Cascade Talent Partners’ Post

A senior engineer could be amazing at an enterprise but awful at a startup, and vice versa. Why? Because with no official standards, individual engineering orgs will level engineers differently. In my experience, I’ve noticed the following: → Engineers in more mature environments tend to have poorer cross-functional communication skills because there are more managers and diverse support roles. → Startup engineers, due to a lack of resources, have to multitask and manage multiple workloads and functions, which tends to make them versatile. As a result, being an excellent senior engineer at one business doesn’t guarantee you’ll be a good fit at another business. What’s the best way to get around this? I recommend every senior engineer should focus on the following skillsets: → Have a good understanding of the business value of work that goes into development → Be able to support junior engineers and be able to train them → Know how to communicate with stakeholders outside the eng team (e.g. design, product, marketing, etc.). I think any engineer who works on these points will have no problem being labeled senior anywhere they go.

Staff Software Engineer vs Engineering Manager. In most tech companies, Senior engineers often reach a point where we have to decide between two distinctive career paths. Whether to continue as an individual contributor (Staff Engineer) or get into people leadership (Engineering Manager. The choice often depends on our passion and career growth opportunities. A Staff engineer is primarily a tech lead. In this role, one will stay deeply involved in coding, architectural designs and problem solving. They are responsible for tackling complex technical challenges, driving innovation and influencing technical directions of multiple teams as per their capacity. While they don't manage teams directly, they act as a mentor and guide other engineers and ensure the scalability and long term impact of the systems. Often the next roles on this path are usually Principal engineer and Distinguished engineer and this vary from company to company. In contrast, an Engineering manager mainly focuses on people management. They spend more time on team dynamics, career development and ensuring project delivery aligns with business goals. Their success is measured by how well their team performs, grows and delivers results. The next step in this path is usually Senior Engineering manager, Director of Engineering and VP of Engineering, where the focus becomes even more strategic, influencing organizational goals at a higher level. Both paths offer exciting opportunities, but the key is to reflect on our strengths and what we enjoy the most. Which direction would you choose for your next step? #EngineeringLeadership #StaffEngineer #EngineeringManager

Our engineers think beyond code, contributing to solutions that push the boundaries of innovation and will transform industries for generations to come. In our latest #InsideInvisible blog, Senior Engineering Manager Emily Thomas shares more about the evolution of our team, the technical challenges we’re tackling, and what to expect when you join us. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3BdPrVW #WereHiring #EngineeringJobs

The Engineering Manager is not a Tech Lead

Can an Engineering Manager who is 50% hands-on properly manage a team of Software Engineers as well? A conversation I had with an Engineering Lead I was pitching a position to, but he was not interested. He said with that much hands-on stuff in the role they would not be able to manage effectively. And not enough hours in the day. Even if the team of Engineers is quite Senior. But with most Engineering Leadership roles requiring a lot of hands-on work - surely this is not the case? And companies seem to think it is very doable based on the requirements for pretty much every Engineering Lead vacancy out there right now. #Ventellect #SoftwareEngineering #TechRecruitment

I call 50/50 split between management and hands-on involvement a death zone. Something like 70/30 can work well: you're mostly focused on one activity type (be it management or individual contributions) and partially covering another activity. And there's a wiggle room to temporary dedicate more time for one of the areas without another suffering too much. Once it's 50/50, it becomes unsustainable once one of activities requires extra attention. There's a critical technical issue that occupies 100% of your time for a day? You will go back to a pile of managerial issues that will occupy you 100% for a few days instead. You spend a day dealing with management stuff? Now there are deadlines at risk with your hands-on obligations. For this to work for you as an engineering manager, you got to be very conscious what you can afford to commit to at any given period of time. Team is running smoothly → can take on more hands-on work for the next few weeks. Got to onboard new employees or push an organizational change → keep your hands off code except for a few limited things. Pick one chair and put your feet on another one instead of trying to sit on both.

While it may seem obvious to some, the benefits of diverse engineering teams are profound: Rich Set of Ideas: Different cultural backgrounds, educational experiences, and personal viewpoints contribute to a richer pool of ideas, essential for tackling complex engineering challenges. #hiring #diversity #engineering

There isn't just one career path in software engineering. Most engineers or aspiring engineers think the default path is that you'll work your way up to management and hopefully to a CTO. Tons of engineers prefer to have some sort of engineering as a part of their responsibilities throughout their career - after all, it is fun to build things! On top of that, not everyone out there is cut out for management - great companies want the right people in their management ranks and a mutual desire to be in a management role. As you go through your first few years as an engineer, your path will become more clear to you. Regardless of if you go the management route or not, you'll still have to learn the ins and outs of mentorship, people skills, technical communication, and dealing with external teams. At what level you want to do this is up to the path you choose. Engineering managers, leaders, and directors will deal more with the people aspect of the job and will spend most of their time leading and setting direction of the team. Senior, Staff, Distinguished (etc - whatever you may call it) Engineers will spend less of their time than managers on leading and more of their time on engineering, setting the technical direction of the team, leading individual projects and initiatives, architecture, and mentoring other engineers on their team in technical skills. Choose the path that works best for you and what you want - not the path that you think you're required to do.

The hardest part of building a "good" tech company, is building a good engineering team. And you cannot build a good engineering team if you don't love the engineering yourself. That is why unlike every other business, most of the successful tech companies are founded by engineers instead of businessmen. Ultimately those engineering-founders turn into businessmen, but the core of the business surrounds heavily around engineers. They are the raw product of a good tech company. The company can have a vision, a plan, and goal to aim for, but if the raw material is not good, the end product is never going to be decent enough. #teambuilding #hiring #engineering #tech

Don't hire engineering managers because they're "technical." When I moved into management, I thought that my superpower would be that I understood coding practices better than my direct reports. I was convinced that my skills in writing clean, performant code would automatically confer respect. I was so wrong. No one who worked for me wanted me to tell them they'd been doing it wrong and needed to change. (Even if they really did need to change.) Instead, what they needed from me was more about bridging the gap between the business side of things and the engineering side. They didn't want to get into the details of what the customers wanted or needed, and the business didn't want to take the time to understand what engineering needed to succeed. My job had almost nothing to do with technology. Sure, there were some moments when I could offer some technical mentorship, but mostly, it was talking to people to help them understand someone else's point of view. So, if you're looking to hire an engineering manager or leader, think about what you want them to be doing and who they'll be interacting with. They'll certainly need to understand what engineers are doing, but your best developers aren't going to be your best managers. Set up your new managers for success. Move technical skills to the bottom of the list of requirements when you're hiring.