Describe some of your role models for software management.

When I think back to my days as an individual contributor engineer, I think about the past managers I've had, which of them I want to emulate, and which I saw as examples of "how not to be" as a manager.  Three past managers come to mind as people I have learned good things from.

Edan

Early in my career, I was hired by Edan into what would be my first startup experience, having come from a big company environment.   I enjoyed working with Edan for several reasons.  For one thing, he was an extremely fast thinker.  He knew how to run a meeting and always had his finger on both where the conversation was going and where it needed to go.  He was very quick to jump in and keep us on track.

This showed through in one-on-one conversations as well.  What I remember about those was that there was always a sense of urgency in his tone.  He really made me believe that my work, and the pace at which it was done, was critical to the company's success.  This helped me stay motivated to work hard.

And one other thing I remember about Edan was that he helped me learn about my own strengths. There was one time when a key engineer resigned and I had to take over his rather complicated code.  After a couple weeks, I had things under control and Edan praised me for being "great at figuring out complex new code written by someone else."  He was right, I am pretty good at that.

Mark

A few years later, I met Mark at another startup.  I'll never forget that our relationship got off to a great start in the job interview.  After interviewing with several engineers, he came in for his turn with me.  Within five minutes he said "I'm not here to interview you, I'm here to hire you".  He had already gotten feedback from the other interviewers, and that plus our five minutes together was enough for him.  Interviews are stressful for the candidate, and so it felt great to hear this.  Right away I knew I wanted to work hard for this guy to return the favor.

We worked together for a couple years at this company.  Over this time, the mutual respect grew even stronger.  Like Edan, Mark recognized things I was good at, praised me for them, and gave me even more of that type of thing to do.  I wanted to work hard because I knew he appreciated it.  I wanted to be forthright and not bullshit him, because I knew he trusted what I had to say.

Mark was not what I would call a highly technical manager, in that he didn't write code himself and hadn't for a long time.  He was a people person with a technical background, which was enough for him to understand what engineers had to say.  He treated me like a peer, and often asked my advice on technical decisions he needed to make.  I really liked that.

Tim


A final role model boss from my past is Tim, but for different reasons that Edan and Mark.  Tim was a perfectionist, and everything was important to Tim.  In my management experiences, I sometimes want to shy away from challenging people to strive for perfection, thinking if I push them too hard they will hate me.  But then I think back to Tim, and the results he obtained by doing so.  Tim wasn't afraid to push me, even to the extent that it might make him unlikable.  Oddly enough, I liked that.

We were building and supporting an application with several hundred thousand users, and when things went bump in the night, Tim wouldn't let us sweep anything under the rug.  Let's say a server crashed or a bug turned up that had a workaround....As much as I would want to just restart the server or workaround the bug and move on, Tim would insist on digging until we found and fixed the root cause so it would never happen again.

In a similar vein, Tim taught me that "edge cases happen".  You can't build a quality product by ignoring your handling of edge cases.  If you do, you will hate your life down the road when they happen and you have to deal with them as a support case.

Tim also helped me make my own career transition from the technical ladder to the management ladder, by being the first one to tell me that he valued my management skills.  Actually, the way he put it was that he valued my management skills more than my technical skills.  At first I took this as a put-down, but gradually came to realize that a technical guy with management skills is more of a rare breed than just a strong technical guy.  At that point I knew where I was headed.

Anti-role models


In general I think I'm a pretty easy-going guy.  I don't get peeved very often and I usually see the silver lining in every cloud.  Because of this, I have a pretty good relationship with most former managers and co-workers.

But a blog post about role models wouldn't be complete without some comments about traits I don't want to emulate as a manager.    I won't name names here, but I've had a couple managers in the past who really made me want to say "F*$% You!".

In most cases, the situations have been ones where the person tries to flex their authority without a human touch and consideration for my feelings.  I remember one in particular where I spent some extra hours implementing a feature that wasn't part of the requirements, but it made perfect sense to me that it was useful and would be cool.

When my manager heard about it, she called me into her office and sternly scolded me.  "Don't you ever do anything like that again without my permission!".  It was so stern I thought I was about to get fired.  And all for something where I was trying to go above and beyond!

Another anti-role model boss was a guy who was just simply never there.  He left me completely on my own for several months while he traveled, schmoozed other execs, and paid attention to anything but the engineers who worked for him.  Then at review time, he gave me a poor review for not having done the things he wanted done, even though he had never actually told me what those were.

So in summary, my role models from the past have had a big influence on how I manage my teams today, and if folks that work for me say any of the same things that I've said here, I would be very proud.  In short, I would hope they would say I respect them, trust them, appreciate them, and push them.  And also that I am very organized, efficient, and I know what I'm talking about.

And, some of them have....