Lara Hogan

there are lots of sports coaches that were not good players, but they are absolute experts in their sport. For some reason we've let agile/life coaches convince us that "management" is the event and someone with customer service management experience has a lot to say about software development management. Ted Lasso is a great show, but it's not gonna happen IRL. Though the Diamond Dogs would be a great peer group for Engineering Managers... https://larahogan.me/blog/manager-voltron/

First and foremost: you need to decide if being a people manager is something you're really passionate about. If you're unsure, probably this is not the right time for you. You can certainly acquire the skills to become a great manager, but it takes effort, and you'll feel miserable if that's not what you want to do with your career. Worse: the experience of folks who report to you will be a mess. If you're not sure what entails to be a manager, a good introduction is "Radical Candor", by Kim Scott [1]. Another one is is "Resilient Management", by Lara Hogan [2]. Lara was a senior engineering leader at Kickstarter and Etsy, so her examples are a bit more focused on tech people managers. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kick-Ass-Without-Humanity/dp/125… [2] https://larahogan.me/blog/coming-soon-resilient-management

1 point by rektide 32 minutes ago | parent | edit | delete [–] | on: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's b... Shout out to Laura Hogan's late-April "We Need To Talk About Your Q3 Roadmap"[1], which talks about taking care of workers just starting to make it out of a crazy pandemic year. [1] https://larahogan.me/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-your-q3-roadmap/

What I have liked both as a manager and as an employee is to talk about things that are important but not urgent, especially focusing on the employee's experience and happiness. I think they day-to-day work stuff belongs mostly elsewhere. When I start 1:1s with a new engineer, I will ask about why they took the job, what they were hoping to get out of it, and where they see themselves as going professionally. Then over the long term it's my job to make sure that they are getting what they want out of the job and staying happy enough that they stay, so I'll return to those early conversations and update them. Lara Hogan has some good resources for managers: https://larahogan.me/resources/one-on-ones/ Regarding the OP's situation, though, it sounds like they are feeling responsible for directing the 1:1. I'd say that's a bit of a managerial failure. But answering the question directly, in the OP's shoes I might turn to broader questions. Ask about the company strategy, and how the employee's work fits in. Ask for career advice. Ask about manager's relationships with higher ups.

Dan Luu has a list of programming blogs you might like: https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/. The rest of his blog is good too! a few of my favorite blogs: - http://blog.acolyer.org for fantastic daily summaries of CS papers. - http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/ -- she has a business creating a new compression algorithm and I love reading about it - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is pure gold for weird debugging stories - https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/ is always a fun read - http://wingolog.org/ on building compilers - http://composition.al/blog -- Lindsey Kuper on her programming languages research - aphyr's blog on distributed systems, of course - https://charity.wtf/ - http://www.pgbovine.net/writings.htm -- Philip Guo is a CS professor whose blog on his experiences in academia I really like - http://whilefalse.blogspot.com by Camille Fournier, mostly on engineering management - http://larahogan.me/blog/ by Lara Hogan, on engineering management Also I think this comment from Dan's blog (https://danluu.com/about/) is very true and important: > I view that as a sign there’s a desperate shortage of understandable explanation of technical topics. There’s nothing here that most of my co-workers don’t know (with the exception of maybe three or four posts where I propose novel ideas). It’s just that they don’t blog and I do. I’m not going to try to convince you to start writing a blog, since that has to be something you want to do, but I will point out…