wants to adopt tech that won't work and will fail early:
- Can voice concerns but if they don't listen, let them proceed
- Shows trust in engineer
- They might actually be right (better solution adoption)
- Builds trust and capability through learning experience
Next recommendations will have more experience backing decisions
Exception: consistently pushing bad things and breaking stuff requires different conversation
Most engineers aren't given enough leash, especially when manager has technical background

Challenge: managing engineers who know more and are more tuned in than manager
Engineers often more capable than managers realize
Video viewers likely among more included people on their teams
Managers should recognize and build into people who:
- Care more about their work
- Learn in free time
- Want to keep learning and bring knowledge to team
Most valuable way for engineers to grow
Provides most valuable team resource: energy

Energy is what companies need to thrive
Code bases don't live/die on:
- Technology choices
- How good hired engineers are
Success comes down to: who has energy to make things move and maintain it through:
- Maintenance windows
- Hard problems
- All project pain until finding users in needed state
Easy for managers to waste energy by saying no to energized team members
Reason: doesn't immediately align with business goals
Reality: no business goal isn't accelerated by energized team
Even if energy direction differs from desired direction, energy enables faster achievement
Why startups can compete: large companies burn out energized people before they can apply energy

Recently became CTO of LTT, scared because:
- Never been "real engineer"
- Never worked on code professionally
- Never had engineering manager
- Just wanted to build things for LTT
Ended up in charge of building Float Plane
Every engineer he works with is better engineer than him
Knows and embraces this, uses it to improve himself
Role involves translating between:
- Developer speak and timelines
- Team needs and rest of LTT communication
Takes role of exploring new things for team
Regular viewer of channel to find things to bring to team
Brought Vercel and Next.js technology to Float Plane and LTT
Results of his approach:
- Gave engineers excitement and motivation
- Significantly widened hiring pool
- Increased energy level of new hires
Reached out for 4-hour Discord call about engineering management
Most of call was reinforcing what he was already doing correctly
Understands importance of energy from YouTube experience
Stellar example of successful engineering management without traditional coding background

Rule enforced for new teammates
Set minimum number of "dumb questions" new teammate must ask daily
Requirement: minimum 2 dumb questions every work day for first couple weeks
Reasoning:
- Awful feeling of being stuck on something you should know
- Information should be in docs or was mentioned before
- Feeling stupid prevents asking questions
Big part of development is feeling dumb
Manager's job: help people get through that feeling
Feeling dumb too long kills energy
Comfortable way for developers to work through moments maintains energy
Results by end of first week:
- More excited to contribute
- All "dumb" blockers resolved (dev environment, GitHub accounts, etc.)
- Things most engineers scared to ask about are addressed
Transforms month-plus onboarding windows into few days

Let people fail
Build trust
Feed into people bringing energy
These make teams successful, not:
- Number of tickets closed weekly
- How good top engineer is at TypeScript
Value comes from:
- Cohesiveness
- Focus
- Trust
- Energy team members bring
Manager's job: make team comfortable and excited to bring all qualities to workplace

Try for free