Over my eight years as an engineering manager, I diligently monitored my time allocation. Managing engineers at a startup meant wearing many hats, so understanding where my time went was crucial for effective planning and scheduling.
For instance, I discovered that roughly one-third of my time was dedicated to assisting my team with technical challenges or collaborating with them. Armed with this knowledge, I could block off time specifically for these activities. Had my schedule consisted solely of meetings and high-level planning, I would have become a bottleneck for my team, who relied on my input for specific issues.
Given the frequent inquiries I receive from aspiring software engineering managers about my role and responsibilities, I decided to provide this comprehensive overview of my typical workday. While every company and position is unique, I hope this post offers valuable firsthand insights into the life of an engineering manager.
What Does an Engineering Manager Do?
Let me start by providing some context about my experience as an engineering manager: My initial foray into management was at Packback, an online platform designed for college professors to facilitate question-and-answer sessions.
When I joined, the company was in its infancy, comprising just four individuals—essentially myself and the three founders. Over the subsequent three years, I witnessed the company secure nearly $5 million in funding and expand to almost 30 employees. My engineering team remained relatively small, with five members at the time of my departure in 2016, but my role underwent significant transformations during my tenure.
Upon leaving Packback, I joined The Graide Network, once again assuming the mantle of an engineering manager. Initially, my team consisted solely of myself and a contractor. However, over my four years at Graide, I expanded the team by hiring three more engineers and assumed additional responsibilities in product management.
Although my day-to-day tasks evolved considerably throughout the years, my core responsibility as a software engineering manager remained consistent: to empower my team to deliver functional software on time and within budget.
The operative word here is “helping.” What exactly does that entail? Does it mean that an engineering manager writes code, or do they simply ensure that everyone on their team is writing code?
The concise answer is: it depends.
Engineering Managers Must Be Technical
Generally, engineering managers write less code than senior developers on their teams, but they should write some code to keep their skills sharp. They also need to excel at guiding their team members toward resolving technical roadblocks. Sometimes this involves directly answering technical questions, while other times it necessitates mediating disagreements among team members.
Engineering managers often play a role in onboarding new engineers and evaluating candidates based on both their technical skills and interpersonal abilities.
Engineering Managers Have to Be Good With People
Being “good with people” can be a rather ambiguous quality.
While many assume that extroversion is a prerequisite for effective management, but that’s not necessarily true. A primary responsibility of an engineering manager is to empathize with their team and provide support through both technical and personal challenges.
However, engineering managers must also “manage up,” which entails advocating for their team’s best interests when providing feedback to superiors and making tough decisions, such as letting go of underperforming team members.
The Hardest Part About Engineering Management
Transitioning into my first management role, the most difficult adjustment was recalibrating my self-evaluation methods. Nickolas Means eloquently articulated this challenge in his fantastic piece on meta productivity for managers:
Every so often, I have a day where I look up after the last meeting has ended and feel like I’ve gotten absolutely nothing done. I’ve been busy all day long: having conversations, reading documents, and checking in with peers and team members. I’m exhausted, but I’ve accomplished nothing.Nickolas Means
Evaluating my productivity as a software engineer was relatively straightforward—I typically made tangible progress on a feature or submitted a pull request. However, as a manager, gauging the productivity of my day proved to be a significant hurdle.
This is precisely why I started meticulously tracking my time. Although the time spent on a task is not a perfect indicator of productivity, it served as a valuable tool to ensure that I was allocating sufficient time to each aspect of my job.
How Does an Engineering Manager Spend Their Time?
Engineering managers often juggle a wide array of responsibilities, which can vary depending on the size and organizational structure of their employer. To provide a clearer picture of how an engineering manager spends their time, I’ve categorized my own time allocation into four key areas:
- Technical (35%)
- Managerial (35%)
- Recruiting (15%)
- Administrative (15%)
This section delves into how I allocated my time as an engineering manager, offering insights into the specific tasks within each category and why they were essential to my daily work.
While I rigorously tracked my time for extended periods throughout my eight years in management, I’ve opted to round each category to a whole number for the sake of simplicity. The precise number of hours dedicated to each task is not the main takeaway here. What proved beneficial was identifying any significant spikes or drops in time spent on particular areas from week to week.
Technical
35% of my time
Technical work encompasses a range of activities, such as writing code, conducting code reviews, troubleshooting bugs, collaborating with teammates, and staying abreast of software updates and best practices. As my teams expanded, the time I dedicated to writing and reviewing code naturally decreased. However, I firmly believe that it is crucial for engineering managers to allocate at least some of their time elbow-deep in the code to these tasks.
Managerial
35% of my time
This category encompasses direct people management, establishing timelines, strategic planning, and engaging in meetings with both technical and non-technical team members. During my time at Packback, ensuring the well-being and satisfaction of my team, advocating for them in business meetings, and collaborating with the product team to develop technical specifications were all integral parts of my engineering manager responsibilities.
At The Graide Network, I assumed a more strategic role, providing guidance to the founders on software selections and actively participating in crucial sales calls. Interestingly, despite the differences in specific tasks, the overall time allocation remained remarkably consistent.
Recruiting
15% of my time
Recruiting efforts encompassed attending conferences, meetups, and coding bootcamps; authoring blog posts; interviewing job candidates; and evaluating technical assessments.
While I dedicated more time to recruiting when actively filling an engineering position, effective engineering managers are perpetually in hiring mode. Recognizing that the most exceptional candidates are often those who are not actively seeking new opportunities, I made it a point to connect with them regularly.
Administrative
15% of my time
Finally, a portion of my week was dedicated to administrative tasks, such as reading and responding to emails, addressing inquiries on Slack, engaging in impromptu conversations, and handling other miscellaneous day-to-day responsibilities to support my team. As the manager, I strived to shield my engineering team from these distractions, intervening only when necessary.
If an engineering manager’s primary objective is to maximize the productivity of their team, it logically follows that they would shoulder the majority of administrative tasks.
What Makes a Good Engineering Manager?
Covering all the intricacies of effective engineering management in a single blog post would be an impossible feat. Instead, I’ll focus on the three fundamental principles that I prioritize above all else.
1. Empower Your Team
Effective management hinges on the ability to helping others achieve great things.
As a manager, your primary responsibility is to impact is much less direct. This means that you cannot afford to remain solely engrossed in coding. Initially, witnessing a decline in my personal accomplishments was disheartening. However, as I learned to accept that my team’s increased productivity outweighed my individual contributions, I began to genuinely relish the management role.
2. Overcommunicate
Whether your team operates within the same physical space or remotely across the globe, effective communication is paramount to your success as a manager. In marketing, there’s a principle that suggests a message must be conveyed people must hear your message seven times before they internalize it for it to truly resonate, and I believe this holds true for team communication as well.
This doesn’t mean incessantly repeating yourself in every meeting. Rather, it’s about reinforcing important changes through various channels, such as one-on-one discussions, team meetings, emails, and casual conversations. Change can be unsettling, but repeated exposure tends to mitigate those anxieties.
3. Be the Source of Calm
Finally, your role as an engineering manager is to “vacuum up chaos”
“Any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it. Good leaders can walk into a situation where people have lost track of their goals and get everyone aligned on a clear path forward.”
Avoid creating or fueling drama, isolating your team from the rest of the company, or fostering animosity among team members. Instead, strive to be a stabilizing force, absorbing uncertainty and stress so that your team can focus on what they do best.