Interviews with developers who became managers

Re:Interviews with developers who became managers by wonderwonder on Monday March 25, 2019 @04:31PM (#19486493)

Who makes the decision to hire and fire? Or decides what to prioritize after speaking with upper leadership and assigns resources? Managers deal with a ton of day to day stuff that most engineers should not have to worry about. I am a software team lead (not manager level in my company, our structure is strange, I report to a VP) but I have to manage several employees while also dealing with the customer to properly capture requirements and code.

I spend a couple hours a day in meetings and can then based on that tell, the developers what to focus on. Having the entire team in each of those meetings is a waste.

Managers for the most part act as meeting shields to the development team to optimally allow them to focus on writing good code with good motivated team mates.

But yes, some of them can micro manage and make things far worse than they should be. Few things are worse than working for a bad manager, especially glory hounds.

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Re:Interviews with developers who became managers by tootie on Monday March 25, 2019 @09:53PM (#19488613)

The number one thing I do as a manager that actually got to me enjoy the job was being responsible for setting expectations. In particular, getting a big say in contract writing. I negotiate the scope and staffing plan. I set the SLAs. I tell stakeholders what iterative delivery looks like, what we need from them to have a successful delivery and what my team can do for them.

The first project I scoped delivered almost to the day on schedule and on budget without burning the team. My next project we had a locked scope where I took one look and predicted disaster and it happened. Now I have enough credibility to make these decisions and set a team up for success.

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