[HN Gopher] What does my engineering manager do all day?
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What does my engineering manager do all day?
Author : mooreds
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-09-27 22:02 UTC (57 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (parkjoon.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (parkjoon.medium.com)
| caeril wrote:
| So, a lot of talking and meeting. No doing. Color me unsurprised.
|
| A good manager leads the team, finagles resources from upper
| tiers, un-sticks stuck processes, settles disputes, and then gets
| the hell out of the way. This manager sucks.
| shortsightedsid wrote:
| This is a classic trap that new managers fall into. It's not the
| number of meetings that you are judged by. It's how effective you
| are in execution and how well can you drive your team(s). The
| meetings are just a means to the end.
|
| I've been in management for a long time now and have managed
| managers. Frankly, I would cut as much as I can and skip as much
| as possible _while_ being able to do my job - which is to drive
| results, quality and other team performance metrics.
| [deleted]
| g051051 wrote:
| How much of all that provided any actual value?
| blastonico wrote:
| I would go crazy with that number of meetings, hearing people
| complaining all the time. Management is definitely not for me.
| officialchicken wrote:
| The author is completely inexperienced and without any sort of
| mentoring. The natural tendency of an organization is, well,
| meetings. So without experience and a guiding hand, it tends to
| rot into the hellscape that is presented in the article.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| TLDR; Attend all the meetings you don't want to be in.
| jh0486 wrote:
| This.
| foogazi wrote:
| What I notice is no time to work on the meetings
|
| When are the action items from all the 1:1s, standups, etc worked
| on ?
| hondo77 wrote:
| I know you don't go to them every day but you aren't required to
| go to all of your teams' agile ceremonies (standups, etc.). They
| can be handled by the teams and their scrum master, which would
| be covered by your sync with the SM and your team members. That
| frees up some time, if you need it. Personally, I'm a big fan of
| managers being so busy managing that they don't have time for
| work. Keeps them from writing code. ;-)
| Fissionary wrote:
| More or less what I expected, actually. Now riddle me this: what
| does a _scrum master_ do all day?
| swader999 wrote:
| I've never seen a dedicated scrum master, they've always coded
| features on the same team. Is this really a thing?
| bradenb wrote:
| It is definitely a thing. And for big projects it can be
| helpful. But in most cases I think a scrum master should
| probably handle multiple projects if that is going to be
| their dedicated role.
| megablast wrote:
| Yes. We had a team of 20 with 2 scrum masters, because they
| wanted to grow the team, and they had 2 scrum masters
| available. It was ridiculous. But don't worry, they will
| manage to fill their time with meetings. Just try to avoid
| them.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| "Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn
| customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills;
| I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?
| What the hell is wrong with you people?"
| g051051 wrote:
| The "scrum masters" at my last place didn't interact with
| customers at all. That was the PO's job.
| Retric wrote:
| Good ones spend most of their time in meetings or preparing for
| them.
|
| To be a full time position generally involves a lot of
| administrative work or covering multiple teams. Talking to
| management is kind of a catch all but generally it's
| interfacing with the rest of the world outside of clients.
| Legwork on security clearances, making sure all the boxes on
| contracts are checked, and or enduring the team has all the
| hardware software they need etc.
| megablast wrote:
| Filling your time with meetings, pretending you are being
| productive.
| dkarl wrote:
| If "scrum master" is a dedicated job, and they aren't in scrum
| meetings all day, they are probably really a project manager by
| a different name.
| PeterisP wrote:
| "Are you a manager and think I'm terrible at time management?
| Which meetings would you cut?"
|
| The immediate thing that raises questions is your meetings with
| "Team #1" and "Team #2", which is a bit unusual. General practice
| is that it takes a manager per team; so if you're managing two
| teams yourself then it's expected that you'll be overloaded (and
| if there's not many people then perhaps you can't afford the
| overhead of managing them as two separate teams and need to
| "merge" them in practice, having one common meeting instead of
| two separate ones) and on the other hand if there are separate
| team leads for these teams, then I'd argue that you don't need to
| participate in as many direct meetings as you do and instead
| delegate more to them and the teams themselves. If you "need to
| know" then perhaps review the meeting minutes without direct
| participation.
| kjs3 wrote:
| You don't know how he's defining 'team' in this context. I
| often organize management of my big-T Team by referring to
| groups of teammates focused on a particular task or project as
| a small-t team, especially if they're on-going tasks. So this
| week I had a couple of people working on a 'team' covering API
| issues, another group covering IAM, and another set on key
| management.
|
| But then this reply is just full of "I don't actually know what
| your on-the-ground reality is, but that definitely won't stop
| me from telling you what you're doing wrong".
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, I'm answering an explicit question by the OP based on
| the information provided; but my observation from the
| schedule is that he seems to be running two teams as if they
| are big-T Teams - if those are actually two small-t teams,
| then IMHO he should devote less meeting time to each of them.
|
| In your big-T Team, would you consider scheduling a separate
| daily standup for each of the task/project you're
| supervising, and running _separate_ social events for each of
| your "groups of teammates" as OP is doing?
| sethammons wrote:
| fwiw, nearly every software engineering manager (at least at
| the senior level) at my work runs two teams. That said, you hit
| the nail on the head: delegate. My tech leads are my default
| catch-all, but we have an owner on the team for different
| things. One engineer goes to security related meetings. Another
| is running point on proj_a and another running proj_b. The
| other thing to do is block out time on your calendar to have
| time dedicated focus time. You can't get anything done in
| 30min. You need a 60-120min block on your calendar.
