Most problems are communication problems
As an engineering manager, you’re a communication conduit - you communicate down to your team about what the business is asking for and the context of the request, and you also have to communicate back to the business with news about what your team is accomplishing, or struggling with, or in need of.
When communicating to your team, you often will need to help translate business needs and context to engineering language and context. It’s not enough to say that a project has a particular deadline - you need to be able to say why that deadline exists and why it matters to the business.
If you don’t, you run the risk of your engineers thinking the deadlines are fake - some sort of mechanism to get them to work faster or harder.
Generally, my goal has been to be as transparent as possible. If I know something, my team knows it as well.
This transparency has limits, however.
Firstly, don’t gossip. Don’t talk about other team members or wildly speculate about other departments. If you know facts, and it’s context that’s helpful for the job at hand, by all means share it.
You might also have knowledge that is not ready to be shared yet - eventually, for instance, there will come a time when members of your team will be laid off or otherwise let go. You might even be asked to choose.
These cuts can only be lightly foreshadowed. Layoffs and how to handle them are a far deeper and touchier subject, but early notice can cause real organizational problems and headaches because you never truly know how the employee will handle the news and the business has to take steps to protect itself concurrently with that knowledge becoming known.
As a manager, this sucks - but don’t ever complain about it to the employee getting laid off, because it sucks far more for them.
Trust me - I’ve been there, on both sides. They both suck, but the getting laid off sucks far more.
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When I first launched this newsletter, I was thinking through future paid members and blah, blah, blah.
That’s not the goal here, as it turns out. Or maybe my goals have changed.
Regardless, last week I opened up the archives for this newsletter and am leaving them open for the foreseeable future. So, if you joined us late, you can go catch up if you want.
My goal is to help as many people as possible, so if you know of someone else these sorts of emails would be helpful for, send the newsletter along to them.
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Finally, you’re getting this a day later than I typically hope to.
But that’s my expectation - and may not be yours.
Too often we hold ourselves to higher standards than anyone else does of ourselves - because, as you get older you realize that other folks don’t actually think of you at all.
At least not much, and certainly not as much as you think they do.
So, if you were expecting this on Monday and are all frowny face that you’re getting it on Tuesday instead, let me know!
Because otherwise, I assume you don’t care which day you get this, and I’ll continue to cut myself some slack when I’m just not feeling like writing over the weekend.
Especially now that summer is around the corner, and I hear the living’s easy.
Stay toasty, folks.
I believe in you.