Metadata
- Author: Gergely Orosz
- Full Title:: Staying Technical as an Engineering Manager
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: An Em Needs To Be Technical
- Finished date:: 2023-05-02
Highlights
It’s beneficial to stay involved with what your team’s doing, as you can course correct when things go astray. At least, that’s the theory. The challenge is that it’s hard to be properly engaged without understanding exactly what colleagues are doing. And in order to do that, you need to keep up to date technically (View Highlight)
By staying both technical and involved, you can also decide when it makes sense for you to be hands on; for example, stepping in to resolve an outage, or resolving a deadlock in an architecture decision. (View Highlight)
For My Control Need, it makes sense!
The choice of when to get involved. You can choose to be hands on when the situation warrants (View Highlight)
Job security. An engineering leader who stops being technical is a lot less employable than one who is technical (View Highlight)
If you can set aside only a small amount of time each week for code reviews, then you’ll likely miss reviews at the team level. In this case, it might be worth going through all the code reviews that happened before , make notes as you go, and discuss questions or observations later. (View Highlight)
This activity is also helpful for getting a feel for team dynamics (View Highlight)
Read design docs / RFCs / ERDs / ARDs. Even if you don’t make comments (View Highlight)
Share your knowledge and teach. One of the best ways to understand something in depth is to teach it (View Highlight)
Build tools. While (View Highlight)
- When you have PM in addition… that’s worse to be hands-on:
- Moving sideways to become a Technical Program Manager (TPM) or a Product Manager. Most activities in these roles are about strategy, working across teams and collaborating with technical and business colleagues.
Deep dive Amazon principle:
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”
- Hire well. “Good technical people can teach you things faster than you can read about them. When I hire, I look for people who are super technical.”