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....

What's the most important responsibility for a software manager?

I'll probably ask and answer this question many times over the course of this blog because, as I've said, there are many very important aspects to software management.  But for today, I'll say "the most important responsibility is: recruiting."

I used to work for a guy who would say "Hire people who are smarter than you" and "fill your team with superstars and your job will be easy."  I couldn't agree more, but man, what a challenge this is!

As a manager, your job becomes less about your own coding skills and more about your ability to leverage your team.  Simply put, you are responsible for more than you can do yourself, and the quality of your help is of paramount importance.

Recruiting is a huge time sink, and often feels like a burden because we all have "real work" that needs to get done.  But its much worse to recruit poorly and end up with engineers that don't produce good results or need too much hand-holding.  These things become a long-term (and often hidden or intangible) time sink, whereas the recruiting burden is only temporary.

So when I'm in recruiting mode, I maintain a couple key principles:

1. Invest a lot of time, especially in preparing for the interview
2. Keep your standards high...don't settle!

Invest the time

Strategies for the interviewer are a topic for another post, although Joel Spolsky's article is a good start when it comes to good advice.  The point I want to stress here is that interviews are an extremely brief opportunity to get to know someone well enough to make the hiring decision.  You had better make every second of the end-to-end interview process count.


To that end, I always do the following...

• Write a concise but detailed job posting.   Think a lot about words and style and how it will attract the type of person you're looking for, as well as scare away the ones you don't want anyway.
• If you have a recruitier on the front lines, give them a list of pre-qualification questions and insist on seeing a write-up with the answers before you'll consider a candidate.
• Read every resume thoroughly (until you can safely conclude "no thanks").  I don't buy the old adage that a hiring manager only spends 30 seconds on a resume.  I spend a good five minutes or more.
• Treat every candidate differently.  They all have unique histories, strengths, and weaknesses.  A boiler plate set of questions won't give you as much info as questions you tailor based on what you already know about the candidate.
• Prepare for the phone screen, for at least half the time of the phone screen itself.  You don't want to get stumped by the awkwardness of the first encounter and waste that time.  You should have a script going in that is tailored to the uniqueness's of the individual.   Ask them questions about their resume, know what you want to hear, anticipate the responses and have follow-up questions prepared, so that no line of questioning is wasted.
• Do the same for the interview itself:  Prepare.  I have a library of several dozen questions I am constantly revising.  There's never time to ask them all, so before each interview I read through it and pick the ones that are best for this particular candidate.
• Make sure your interview team all does the same.  You may only have 45 minutes with this person, but they'll probably spend 4-5 hours or more in the total interview.  If any of that time is wasted by too many softball questions from inexperienced or ill-prepared interviewers, your risk of a bad decision is increased.

Keep your standard's high

I agree again with Joel here:  "If there's any doubt, say no."   You may feel that you really want to be done with recruiting and get back to developing product, and hence be tempted to compromise.  You may see some really positive attributes of the candidate, but "just one red flag".  But imagine if that red flag turns out to be the dominating attribute of the candidate....  Sure, you've lost a couple hours on this person so far, but if you hire them you'll be regretting it for months or years to come.


In writing this post I thought of many aspects of recruiting and interviewing worth discussing, but I'll have to save the rest for later posts.  The bottom line for today is:  Recruiting is serious business.  Spend the time to do it right!

How did you make the transition from software engineer to manager?

Like most career-minded folks, I've never been willing to say "I'm happy where I'm at, and I'm not interested in further career growth". With that in mind, I've had to constantly examine my limits, my talents, and my passions to figure out my direction.

My limits: I love Computer Science. I got my BS and MS degrees in Computer Science. But I don't identify myself as a "Computer Scientist." That, to me, is a much more intense title. I don't have the patience or the mental capacity to solve the hardest problems in my field. I find complex problems like search algorithms, frameworks, or massive scalability to be intellectually fascinating, and I love learning how they were solved, but I'm not the guy who's going to solve them myself. This is why I chose not to follow a purely technical ladder beyond the level of Senior Software Engineer, or go for a PhD.

