HN Explorer

Ask HN: Are you a SW Dev Manager? What do you do?

2 points by tcgv ↗ HN
The Dual Career Ladder [1] allows software developers to be promoted along either a managerial or technical track.

I'm trying to get a picture of how the managerial track varies across companies, especially in regard to the key responsibilities of Software Development Managers within agile teams and the SDLC [2].

So, are you a SW Dev Manager? What are your key responsibilities? What does your team look like?

Thanks in advance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career_ladder#Dual_career_ladder

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle

9 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] thread
ggeorgovassilis
I work for an IT consulting firm and manage a team consisting of system engineers, cloud architects and big data application developers. The team's mission is to operationalise new technologies for clients.

My responsibilities (apart from administrative tasks) are:

- coordinating effort estimates

- aligning team skills with the project pipeline

- evaluate tools, technologies and methodologies

- advising on SW/cloud architecture topics

- colab on PoCs

- smoothen load peaks with hands-on work (rarely)

- contribute to interdisciplinary workgroups

tcgv
Does your team have a Product Owner (PO)? A couple of your responsabilities seem similar of that of a PO. I wonder if they would overlap.
ggeorgovassilis
We provide technology expertise for vertical product teams which have dedicated POs. In a way, I'm the "PO" for the "system/cloud/big-data-eng" capability in the organisation.
stocktech
I'm at a tech company as an EM. My primary responsibility is making sure my team is delivering high quality software. Sometimes this means my job is documentation, testing, being a PO/PM, or recruiter. I have to know the codebase to communicate and organize things, but I rarely have time to code. My days are spent in meetings and when I'm not in a meeting, I'm writing slack messages to other managers/teams or analyzing problems.

As a manager, you have the freedom to set your own schedule and run your team the way you see fit. I don't know if I'd recommend that when you first start out, but you're judged based on the outcome - generally. Some managers still do 50% coding, which is fine, but I think those pitfalls need to be considered carefully.

Once my teams get to a self-sufficient status, we're able to take on more responsibility and do more "innovation" type projects. That's "success" in my mind, but it takes time to get there. Up until that point, I do whatever I need to.

tcgv
> Sometimes this means my job is documentation, testing, being a PO/PM, or recruiter

Interesting. Do you also manage a PO in your team? And if so, when you need to act as a PO, how do you interact with him/her?

stocktech
No, eng and product are separate orgs, but I'll work with them on process, documentation, meetings, etc. I'm a big believer in demonstrating value before asking people to do more work. So when I wanted product to do write more documentation, I did most of it myself to show the impact it had on engineering and how organized the team was. Now product owns it.

It's less about taking on roles and just doing what needs to be done. Everything is a partnership in building the product, so I help where I'm needed most. When our hiring pipeline dried up, I'm the one doing outreach. When our test suite needed enhancements, I'm writing demo code to show best practices. When an upstream service pushed breaking changes, I'm the one pushing for process/communication changes.

Granted, my current org is a little bit of a mess, but every place I've worked at needed me to flex because it gives my team the ability to do what they do best - code. And since I'm fixing processes and not a bottleneck, I have a stronger case for promotion too.

tcgv
Thanks for the clarification
matt_s
Eng mgr here with a handful of engineers. We use a CI/CD process and there are other teams of product folks that handle project mgmt tasks, deal with stakeholders, etc. We don't estimate work other than very rough sizing - things like can it be done by end of Q2 types of sizing.

I still do hands on work, sometimes feature work but mostly uninteresting stuff because I'd rather have people on my team pick what they want to work on. I help align work with people - generally people will pick up whatever is next in our prioritized list but sometimes we need specific people on things, or not, depending. I help coordinate/plan engineering led work - tech debt, refactors, stuff other teams want us to do, tech upgrades, etc.

Having people management responsibilities takes time and is pretty much a different job. You have to understand what the people you manage actually do, but in general managing people that do accounting or any other office type of job will involve many of the same people management activities - 1:1's, assigning work, reviewing work, hiring, firing, raises, bonuses, promotions, etc. Although I've found as a 1st line manager, anything dealing with money requires approvals at a higher level, sometimes they just make those decisions.

tcgv
So if I understand correctly you work on a lot of engineering related tasks, as a facilitator, or enabler, of what needs to be done by your engineering team and the best way of doing it, but don't have specific product / people management duties?