The 3 hero traps experienced EMs fall into
The stories of the fixer, the umberlla, and the hen EMs.
“Don’t worry, Anton will be out of that meeting soon, he’ll help us solve this.”
I was just walking toward the team’s area when I heard it. Music to my ears.
Who doesn’t like to feel needed?
And when I actually solved that weird bug? Pure dopamine. I’m a genius. I’m awesome.
It took me a few (embarrassing) years to understand I had not one, but 3(!) ‘hero EM’ syndromes 🤦♂️
The Fixer EM
The hen
The shit umbrella
In a nutshell:
The fixer EM
You are a very strong ICs who became a manager. You like to be called for difficult problems. You enjoy being the last resort, and hate being technically irrelevant.
The shit umbrella EM
You protect the team from organizational shit. You believe that your engineers shouldn’t be distracted, so you ‘shield’ them from the uncomfortable reality (unclear strategy, overloaded roadmaps), dealing with it yourself.
The hen EM
You take care of people… But a bit too much. You act like the champion of their people. You’ll fight to the death for their raises, but also for every small request, not letting the people fight their own fights.
TLDR: they are all bad.
Check out the full article for real stories from my career, and how I overcame those syndromes:
On average, only 3-4% of readers read an article to the end. So I decided to save people time, and change the format a bit. I’ll write the full articles on my own blog (not worrying about length), and send in the newsletter just the intro. This will also give me some space for the weekly dilemma or additional corners I consider adding.
Last week’s dilemma:
You just hired a senior dev from Big Tech. They resigned. Their start date is next week. Then your manager tells you: “We’re pulling the offer.” What do you do?
It’s so easy to say ‘this is so unethical, not way it’ll happen to me!’. Until it does. The original case was shared in Gergely Orosz’s newsletter.
Thanks to everyone who replied. Here’s how it feels, from a reader who asked to stay anonymous:
I've been in the position.
I got approval to hire 3 new developers, but a couple of months later. Oops... Our runway is running out. A CEO mistake in a startup.
We already had a signed offer for two, and the other one had started a week earlier, rellocating to our country for that role.
HR suggested to let them start and not pass probation (1st month). I refused that, because it is really not fair for the candidate, and my manager supported me.
We called the candidates, offered one month of pay, and offered help through our network to find something else.
I hope to never have to do this again.
It’s so easy to take the easy path here, and not even show your face to the candidate. It’s much harder to take responsibility and do whatever you can to ease the pain a bit:
Offer pay (yeah, 1 month feels barely adequate, but better than nothing).
Sincerely offer to help through your network.
My 2 cents:
I think our goal is to never get into this situation in the first place.
I’ve had cases where, together with my manager, we decided to wait and not hire roles we had budget for, just because things were unclear business-wise.
If you’ve got a big leadership offsite coming up in 2-3 weeks, and potential changes on the table - delay the offer. Simple as that.
Check out my LinkedIn post for additional opinions (got a bit heated).
This week’s dilemma
This time it’s my own. Spoiler - I handled it awfully. Would love to hear your take! And if you have your own dilemma (current/past one), please reply to the email and share it :)
You manage a team that heavily depends on the platform team in the same org. It’s a small startup, so until now, things ran informally. Your engineers would walk over, ask questions, solve problems together.
One day, the platform team’s EM decides to change the rules:
"From now on, all communication goes through formal support tickets. No more ad-hoc conversations."
Fair enough.
But then - you hit an urgent problem, and you need their help. One of your developers approaches a platform engineer directly, like before.The engineer brushes him off, saying “we only handle support tickets now.”
The platform EM even tells his team not to help you outside the ticket queue.Your developer comes back frustrated, asking what to do next.
What do you do?
Next week, I’ll share what happened in the real situation. Meanwhile, there are some interesting debates in the LinkedIn post where I shared this dilemma.
Weekly Comic
Discover Weekly
Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI by Addy Osmani. Another great article in Addy’s series about AI-programming. A very useful read.
A weekly mind meld by James Stanier. Why it’s worth spending time writing weekly to your team (for more senior leaders).
Ultimate employee: the one that is truly proactive by Auren Hoffman.
Your #1 marketing channel is people's egos by Tom Orbach. I know most of you don’t care about marketing, but trust me - you’ll still enjoy Tom’s newsletter :)
The shit umbrella EM is the one that resonates the most for me. I keep hearing that we should protect our teams, and idealizing the umbrella metaphor.
As you, I quite disagree with it. In fact, I wrote about this controversial topic in my post "Close the Umbrella".
By the way, interesting format. I like you include the dilemmas and other sections.
Love the framing, and couldn’t agree more! I’ve fallen for the traps many times myself.