The Unreachable Engineering Managers
A few years ago, my team joined two other teams to work on a big project for the quarter.
A month into it, something wasn’t clear to me, so I sent a message to the EM of one of the other teams to get an answer. Let’s call him Logan.
I’d never worked with Logan before, but I heard many good things - he was previously a developer on the team, super technical and hardworking, with lots of ownership areas.
Surprisingly, I didn’t get an answer.
So the next day, I snooped at his calendar and ambushed him outside of a meeting. In 2 minutes, I got the answer I needed.
A couple of weeks later, it happened again. One of my engineers complained he couldn’t get hold of Logan for 2 days already. He had a question, and the devs on the other team said only Logan would know the answer to it.
When I asked around, everyone told me it was a known fact. Logan was just super busy, and it might take him a few days to answer you. The ‘best practice’ for handling it was scheduling meetings with him (which was also quite hard with his hectic schedule).
In the following years, I kept seeing the same behavior from key people in the companies I worked at.
The problem isn’t with ‘paper pushers’ who just spend all day in meetings and don’t really contribute, I don’t really care about them being unavailable. Their engineers handle the questions.
It’s the managers who are actually strong technically, and whose opinions matter. The ones who have tons of context in their heads.
In the case above, it ended up fine, I got the answers I needed. But who said that what I wanted was more important than the tens of messages that waited in Logan’s Slack during my ‘ambush’?
What about all the cases where engineers give up and make slightly non-optimal decisions? Or work that gets delayed just because an answer is needed?
The ‘unreachable’ EMs slowly become bottlenecks for moving things forward.
Misleading appreciation
There is a lot of appreciation for busy managers. Like they are more important.
People take pride in having tons of unanswered messages, as they have ‘tons of things’ to do.
Honestly, I believe they love the control and power that comes with being involved with everything. I don’t think they are even fully aware of it in many cases.
The organization gets used to it. The managers get used to it. Nobody even questions whether there’s something wrong.
When you do talk with them about it, most will answer “yeah, I know, I’m planning to improve this, sorry” - and then nothing changes.
Being responsive IS the job.
My take on the Engineering Manager job is that we have a responsibility to unblock others first.
As a first step, my goal is to answer ASAP to everything. I treat my SLA as 1 hour for personal messages and at least twice a day for channels. I don’t let things accumulate (I also don’t have notifications, so I can get 30-60 minutes of focus time). I wrote a bit more about my Slack system in 7 Slack hacks for engineers and managers.
My second step is to methodically clean it up.
Is there a channel where I don’t need to read unless tagged? Mute it. Is there a channel with lots of critical discussions? Move it to a dedicated group that I look at more often.
The third and last step is the most critical - understanding whether I should have been the one to answer it in the first place.
Was this a message that someone else could have handled? Who? Is there a pattern of messages? An area I can let an engineer own? Maybe it’s an opportunity to give an engineer a kingdom?
Of course it’s easy to criticize from the outside. Those unreachable EMs very often have big teams, huge challenges, and lots of responsibility. “Just delegate” is a bullshit tip.
Still, if it’s you, I believe that trying to put ‘unblocking others’ higher on your priority list can do a lot of good, both to your org and to your own sanity.
Discover weekly
I Quit My Job by Ryan Peterman. Ryan’s journey resonated with me (altought there are many differences), enjoyed reading it.
(comic) Day 3 Performance Review by Work Chronicles. I love getting those work/tech related comics in my inbox :)
7 Cognitive Biases of Engineering Managers by Suresh Choudhary. A great cover of some famous and less known biases.
As a manager, being available is one of the most important responsibilities. When your team knows you are accessible and ready to support them, it builds trust and strengthens their confidence in your leadership.
True for marketing team leaders as well :)