Queer tech and management

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  • How My Brain Works

    Photo by Patrick Perkins

    Collaboration

    I like ideation workshops, I really do. But compared to my colleagues I’m really bad at them. Ideation or brainstorming lives from spontaneously generating ideas or topics. You meet (in person or online) with several people, the meeting has a topic and people start to write down their ideas on stickies.

    That’s the point where I fail. It’s not that I have less or worse ideas. And I don’t think slower. It takes me longer to pick one of my thoughts, because there are so many. Then I take some time to phrase my idea in an unambiguous way. When I’m at this point, everyone else is done with writing and it’s very likely that one of them is similar to what I wrote.

    Back references

    “This ticket we talked about yesterday …”

    Yeah, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Not because I forgot what that ticket was about. But because I need more context to find the information in my memory. I don’t have random access memory like that. I need this thread to follow into my memory. Once I get there I will remember details nobody noticed. Like an undertone that showed how someone didn’t like an idea discussed.

    The mind as a landscape

    When we start to talk about some topic two minutes in I might come up with something that does not seem to have any connection to the conversation at hand.

    “What the hell has that to do with it?”

    Well, I can trace back a whole chain of associations to the start point. But it’s not very likely I’m able to get to some endpoint by just applying linear forward thinking.

    When we started the conversation a whole landscape around the topic unfolded in my mind. And my brain follows a lot of routes in a quasi simultaneous way. I don’t deliberately steer my thoughts into a specific direction. They just seem to happen all at the same time. So I get from A to B to C to D without noticing. And then I tell you about D.

    How can you solve any problem at hand, if you don’t steer your thoughts? Easy answer: I follow all possible routes and pick the one that looks most interesting to me. Interesting? Yes! A good solution is interesting. Otherwise it’s obvious and you don’t need me to point you into a direction.

    The long answer: It’s not a rational process of judging the potential of my proposals. It’s about a feeling. I do a lot of things because of “a feeling”.

    Emotions

    The basis of a lot of my decision making is based on gut feeling. No overthinking, no long list of pros and cons. Most of the time. A certain type of impulsivity and a lot of emotions are the fabric of my personality. As an AuDHD1 person this is not without inner tension. Sometimes I would love to have a well ordered rational process, but I decide in the blink of an eye.

    So I’m in danger of making risky decisions? Nope. A lot of ADHD folks are infamous for making dangerous decisions. I learned to trust my gut feelings. This also comes with …

    Reading people

    I’m what some folks call a people reader. I’m good at guessing people’s emotions and emotional situations by looking at them. I’m not a psychic, I need to verify my impressions. But this is at the core of how I work with people.

    I don’t know how much of this is my natural empathy and how much is trauma-generated2. But it’s definitely helpful. And I’m not spying on people. I can’t read minds 😅

    The end

    All together this sounds complicate, right? For me it doesn’t feel like. I don’t know another way of existing. And I have to work with what I have3.

    1. AuDHD is the abbreviation for Autistic and ADHD. Both conditions very likely have similar origins and often occur together. ↩︎
    2. I was bullied for all of my school time. So seeing at someone’s face when trouble is coming my way was needed for survival. This also means that I’m a bit better at guessing negative thoughts and emotions than positive ones. ↩︎
    3. I want to stress the point that I’m not disabled. Some things are harder for me than for neurotypical people to do, some are easier. My brain is wired differently, not broken. I know there are neurodivergent folks who suffer from the way they are and they often identify as disabled. We are all different. ↩︎

  • Engineering management in the face of AI

    Photo by Drew Beamer

    As engineering managers we need to think about how our jobs and tasks will change with the broad scale usage of synthetic text extrusion machines, commonly known as LLMs, for short inaccurately summarized as AI. I will not talk about the ethical implications of using AI, as I think they are not up for debate. There is no fair and ethical usage of AI.

    So let’s get back on topic. These tools will not completely disappear, but their capabilities and usage will change. Like with all coding tools. Companies will go bankrupt due to data center cost, new ones will appear. Specialized models will be developed and so on. This means the role of (a lot of) engineers will change a bit. Not only regarding the things they do, but also the priorities and tools (sic!).

    Since forever a large part of the work of software engineering has been thinking about architecture and solutions, specifying (maybe not in written form, but you always needed to have a plan, however rudimentary) and reading already existing code. And learning. New languages, new libraries, new tools or just a clever solution for a problem someone else found. Only then you would produce code. But learning and specifying often are done while coding.

    The learning while problem solving ensured that engineers stayed up-to-date and progressed in their career. There are concerns that through the use of AI learning will decrease, because people get readymade solutions. That coding agents produce more and more of the same maybe unmaintainable duplicated code.

    That’s the challenge we as engineering managers have. We need to make sure that our colleagues have opportunities for learning. That they have time to read the actual code. That they know and understand our systems and their tools.

