u/gregorojstersek

Curious to hear from your experiences what actually makes a good manager?

One of the signs that I've recently heard (has been shared in a recent guest article on the Engineering Leadership newsletter) is that they won't just give feedback, but they actively coach.

Here is an example of giving feedback:

“I noticed in your weekly update to the senior leadership team that you gave too much unnecessary detail, and the feedback I have got is that it’s hard to tell at a glance the status of the project and any actions the recipients needed to take”.

And here is the difference when a manager has the coaching mindset:

“I’m sorry for not sitting down with you earlier to go through this, let me book some time on our calendars whilst we are both in the room before the next update is due, so we can have a live coaching session on how we might communicate to different stakeholders”.

https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/how-to-tell-if-your-manager-is-actually

Interestingly, almost every engineer and engineering leader, I talk to these days works within a different engineering org structure. 2 years ago, the org structure was fairly standardized, these days, everyone is figuring it out as they go.

Here are some examples:

- OpenAI works within smaller teams of 2-4 engineers, each team owning a particular project with a DRI (directly responsible individual). With around a 30:1 ratio of engineers and PM.

- Anthropic favors the 2-pizza team with 5-8 engineers, and every team has a PM and a designer, no dedicated QA engineer (which has merged with the engineering work). Every team also has an engineering manager. The difference is just that there are more projects happening simultaneously in the team (can be 5 or more), while before there was a max of 2 projects that could happen at the same time for one team.

- Shutterstock also uses the 2-pizza team with 5-8 engineers and an engineering manager, but without dedicated PMs and a product designer. Every PM is part of 2 teams. They also have a dedicated Tech Lead for every team.

- Telnyx's engineering org consists of 200 engineers, 0 engineering managers, and 1 VP of Engineering. They took the word “flatter org” to the extreme.

- Portkey's engineering org consists of 24 Product Engineers, 0 PMs, and 1 Product Designer. Engineers are expected to wear multiple hats, including the PM, CS, and FDE.

- PostHog has teams of 1-3 engineers, with an assigned Team Lead for every team. The Team Lead also reports directly to the VP.

What is the engineering org and team structure that you are working in? Curious to read if there is even more devation or some common patterns.

https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/how-companies-build-ai-native-engineering

There's too much narrative these days about engineering managers needing to be highly technical. Which simply isn't true.

In my opinion, the role of a manager is to make their team better, bot to be the best coder on the team.

An engineering manager should be technical enough to help the team succeed, but not so focused on coding that they neglect their primary leadership responsibilities.

This is a good example:
If you can enable your team of 5-8 engineers to be 20-30% more productive, that’s a LOT more valuable than just your own contribution.

https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/how-technical-should-an-engineering-258

What's becoming more and more common is that every engineer is expected to wear a Tech Lead hat and own projects end-to-end.

So, a good mix of technical and people-related skills is really important, which includes:
- common sense and pragmatism,
- good communication and leadership,
- being a multiplier for others and making everyone around them better.

Especially in smaller and mid-size companies, this is becoming the norm.

https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/a-lot-of-software-engineering-is