📘Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

Engineering Management for the Rest of Us, by Sarah Drasner

A heartfelt (and very skimmable) guide to engineering management for the many, many managers in this field who rose to their position on the strength of their technical skills and then suddenly discovered a whole other human skillset is required. 😅

⭐ I would recommend this book to more than managers. Actually, I think anyone who has a manager, has to work with other people, or wants to better understand their own motivation at work should read this book, too.

(More detailed notes in 🔒 Private Note.)

Key Takeaways

Here’s the job description no one really gives you.

A manager’s job is creating clarity and psychological safety to enable the team to do their best work together. Day to day, this looks like:

• Going first. Modeling the attitudes and behavior you want to see on the team. Having the courage to be vulnerable.
• Having big-picture vision and communicating it clearly (usually over and over again) to keep everyone aligned to goals, priorities, and strategy.
• Working to learn team members’ values (and your own) to help everyone understand where others are coming from, and help everyone stay motivated and fulfilled in their work.
• Creating spaces and framing debate so that the team can communicate and navigate conflict in healthy ways.
• Proactively mitigating stress and negativity that sap morale.
• Breaking down big problems into approachable, achievable tasks.
• Taking the meetings and the interruptions so your team can stay in flow state on tasks without communication breakdowns across teams.
• Giving feedback effectively so everyone can grow and adapt to change.
• Stepping back from the how to focus on the why. Trusting your team to figure out the how.

This sounds a little vague as a list, but the book is full of specific examples, tips, and techniques for how to do these things. Reading through it was a great orientation to this kind of work, but I’ll probably be reaching for it again to review specific chapters as needed.

Empathy, communication, and leadership are learnable skills.

Reading this book made me realize I’d started to drift into an unhealthy mindset that I think is a little too common in tech. In my head I was creating an artificial divide between technical skills like writing code (measurable, learnable), and human skills like communication and empathy (perhaps innate talents, perhaps derived from magic ✨).

But they’re not completely different. They’re all just skills. You can actively practice a skill and build strength, or you can ignore a skill, watch it grow weaker, and feel more and more helpless.

Humans are much more complicated than computers—that much is true. But there are still specific things you can do in conversation and meetings, in written documents, in the perspective you cultivate to improve at the human skills over time. That reminder was very empowering. 💪🏻

Our values play a huge role in how we work.

People process and respond to information based on internal context: their values, or the things they most want, believe in, aspire to, admire. Values shape our motivation and sense of purpose at work. They shape how we communicate. They shape how we perceive a problem and evaluate solutions. Sounds pretty important, right?

But I have to admit, I had never thought about my work in terms of my values before I read this book. And then, when I tried some of the exercises Drasner suggests to identify my core work values, I realized that my ignorance might be why I was feeling a little disconnected from my job and uncertain about what I wanted next in my career. I had been trying to go with the flow, to meet others’ expectations and prove my value to my team, but I hadn’t really taken ownership of my career or identified the impact I wanted to have. Without my job description changing at all, just identifying what matters most to me helped me reframe the challenges on my plate in terms that were more interesting to me.

You can’t do everything.

As a manager or leader, your primary focus isn’t your own individual contributions anymore; it’s keeping the team unblocked and productive.

This might be Drasner’s hardest lesson about management and leadership for engineers. Among the engineers I know, it’s the single most important factor holding most people back from an interest in management. (And certainly the biggest factor holding me back.)

But I have seen the truth of this on projects. When someone tries to take on a management/leadership role in addition to individual contributor responsibilities, everyone winds up stressed out and overworked. Communication breaks down. The process gets disorganized. And work slows down.

Someone has to prioritize the big picture, communication, and the process, and that person is the manager.