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jasoncwarner / ama

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What don’t engineering teams understand about leadership teams, and vice versa? #10

Open jasoncwarner opened 4 years ago

jasoncwarner commented 4 years ago

From: https://twitter.com/importantshock/status/1265326338346450944?s=20

cc @patrickt

patrickt commented 4 years ago

Hehe, thanks for porting the question!

jasoncwarner commented 4 years ago

Engineering doesn't understand about leadership teams

(Obviously this is going to, by nature, be broad sweeping categorizations that will not universally apply to all leaders at all times with all engineering teams etc etc caveat caveat)

  1. We also disagree and commit
  2. We all have bosses
  3. We get annoyed with ourselves when we fuck up
  4. We really really want to know, but we really really want to know what we should do about it more. Bring us even a partially worked out solution and 90% of the time that is what we go with.
  5. Our calendars are our lives.
  6. Thinking feels like a luxury. We probably schedule in our calendars.
  7. We also disagree and commit
  8. We have hopes and dreams, fear and insecurities, doubts and ambitions.
  9. We wish we were better in almost every way. We are probably our own worst critics.
  10. We sometimes have to choose between lots of shitty choices and find the least bad path forward. This happens more often than you would think. Everything is a tradeoff.
jasoncwarner commented 4 years ago

Leadership teams don't understand about engineering

(Obviously this is going to, by nature, be broad sweeping categorizations that will not universally apply to all leaders at all times with all engineering teams etc etc caveat caveat)

I will say these having had the leadership exclusively for the last decade and before that engineering roles....I'll try to represent.

  1. Engineering is likely the hardest role to balance in the org. Everything funnels to engineering and line engineers feel it.
  2. on call suuuuuuuper sucks. Invest in infra, sre, tooling and all the things needed to have a healthy overall system and team at scale. Invest before you think you need to because the cost of doing so later looks like a high growth startup revenue (hockey stick!) and when that is cost, DO NOT WANT!
  3. focused time is very necessary. Please don't ping on slack, tap on shoulder, or interrupt. Schedule 'no meeting days' and 'no interrupt unless house on fire' time.
  4. When engineers suggest a path forward, leadership decides otherwise and ends up wrong, engineering remembers. Leadership, don't sugar coat that...own it or lose credibility.
  5. engineers smell bullshit a mile away. Maybe 10 miles away
  6. more people does not make things go faster or something

I'll add more on these as I think of more. Feel free to get the discussion going :)