Category: General

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.

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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. ↩︎

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.

“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.

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.

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