    So if a manager’s focus until now was more on output optimization, their organization already is and increasingly will be a dire place to work at. We need to focus on mentoring and making space for people to learn. Those of us who were already good at this will excell. And engineers will know where these people and places are. More than ever we are responsible for their personal growth and the teams’ culture and wellbeing as the job of an engineering manager is disparate from that of a project manager.

  • Removing Bias in Recruiting With AI?

    Photo by Nathan Sack

    A lot of companies have already introduced AI systems in handling applications for open positions or are thinking about doing so.
    So I wanted to take the opportunity to have a nuanced (at least I hope so!) look at the state of hiring.

    Companies introduce AI systems for various reasons:

    • They want them to help reduce the workload of the HR team.
    • They want to make the hiring process fairer for underrepresented groups by anonymizing CVs to reduce bias, before they are handed over to the hiring manager.

    The first point is valid, as companies receive a lot of applications that very obviously do not fit the requirements. Be that country of residence, length of experience or preferred tech stack (for engineering positions).
    The second item is a problem. And I will try to explain why.

    Roughly speaking there are two groups of hiring managers:

    • The ones who didn’t take diversity into account until now. They will most likely hire people like themselves, which often is white middle aged cis men.
    • The ones who are already actively trying to source and hire people from diverse backgrounds.

    For the first group, the anonymization approach might work. How well I can’t say. But they will not learn anything as a manager and not grow in their experience and knowledge about implicit and explicit bias. It’s like a lock-in. Without the AI system they fall back into old habits. And they absolutely will, even if their experience with diverse hires is great. Because fighting unconscious bias is a lifelong process. There is no “ok, I understood, I’ll be good from now on!”
    For the second group the introduction of anonymized CVs is a step back. Because they can’t do anymore what they were actively doing already.

    But isn’t it a good to judge candidates purely by skills, knowledge and experience, without taking cultural background, gender, age or religion into account?
    Actually not. There is a growing body of research¹ on meritocracy that shows that the merits (in our case skills, knowledge, experience) are a result of luck and the lack thereof often a result of bias of their managers in previous jobs.
    In addition there is research indicating that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish and behave in more discriminatory ways.

    Meritocracy is a well known and pervasive problem of the open source community². The contributions to projects by women are often regarded as less relevant or good.
    But … we have anonymized CVs! You don’t know if someone is a woman! Indeed. But do you offer someone a job solely based on their CV? I guess not. You will invite them to one or more interviews. And you will make your decision after seeing them.
    If you don’t try to mimic the blind auditions common in the music sector, you will know who is sitting in front of you. So whatever you do to prevent bias, in the end it will play a role in hiring decisions. And for this reason you will want to learn and grow as a person and manager.

    Something I haven’t talked about yet is, that your CVs will be less anonymous than you think. People from a lot of cultural backgrounds³ will use language in subtle ways typical for their communities or cultural groups.
    So someone who is biased towards non-white eurocentric folks or even is racist will know about at least some of the specific idioms of groups of people they despise.

    What do I propose instead of anonymized CVs? It’s not hard to guess:

    • Make “Blindspot – Hidden Biases of Good People”⁴ a required reading for everyone in your company who is in a managing or hiring position.
    • Have hiring managers joining regular trainings and discussions about bias.
    • Have some statistics about the diversity of applications going into the process and actual hiring decisions.

    And most of all: be a mensch! 💕

    ¹ See this paper from Princeton University
    ² See this well researched blog post
    ³ You will never hear me talk about race or racial background. I’m German and these words have a terrible history in our past. They mean something quite different and are highly discriminatory in German.
    ⁴ Mahzarin R. Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald, “Blindspot – Hidden Biases of Good People”

  • On Communication

    Photo by Alexandra

    Sometimes I’m told that people like the way I push for the things important to me while not stepping on anyone’s toes. This is no coincidence. I’m very sensitive to the way how someone delivers a message to me. So if you kick me in the shins first before you tell me what you want from me, I will not listen. I will be upset, maybe feel offended, but I will definitely not listen to you.

    You might now think: certainly, that’s just common sense. But this concept reaches further. If you are not unfriendly, but just very direct, I probably also will go into opposition. Why? Because nothing will be understood without context. So if your message lacks any friendly context, the receiver (me!) will make up one. And it probably will not be a positive one.

    This is the opposite of “reading between the lines”. It’s writing or saying things without explicitly saying them. If you don’t fully understand what I’m talking about, let’s have a chat (pun intended!).

  • Auditory Processing Disorder

    I just recently realized how the auditory processing disorder (APD) that comes with my ADHD influences the way I work.

