Camille Fournier, author of The Manager's Path and former engineering executive, discusses the timeline and technical foundation necessary before stepping into engineering management.
“So I do think it's probably a like somewhere in the 10 year range of like really having spent a lot of your time over those years in writing code and, you know, really understanding how to be a technical expert.”
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More from Camille Fournier
Opinion
Fournier: GraphQL rarely works well in practice outside of Facebook
“The impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front end engineers that they don't really have to like collaborate with back end engineers and they can just sort of build whatever and it'l…”
Camille FournierSep 15, 2024▶ 29:32The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
Opinion
Fournier: Product managers are far easier to manage than engineers
“PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to, like, they're just so helpful. They're, like, want to do things. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I just, like, my experience, engineers are such a pain. They …”
Camille FournierSep 15, 2024▶ 39:43The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
“Trying to say, we're going to just go away, we're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new, and it's going to solve all our problems, it just very rarely works.”
Camille FournierSep 15, 2024▶ 19:25The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
Insight
Fournier: Big-company frameworks often fail when adopted outside their original context
“Some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? Where the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company …”
Camille FournierSep 15, 2024▶ 30:35The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
Insight
Fournier: Companies must allocate dedicated product managers to internal platform teams
“I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset. And frankly, you need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste headcount on product mana…”
Camille FournierSep 15, 2024▶ 56:48The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
Insight
Fournier: Excluding engineers from product ideation triggers massive over-engineering
“What I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things because engineers Are like, well, I need to take control of something, right? Like I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creat…”
Camille FournierSep 15, 2024▶ 8:22The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)
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