Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

Leadership is challenging: where your work used to be about you and what value you brought to a team, your work is now about enabling everyone around you.

People are not pure functions; they have all sorts of interesting side effects.

Values are the fundamental beliefs that guide us, motivate us, and drive our actions.

The act of sharing values can also have a side effect of building trust and vulnerability on a team.

What life events have the people you work with been through that changed the way they think about things? What can you learn about how they’ve evolved as people by understanding what shaped their values?

“All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message.”

However, giving your team space to build values together is important.

If I don’t create boundaries to protect my core values, I eventually feel misaligned, like my life’s work isn’t lining up with my needs, and that’s not sustainable.

it’s to enable the people around me to do their best work . . . together.

Cultivating an environment of trust should be paramount for a manager.

Some behaviors, when displayed by my male peers, can look like humility. The same behaviors, when displayed by me, could be read as incompetence. This dynamic exists for any in-group/out-group dynamics: race, social class, disability, and so on.

frequently try to remind myself that everyone I meet has something they know well, and that I would be lucky to learn from them.

when you force yourself out of small talk and into subjects that matter to you, people tend to build trust faster.

Notice what good qualities they bring to the table, and let them know you see and value those qualities.

Organizational health lies in being able to work together.

If people on your team have issues with the direction in which the leadership team is headed, it’s also your responsibility to own that conversation and next steps, as a liaison to the leadership team.

The first is not just passive, but demotivating.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone on our team felt like they were doing their best work possible? That they avoided cognitive overhead when they could, and felt an innate drive to complete their work instead of trudging through for a carrot on a stick?

I’ve noticed over many years that the teams that are able to express joy and humor together are often the most productive, both in good times and when things get tough.

This sense of autonomy and mastery is something I wish for and try to cultivate in my teams, in part because I myself feel so much joy when connecting to my work in such a productive way.

Another wonderful benefit of flow state is that tolerance for frustration goes up.

This does not necessarily have to be human feedback.

person who can be in flow state is also capable of seeing perspectives other than their own.

key to this practice is making sure that the person with the most knowledge remains patient.

Someone who is good at separating their self-worth from their work will be a good person to lead pairing sessions.

The key is to find someone who derives value from supporting others, not in looking smart themselves.

Peer and mob programming can also help a team share context when a project is in a 0-1 (from n...

Not every fear reaction is an endangerment to our livelihood or well-being. We’re no longer running from predators.

Sometimes our brain protects us by leading us to a negative outcome so that we might prepare for it.

looking for the positive elements of a situation and saying them out loud can help balance what’s naturally imbalanced.

Conversations should remain as open as they can be, but there can be times where meeting as a group is no longer productive, and everyone needs time away to cool off. Use this tool infrequently and not as a default practice, but use in situations where things feel especially off track.

that to be truly rational, creative, and thoughtful, we have to be mindful to resist our instincts to seek out and remember the negative.

Feedback, as well as trust and understanding each other’s values, is connected to the happiness of the team.

But I could tell it wasn’t really me she was trying to make amends with. It was herself and her own ambition.

For someone who might be trying to grow, breaking tasks down and focusing on the smallest, most doable bits first can help a ton.

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

The more we can break things down into incremental habits for our employees, the higher the chance that they can get into “flow,” and the better chance they have of truly enjoying their work and moving past small goalposts to get to further and further destinations.

have never seen employees more demoralized than when they’re unsure where their career is headed and whether their title or compensation is fair.

what became very clear to me was that all of that “protection” I thought I had set up for her didn’t really serve her well for the long haul. For example, I didn’t teach her how to advocate for herself or how to navigate the system.

The point is not to throw that person into the fire. The point is to care.

This works for a manager wanting to code all the time, as well. It’s a paradigm shift to realize that your primary focus is no longer to do all the programming for your team. It really isn’t. You can impede your team’s growth, make them feel that you don’t trust them, and worse, block them because you have knowledge of the project they don’t have and now you’re stuck in meetings.

Try to think through what skills someone needs to succeed without you. Teach those skills incrementally.

You don’t have to code it all yourself, you need to articulate why the code is necessary, and what it will need to do in order to accomplish this.

And when you realize that this stressful experience is probably a chronic feature of the setting for you, it can be difficult for you to stay in the setting, to sustain your motivation to succeed there.

It is your responsibility to work toward and demonstrate an inclusive culture. You cannot passively watch and hope it emerges.

Trust is inclusion.

The culture of your team is only as strong as the worst behavior it tolerates. It’s your job to speak up.

If you are working with someone on their growth path, and they trust that you will honor it, you enter into a sort of partnership.

A lot of your activities are related to enabling the success of everyone around you.

But they give you a sense of people’s values, their boundaries, and what we may want to incorporate as part of their working environment.