    • I dislike pairing sessions (very superficial explanation: two people have a call and one shares their screen and does the work while the other observes, comments and/or guides the first one). While I totally get what I am told during the meeting, I will have forgotten 20% of it right afterwards and the other 80% are not in the correct order but floating around my mind. This is a bit like the type of dyslexia, where people have little or no problems reading words but difficulties to connect them to sentences and get the meaning of it.
    • I don’t like to ask people for directions when I have to go somewhere, because of the exact same reason. I mix up the individual steps of the route or I forget them.
    • Same reason: video courses don’t work for me very well.
    • I very much prefer written documentation or instructions. They don’t need to be detailed (aka micromanaged), but I need bullet points. First because reading is processed differently and second, because I can go through the list as often as I like or need. And believe me, I will. Because otherwise the inattentative part of ADHD hits.
    • I take notes in meetings. Lots of them. I work through a whole block of post-its in two weeks. But I try not to take notes (or just key points in a few words) while in a 1:1, because as a manager writing in a 1:1 influences the meeting atmosphere negatively. Right after the meeting I have to put the sticky notes into real text in my notetaking app (LogSeq), or I will have forgotten what the shorthand notes mean.

    I am not hampered in my tasks, the routines and tools I have in place often make me more productive than others.

  • I Am Not a Manager

    Photo by Jason Goodman

    “You manage things; you lead people.” (Grace Hopper)

    I don’t manage people. That’s a deeply inhumane way of thinking about people. For Hopper with her military background, leading might be a term that works. For me as an antimilitarist it does not. It’s a loaded term like managing.

    Marcus Blankenship recently in his great newsletter talked about how all titles are fiction. Someone invents them and gives them to you. This sometimes is helpful, for example as a shorthand description of your role. Sometimes it is not, because it prevents people from connecting to you as a person and not a role.

    So where does that leave me? I don’t say “I am an engineering manager” (although I slip sometimes), my wording is “I work as an engineering manager”.

    And I don’t “lead or manage a team”, I work with a team. I’m sort of an administrative contact for them. As such I don’t tell them how to do something. I’m an information hub between different teams and hierarchies with a harddisk full of previous experience. If this is helpful, I’m happy to do so. But otherwise one of my most important skills is to get the f*ck out of the way.

    This is also where my talent and special interest topics come into play. I’m interested in people, communication, groups, knowledge management.

    I deeply despise telling people what to do. Well … sometimes I have to, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I look dominant, but I’m not.

    So, here I am, the non-managing non-leader. I will not tell you that I believe in teams “with absolutely no hierarchy”, because that’s a harmful myth. But that’s a story for another post.

  • So What Is Your Job?

    Photo by Van Tay Media

    Introduction

    We sometimes get this question some of us don’t really know how to answer. What do I tell people? My title? What I really do?

    Some time ago I read an interesting article about this (that I can’t find anymore, ADHD … you know) where someone tried to
    explain the different types of how to talk about a job. I will try to explain the concepts with my own words and give examples for my own role.

    Job title

    This is the short title that maybe is on your business card (if you happen to have cards) or sign at the door to your office (if you happen to have an office).
    In my case this would be “Engineering Manager“, or what I prefer “Senior Engineering Management Squirrel” (if you would like to know more about why, just ask).

    Job description

    This actually is what you tell people, when you are at a meetup or party and someone asks, what you do. This normally is a bit longer
    and contains a personal view on what your tasks and responsibilities are.
    For me a possible example is “I work with a team of software engineers and I’m responsible for their growth, career and partially also wellbeing. This also includes high level roadmap planning and stakeholder communication and management. I’m a people manager, not a tech lead.“

    Job profile

    This is probably the text someone wrote as a job offer that you applied to. Which essentially means this is also what HR thinks is your job definition.
    That can be a list of bullet points with tasks and responsibilities. The job offer itself would also contain a list of perks or benefits and other conditions.
    These are not relevant for an internal job profile.

    I have to leave you without a profile, because actually I never saw one for my job. I did not apply for a job, I was extremely fortunate to be asked if I wanted to join.

    Final thoughts

    Not having a job profile to refer to is an uncomfortable situation, especially for people new to a job level. Because the profile would define some expectations,
    the team and the company has for the new joiner. For me this was not that much of a problem, because leveraging my experience (gosh, I sound like one of these business suits …)
    I started to take responsibilities as I saw them coming or as I was asked to do them. In higher positions there also always should be some slack to fill a role the way you prefer to.

    Update

    Since comments are not yet working, I’ll add an update this way. I had a nice discussion on Mastodon about this article. And there was an
    addition, that really makes sense. The job posting as a first draft of a profile might be OK. But a real job profile, like “welcome, this what you’re going to do”
    is different from a job posting. Example: at a previous job my profile (the first one I ever got!) included things like limits for what I was
    allowed to sign in contracts. Like “you can sign contracts up to 50k€ on your own and up to 500k€ with your manager cosigning”. This something that is
    important, but that you will never find in a job posting.

    On the other hand there are phrases or requirements in a job posting, that are specifically designed to attract a certain target group of people.
    Think of it as promotion for the job. That doesn’t need to be in the job profile exactly like that. But certainly if you promise some attractive tasks or benefits
    they certainly should find their way into the profile. Otherwise you just lied to the candidates.

  • Welcome!

    Following the old and revered tradition of having a first welcome post: here we go 🙂