The Black Magic of Engineering Management (Sauce Labs)

The Black Magic of Engineering Management
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- Adam Christansen (Sauce Labs)

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Thursdays is no-meetings day

Manager's function is to make opportunities for people to work, not make them work.

- Seek out mentors
- Read books
- Solicit Feedback
- Count on senior team members
- Get a coach
- You will fail. Accept and move on.

Be an agent of change


Value Systems
-------------

    - Provide order, cohesion
    - Decision system
        - let's you figure whether something/situation is okay or not
    - revisit and adopt/honour it
        - moment you stop honouring it, it's worse than not having one
    - exist from inside out

https://saucelabs.com/our-values

Culture

- make sure everyone feels as though they're moving in the same direction
- allow freedom to innovate
- fun and challenging workspace
    - celebrate wins!
    - announce things you're deploying that you're proud of to whole company

Balance

- Breaks after big pushes
    - Allow people to recover deliberately
- Tech crunch all nighters
    - gets old after a while
    - doesn't scale
- Priorities
    - make sure everyone is clear
- Saying 'no'
    - You have to have conversations about big things that come up
- Real vacations
    - actually disconnect, for a significant amount of time
    - real boundaries

Hiring

    - Cultural first, technical second
    - Be creative and open minded
    - quality over quantity
    - slow and steady wins
    - trust your gut

Org structure

    http://firstround.com/article/Why-Yammer-believes-the-traditional-
    engineering-organizational-structure-is-dead

    - do your homework
    - cross functional
    - Dis-org chart
        - Evolving graph, not a tree