Fournier: Engineering managers cannot code their way out of delivery problems
Camille Fournier · Camille Fournier on Managing Technical Teams · Y Combinator · Jul 17, 2019 · at 15:28
Camille Fournier, author of The Manager's Path, discusses common failure modes of first-time engineering managers transitioning from individual contributor roles.
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“New managers tend to default to writing code to solve their problems. So new managers who used to be ICs, they look at a team, and they look at a team that's struggling, and the thing that they want to do is be like, I can just take some of these tickets, I can take some of these features, I'll bang it out over the weekend, I'll bang it out tonight, I'll get us back on track no problem, and that very rarely works well. Usually, if your team is struggling to ship or they're, You know, they've got a tight deadline that they're not meeting. The right thing for you to do is not to jump in there and add more code, but is to figure out what went wrong in your planning that got you to this point is to figure out how you can unblock them in other ways. How can you get designed to get them assets faster or whatever? How can you work with the product team to downscope what needs to be delivered instead of just jumping in and writing code?”
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