The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds. Casey Stengel

Ideally, the feedback you get from your manager will be somewhat public if it’s praise, and private if it’s criticism.

Developing a sense of ownership and authority for your own experiences at work, and not relying on your manager to set the entire tone for your relationship, is an important step in owning your career and workplace happiness.

It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected.

Plenty of great engineers make ineffective managers because they don’t know or want to deal with the politics of leadership in their companies. A strong engineer may make a great mentor-manager to someone early in his career, but a terrible advocate-manager for someone who is more senior.

The idea that the tech lead role should automatically be given to the most experienced engineer, the one who can handle the most complex features or who writes the best code, is a common misconception that even experienced managers fall for.

I could be the tech lead, despite not being the most senior person, because I was willing and able to take on the responsibilities of the role, while the rest of my team were more interested in staying purely focused on the software they were writing.

Regular 1-1s are like oil changes; if you skip them, plan to get stranded on the side of the highway at the worst possible time.

As much as you may want to believe that management is a natural progression of the skills you develop as a senior engineer, it’s really a whole new set of skills and challenges.

As you progress in your career, even though you may stop writing code, your job will require that you guide technical decision making. Even with architects who design the systems or other senior technical staff who are in charge of the details, as the manager of a team, you have the job of holding those people accountable for their decisions, of making sure that the decisions pass the technical smell test and have been balanced against the overall context of the team and the business. Technical instincts honed over years of doing the job are very important for guiding that process.

Well, you can learn things from success, but it is often a poor teacher. Ironically, while luck plays a role in both failure and success, we often attribute failure to bad luck and success to our own actions.

I’ve had great working relationships with people that I would not want to chat with for hours outside of work, and terrible working relationships with people I would love to be stuck with in an airport.

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others.