| black_13 wrote:
| Think of ways to to replace you.
| bllguo wrote:
| 7:30 meetings are horrifying to me
|
| also, do 1-1s need to be weekly? what about biweekly? i only have
| a few direct reports and even then i feel weekly is too often
| jshen wrote:
| There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. It's certainly fine
| to do them less often if you aren't finding enough value in
| doing it weekly.
|
| Most of these rules of thumb came about before tools like
| slack, which for better or worse, let you communicate more
| directly more frequently.
| ng12 wrote:
| I do biweekly. It's my job to keep myself appraised of what
| reports are working on and make sure they are unblocked. A 1:1
| should be focused on long-term career goals and relationship
| building which can be done biweekly.
|
| The obvious exceptions are new hires and very junior engineers
| who need more handholding while they ramp up.
| Traster wrote:
| Yeah this is what struck me, the fact that the 1:1s were so out
| of sync with the standups. Realistically this manager is
| probably making the same mistake most managers initially make,
| which is failing to manage up, and failing to take a role
| strategically shaping the company. Mostly, the 30 minutes "So
| what are all the things you've stored up to talk to me about"
| conversations aren't that valuable, the more free-form broader
| conversations are. Especially in covid.
| jldugger wrote:
| > i only have a few direct reports and even then i feel weekly
| is too often
|
| 1-1s aren't about how _you_ feel. They're about your directs's
| feelings, and the relationship between the two of you.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I would rather take up work on the farm shovelling pig shit, and
| administering anal suppositories to sick horses than do all that.
| domk wrote:
| A lot of this seems like things that could be cut. 1.5h every day
| on post-mortem meetings stands out as the obvious time sink -
| does the organisation really have that many production issues to
| debrief every day? Also a fair amount of ceremony, planning and
| pro-bono. Webinar for distributed ledgers in enterprise??
|
| The things that truly matter - 1:1s, own team stand-ups... - only
| take about 8 hours per week.
| krautsourced wrote:
| That... is my nightmare.
| aero142 wrote:
| I don't like the implication that being busy is indication that
| something is being accomplished. I would ask the question, what
| are the outputs of this schedule? If there are meetings that
| happen but don't have meaningful outputs, then it doesn't matter
| than you attended them. Perhaps those can be dropped entirely.
| JPKab wrote:
| The author goes to far too many meetings.
|
| A manager with multiple teams should and will likely have team
| leads for each team. This should be a person who mostly codes,
| does some leadership for team as well.
|
| Manager shouldn't be micro managing being in daily scrums. Every
| other day is fine, alternating between teams. Why have a team
| lead at all?
|
| Working lunches are terrible idea as well. Eat lunch, don't
| pretend like you're paying attention to the totally coincidental
| "anti-racism webinar" that just so happened to be on your
| calendar that day and totally isn't a way to tout HR policies and
| virtuousness.
|
| Other meetings are quarterly meetings, so that's 1 day out of 90.
| Let's not pretend that's normal. Meetings with directors
| shouldn't be every day, EVER.
|
| Not commeinting on this anymore, other than to say that I'm blown
| away by how wasteful big companies are. After having been at a
| startup that blew up and went public, and then recently starting
| a company and being one of 5 engineers, its just obvious that big
| companies eventually accumulate a whole class of people who do
| nothing but talk all the time. Those people LOVE hiring other
| talkers who then hire more talkers who hire scrum masters to make
| up for the engineering teams getting bombarded by the talkers and
| so the hell continues.
| Traster wrote:
| >Working lunches are terrible idea as well. Eat lunch, don't
| pretend like you're paying attention to the totally
| coincidental "anti-racism webinar" that just so happened to be
| on your calendar that day and totally isn't a way to tout HR
| policies and virtuousness.
|
| In order to become senior leadership you need to signal you are
| a leader in corporate values, which means loudly talking about
| how engaged you are in whatever you think might be what the
| company wants to thinkits corporate values are. This is very
| easy when your company is kind enough to literally run a
| seminar about what its corproate values are.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Are you an engineer and think I'm wasting time?
|
| Well, yea. You're a manager :)
|
| > Which meetings would you cut?
|
| Well, 30 min standups seem long for what I assume are two groups
| of 4 people. I'd probably shave off 5 minutes from those every so
| often until you get it to 15 minutes each. That will net you 2.5
| hours a week.
|
| pro-bono project during business hours: sounds silly if you're
| feeling stressed about time management.
|
| "50 days of learning": continual learning is good idea, but I
| save this for after work hours, and probably you need to do the
| same. Especially since you're already doing multiple training
| sessions a week during the work day.
|
| Going-away get together for team #2 member / virtual happy hour:
| shouldn't these be happening during "after work" hours?
|
| Finally, 9-5 is banker's hours. A typical 40 hour work week would
| involve working from 8-12pm, an hour break for lunch, and then
| from 1pm-5p. If the daily operational review meeting is running
| from 7:30am-9am you're doing it wrong. It reads like you want
| credit for attending an early meeting but aren't accounting for
| the 8am-9am hour?
| tnolet wrote:
| One thing I learned: do not do meetings for status updates. Those
| are emails. Meetings are for decisions.
| LegitShady wrote:
| that used to be the case for me, but since we all started
| working from home my manager started doing team meetings to try
| to get some of the discussion and help that happens
| incidentally in the office to have a time scheduled for it. So
| everyone talks about what they're doing and what difficulties
| they're having and I want to die as I waste time I could be
| working.
| jollybean wrote:
| I think you need to have open ended meetings or you will miss a
| lot of things. It doesn't need to be every day.
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