My talents: What I bring to the table is a healthy mix of technical and architectural skills coupled with organization, communication, and interpersonal skills. I have a strong sense of the "keep it simple" design philosophy, and I'm unlike many engineers in that I see value in and am good at writing clear specs, diagrams, e-mails, plans, and other forms of engineering beyond code. As I like to say "Even a simple e-mail has a user experience that needs to be considered." Also, over time, I've gotten good at paying attention to more work going on around me, but at a higher level. This is a key function of a manager, but not so much a requirement for an engineer.

My passions: I a nutshell, my passion is for seeing ideas turn into applications in an elegant way. As an engineer, I got to do just that pretty much on my own, and it was rewarding. But I was often frustrated that the coding process just took too long. As a manager, I get to do it with leverage. I get to be involved in more projects coming to fruition. As long as I'm involved, I don't feel the need to be the actual coder. Quite often I'm heavily involved in conceptualizing requirements and creating high level design (like, for instance, the data model), but then leaving the coding to one of my engineers.

Anyhow, to answer the question, my transition to management happened in my current job, where I hired on as an engineer six years ago and gradually became more and more of a manager. Yes, there was a specific moment early on when my job title changed, but the mental transition was much more gradual, and in some sense is still not finished. With a team size that has grown from 2 to 9, my hand was somewhat forced, and I've had to learn to resist the inclination to just "do it myself." Its been a good learning experience.

At one point a couple years in, my boss said to me point blank "I value your management skills much more than I do your technical skills." That was a real eye opener, since at that point I still identified myself as an engineer, and a good one at that. It was hard not to take it as a put down.

But I've come to realize that good engineering skills are a required part of a bigger package that makes a good engineering manager. At this point in my career I'm cultivating the rest of the package.

Tell me more about this marbles analogy...

Sure. And please note its not that I'm calling the folks on my team a bunch of marbles. Rather, the marbles are the issues a manager has to deal with every day. The point is, there's no focus on one single thing, like there is for an engineer. A manager has to be able to deal with a little bit of everything, and context switch almost constantly. One moment you're advising product management on the feasibility of a new feature, and the next you're deciding if a bug should be fixed or deferred, or being asked for advice on a topic you may know little about. Then, you've got recruiting to do, performance reviews to think about, and perhaps an action item or two you took in your last meeting. Sometimes you're reacting to a fire, and other times you're thinking proactively about change. For the manager, responsibilities are all over the map.

For the engineers that you manage, it should ideally be the opposite. Their job is to take on a coding project and get deep into the weeds with it. The more minutiae and boring (in their mind) meetings you can shield them from, the more the good engineers will thank you, and the more productive they will be. They don't want to be discussing the requirements...they want to be coding them.

If I were to title a different blog about the mindset of an engineer, it might be called "Getting the real work done." In fact, letting go of that mentality, that feeling of "I'm not being useful unless I'm coding," was one of my biggest struggles when I transitioned into management, but that's a story for another post.

About Loose Marbles...What's with the name?

Loose Marbles is a blog about my experiences as a software engineering manager. Throughout my career, even when I'm not looking for a new opportunity, I'm always thinking about the experiences I'm having on the job, and specifically how I would talk about them when asked in my next job interview. In part, this is because I'm not very good at thinking on my feet, so I prefer to anticipate questions and have an answer in my pocket. But also, I just feel that constant introspection is a good learning experience. We should always be thinking about the takeaways from our experiences as they happen, and recording them in "permanent storage". A perpetual post-mortem, if you will.

So the first question I expect to be asked in any future interview is "What does management mean to you?"

I'll answer with an analogy: "Its like somebody dumps a bag of marbles on a flat table, and your job is to make sure none of them rolls off the edge."