Re:A Terse Guide On Hiring Your First Engineering Manager
by mathattack on Friday March 05, 2021 @12:23PM
(#26359341)
I’ve found that managers who think of themselves as protectors don’t do their teams any favors. When the teams lose this protection they get surprised that reality is very different than their managers let on. (“I never realized the rest of the company didn’t think we were rock stars.”)
Re:A Terse Guide On Hiring Your First Engineering Manager
by mathattack on Saturday March 06, 2021 @02:04PM
(#26369634)
This can still work. The protection is when the external customer says “the output is garbage” and the scrum master says “you are doing fine”
You don't want to protect the team from a foreign entity, having to understand the political structures around them or the actual value they bring to the organization.
You do want to protect them from pressures of working 60 hours a week. You want to protect them from feeling like their priorities are a shifting sand. You do want to protect them from a VIP who just goes to them and says,"can you do this for me?" which confounds another series of priorities unbeknownst to the cofounder.
If there are toxic elements of the business, you cannot completely shield them, but you do want to preserve an island of sanity.
The bigger the business, the more "protection" the job entails because the sheer number of moving pieces can subject a team to thrashing. The smaller the business, the more a manager needs to make a strong decision of if those toxic elements exist at all and stamp them out. If you need to "protect" a team at a small company, you are at the wrong company and need to get out.