Metadata
- Author: Gergely Orosz
- Full Title:: Staying Hands-On, as an Engineering Manager or a Tech Lead
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/staying-hands-on
- Document Tags:: An Em Needs To Be Technical
- Finished date:: 2023-04-01
Highlights
Different from Staying Technical As An Engineering Manager.
Onboard to your team like a software engineer (View Highlight)
So lean in and create – or improve – onboarding materials for the next new engineer and volunteer to onboard them to the technology stack. (View Highlight)
Consider creating a “team introduction” document or presentation for capturing technical details (View Highlight)
Code reviews. Even if you don’t write code, you can still review it. However, if you have a busy schedule with less time for code reviews, be clear about whether or not your comments are blocking; that is, can a change be merged before they’re addressed, or not? The problem with a blocking comment is that if someone disagrees, they might need to discuss it with you. But if you’re on a manager’s schedule with lots of meetings, your availability may be poor and in this way, you could slow down coding. You could also block out specific times for doing code reviews. Another alternative is to ensure you are not the primary reviewer, and therefore won’t block code changes from being merged. (View Highlight)
Metrics is another great area to understand. Understanding data helps you to participate in goal setting for the team. (View Highlight)
Go oncall (View Highlight)
it doesn’t change the fact that when the demands of being a manager don’t include much hands-on work, you simply can’t be as hands-on as you were earlier in your career. (View Highlight)
I do think many companies make a mistake by not onboarding engineering managers like software engineers to the codebase, instead rushing them into taking on managerial responsibilities. (View Highlight)
I later observed that engineering managers who joined and didn’t have time to work on the codebase struggled more to gain the trust of their teams and to understand the systems. (View Highlight)