Comment by nudgeee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nudgeee | Hacker News Reader

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Things off the top of my head:

- Alignment / priority management / keeping team focused

- Saying yes/no to projects

- Medium term planning, resource balancing

- Helping to set team vision and mission

- Reporting to upper management (up)

- Keep up to date and abreast with what’s happening in the org, filtering info to the team (down)

- People management (career, performance, strengths/weaknesses etc)

- Spotting and creating opportunities for the team

- Often acting as a tie breaker for decisions (including technical)

- Often involved in steering technical design and solutions

- Help keep the team productive and happy

- Probably a ton more I’m forgetting

Tons of finesse and strong communication skills required for this as well as strong technical experience.

And then there’s project management which I haven’t touched on — either can be done directly by engineers (personally I enjoy it, some don’t which is fine), engineering managers or dedicated technical project/program managers.

The difference from project management I understand, but a lot of what you described regarding keeping the progress going seems to be a SCRUM master's job. Would you say that is also management? Its all a bit fuzzy to me, because for example these are still engineering tasks for me:

>- Saying yes/no to projects

>- Medium term planning, resource balancing

>- Helping to set team vision and mission

>- Keep up to date and abreast with what’s happening in the org, filtering info to the team (down)

>- Often acting as a tie breaker for decisions (including technical)

>- Often involved in steering technical design and solutions

I think it should be done by senior engineers organically as engineering is a social activity. No one person can achieve greatness and to me an engineer becomes a senior engineer not by being a brilliant coder (for example) but by understanding that the job is to solve problems.

> The difference from project management I understand, but a lot of what you described regarding keeping the progress going seems to be a SCRUM master's job. Would you say that is also management?

These are my rough notes on project management (from an engineer’s lens):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XFdBUfi3MvQuh9NTFBJMQFA0...

Lots of blanks to fill still, but I am a proponent of engineers owning their own project management.

> I think it should be done by senior engineers organically as engineering is a social activity. No one person can achieve greatness and to me an engineer becomes a senior engineer not by being a brilliant coder (for example) but by understanding that the job is to solve problems.

100% agree, lots of overlap between responsibilities and often a good thing! Roles from all parts of the org coming together to solve problems is the ideal situation.

My first approximation is that engineering managers are responsible for the team health, whereas engineers are responsible for project health, or at least raising issues when things aren’t so healthy.

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