Seriously. I would like to understand this more. ICs have tickets moving across a sprint board and retro sessions to talk about what happened during a sprint. But MGMT work is never talked about, just occasional "can you get me this information before X when I need to meet with {{DIRECTOR}}" I PROMISE I am not trying to flame mgrs, I am just actually curious. The only thing I know they do is do a bunch of 1-1s with the team and meet with the product mgr.
Talk 🐂💩
I wish they were at least good at that…
Answering questions, sitting in meetings making sure other groups’ work doesn’t screw you over, answering more questions, sitting in more meetings, anticipating/following the roadmap to make sure work is completed and delivered, keeping developers from getting themselves too deep into something, reporting out status, more meetings, and answering more questions.
Lol managers always end up asking SDEs to answer anything… Also there is also TPM role… which intersect with many of the things you said manager do.
Most of that is actually done by sr/staff engineers if there is no program manager role
My team has a lot of broken process so I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what would fix that. Additionally, frequently meeting with leadership (TL, PM, Designer, Scrum Master) to track current work and plan upcoming work. Also meet with every team member at minimum every two weeks to check in and make sure they’re happy and improve anything that is less than great. Also meet with other team managers frequently to make sure our teams aren’t stepping on each others toes. Also hiring and planning on boarding (not so much currently). Having difficult conversations when things aren’t going great, having happy conversations when the promo docs I write are successful. Planning team outings and celebrating the teams success to maintain a high morale. Protecting the team from overloading on work by setting realistic expectations. The most important part of the role to me is finding growth opportunities for my team so I can level them up in their careers. There are a ton of other little things in the role that you’d never think of too like coordinating with HR when team members need FMLA, etc. or meetings with recruiting frequently when hiring, it’s a hectic role and very demanding, I honestly sometimes question if I want to be an IC again because it was far less stressful.
Talk the talk
Nothing productive I would say
The role is mostly soft politics. Otherwise, 95% replaceable by a LLM that manages a pub/sub between parties. By soft politics I do mean people skills, but with a implicit understanding that the candor and transparency can only go so far before the role loses its purpose as a separation of concerns between upper management and ICs. The value add comes from preventing derailment of the team either from bottom up or top down.
In all of what you just explained what is it that makes you fodder for PIP ? What is it that keeps you up at night? What is it that requires you to read , understand , learn and apply new concepts? What is it that has deadlines which completely depends on you and not your IC?
No manager wants to PIP. For it to get to that point, I’ve already talked with an engineer about their performance at some capacity in a 1:1. Usually the part that keeps me up at night is questioning if I’ve done the best things to create a healthy work environment for my team. Managers should still understand technical details to an extent to understand the teams work and be able to communicate limitations or trade offs. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to communicate when deadlines are likely going to be missed & communicate it as early as possible. You’re also responsible for helping the team on setting them in the first place to be realistic.
Not much really. I spend most of my time making sure you are working on the right project for you and for the company, that you are being properly challenged, keeping all the political shit out of your desk, keeping PMs as close to the ground as humanly possible, keeping an eye on your career path, taking responsibility in front of stakeholders, many times c-levels, for things that are mostly out of our control, in addition to of course code reviews, 1:1s, onboarding engs, sometimes pushing code. Pretty sure i left out of many other things anyone coding 80% of their time could be doing blindfolded.
Man I can't believe how little you do!
I still contribute to design and if the team is behind I’ll take a story or two to help out and make sure people don’t have to work overtime (and because I still enjoy writing code)
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Some don’t do anything. Some do lots of work. Depends.
The split is like 90/10 though. The vast majority are leeches
the ones that do "lots" what is that? Lots of what?