Who wants to be an EM?

One of the most overloaded terms in our industry is the term Engineering Manager. We have applied this term to anyone who leads others and is responsible for their output. Many engineers have mixed feelings about becoming EMs. Of course there is power (not really) and prestige (ok, some), but it also comes with a whole lot of boring-ass work. Your calendar fills up with meetings which chafe your introvert self. You find yourself coding less, and more and more time outside your comfort zone. Suddenly things like people taking unanticipated leaves fills you with dread. It's your responsibility to manage the timelines and 'manage expectations'. A lot is expected of you and there's a level of accountability that you might find overwhelming.

All this is quite normal. But how to deal with it? - Just remember - You are no longer writing code. You're building the machine that writes the code.

The thing is that the organisation is quite like a computer. When you add people and want to coordinate them, you find yourself dealing with a large distributed system with a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, terrible latencies and atrocious observability. Your job then, as an EM, is to bring good engineering to the organisation as much as it is to bring the organisation to good engineering. Those meetings that could have been emails? Congratulations - you can now write that email.

Good engineering and architecture solves a lot of people problems. When the work is meaningful and well structured then people tend to have fewer problems. If your code is a mess, people will become alienated from their work. Keeping the system humming along smoothly is one of the key roles of an engineering manager. You're now building the machine that makes the code. You're also free to shape the inputs into this machine make it work smoothly.

The other thing you will pay attention to is project management. Good project management is always knowing how much of the project is done and how much is left to do. Good project management is being able to know when you have confidence in your estimates and when you don't. Good project management involves broadcasting your status to stakeholders at a schedule. Good project management is asking for help proactively and avoiding surprises (which are more often than not unpleasant).

Between good engineering/architecture and a no-surprises approach to stakeholder management (backed up by good project management) you will have covered 70% of the Engineering Manager role. Another 20% you should spend trying to turn your team into absolute monsters that you can delegate to confidently. Is this 'people management'? You can call it that, but it is also a very logical thing for anyone to do for their teammates. The remaining 10% is the only real 'people management' part - 1:1s, performance appraisals and negotiating for their raises and promotions. There are aspects of it that are deadly dull, but with some good process engineering, you can turn this also into a real joy.

Nothing beats the happiness of seeing the people who fork under your guidance grow and increase in skill and power. This is the real people management of the EM role.

Which brings me to this weeks juicy EM roles -

first up - Headout is hiring an Engineering Manager for their backend team. I met with their CTO Rachitt and found this to be a really exciting role. Rachitt is a seasoned engineer and you will learn a lot in his lean team that runs a global business at scale. Excellent role if you're eager for real EM work. Headout is well funded and close to EBITDA profitability.

secondly, Dyte is hiring an EM. While the role might say EM, it has a path open to head of engineering, so if you want to be VP Engg but not sure you're ready for it then this could be the right fit for you.

I am once again reminding all readers that I am offering a significant referral bonus to you if you refer me to the successful candidate for any role on my job board. Some of you have an 'Invite' link in the top navbar. Go ahead and use it. Feel free to forward this email to your friends. If you don't have an invite link, reply to this email and ask.

Also, reupping two "deep tech" roles that are a great fit for specialists -  Principal Engineer - Foundation Team at Druva is perfect for filesystem nerds and distributed system mavens and Software Engineer - Performance at E6Data is for anyone that's every dreamed about optimising the compute and query planning parts of large distributed databases.

Now on to the rest of the jobs.