Re:Soft Skills in Engineering Leadership
by ChrisMarshallNY on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @11:35AM
(#26168277)
> have empathy and keep coding.
This.
I worked for a company that didn't encourage managers to be technical. In fact, they sometimes deliberately interfered with my efforts to remain technically relevant. They really lost some good stuff, that way. I'm no tech slouch.
Luckily, I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract, so I did a lot of open-source work, in order to remain relevant.
They directly benefitted from that; though they would never admit it.
So did thousands of others. I did work for NPOs, and the work I did went towards a lot of lifesaving stuff.
The "empathy" part is every bit as important. It pays huge dividends, as a manager. It needs to be real empathy, though; not the two-faced kind that only appears when someone's watching.
This.
I worked for a company that didn't encourage managers to be technical. In fact, they sometimes deliberately interfered with my efforts to remain technically relevant. They really lost some good stuff, that way. I'm no tech slouch.
Luckily, I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract, so I did a lot of open-source work, in order to remain relevant.
They directly benefitted from that; though they would never admit it.
So did thousands of others. I did work for NPOs, and the work I did went towards a lot of lifesaving stuff.
The "empathy" part is every bit as important. It pays huge dividends, as a manager. It needs to be real empathy, though; not the two-faced kind that only appears when someone's watching.