One of the best engineering manager job adverts I've seen.
1. No unnecessary requirements beyond "having done some level of a similar job" 2. A very clear 30-60-90-180 days plan (the majority of the ad) 3. A salary range 4. Paid the same wherever you are based (even outside US!)
I assume decent job ads like this (that also offer terms that should be standard but are not, like remote, with the same, NY-like salary) will get lots of applications.
I heard the team is split between the East Coast and EU: I assume the timezone will be important.
Just know that honest job ads like this can generate a LOT of interest. Take it from @dhh - Basecamp saw 400+ applications for a senior engineer: m.signalvnoise.com/the-worst-part…
Also, has anyone noticed the company
*gasp*
does NOT expect the new manager to manage a team from day one? They
*gasp again*
Onboard this person FIRST and THEN (after around 3 months) pair them with a team.
This is not some massive corporation. It's a small startup!
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Two small reasons to consider working at a company that has a high-quality engineering blog:
1. A sign of a transparent engineering culture (important!)
2. Some of your work & impact can become public (writing on the eng blog), possibly creating future opportunities for you.
High-quality eng blogs:
- Share in-depth details about eng challenges, approaches, learnings.
- Talk about (internal) tools used & specifics. Often with screenshots, code samples.
- *Always* display names of the engineers authoring the post
A company with a high-quality engineering blog typically:
- Supports engineers attending engineering conferences, talking about their learnings
- Has much larger internal awareness of who does what ("have you read their blog post?")
- Can attract industry-known talent more
I've been tiptoeing on software engineering compensation in the Netherlands and Europe because... I was on the high end of it. Me and many others.
I'm starting to talk about how this system works, starting with why compensation is "tripolar". And why this is important (cont'd):
Silicon Valley is having a *huge* effect on the market going up. It might also help reverse people leaving from the EU to the US to make massive salary gains, now that the "top of the market" is going up. By a LOT.
Don't take how important it is to talk about salaries from me. Take it from a DM from a person who told me he wished he knew about these things *years* earlier.
In the best engineering organizations, engineers tend to get a lot of support from managers. And it works!
But I've yet to see a place that gave *proper* support for the frontline managers supporting their teams. It works for a while: until these managers burn out and leave.
"Proper support":
- Mentors in the org for line managers
- Team meetings with the "manager team" that's both a safe space to vent, and to take action
- Involving EMs in top-down decisions that will hit their teams
- Running retrospectives with the EMs, and acting on them
While I know a *lot* of frontline engineering managers who are amazing at taking care of their team, managers of managers and directors suddenly "forget" to do the same with their EMs.
Directors will often assume EMs don't need this. On the medium- and long-term: they would.
LinkedIn built their own crash reporting solution, and explain why they did it, and what benefits they saw.
2. At Uber, similar to LinkedIn, the mobile platform team built an internal crash reporting tool called Healthline that supported signals like ANR, non-fatal, OOM and memory leaks.
It was/is a really nice tool, with many internal integrations.
The engineering career framework for @prezi, with typical post-college experience years of experience, as shared by their former CTO. He's talking about what makes for a good software eng growth framework.
They settled on 6 levels to allow for enough space for growth.
They created an internal tool so people can browse definitions & examples, and for people to be able to rate themselves.
Engineers started to rate themselves, and use it as a starting point for career conversations with managers.
It worked out FAR better than they expected.
Promotions, merit increases are pretty standard (note to self: I'll share some details on this for non-EMs).
Promo committees are what you'd expect from a "modern" tech company their size.
Uber used to have more eng-heavy, as well as more manager-heavy committees:
Today’s episode of of practical software engineering tips & tricks: load testing 3rd party services/APIs in prod.
Aka how we made sure Uber’s payments providers would also be ready for the New Years Eve surge in the early years. A thread.
Up to around 2018, Uber saw a 5-10x traffic spike on NYE. Funny enough the spike would become the new “baseline” traffic for the next September.
But the first few years this spoke would nearly cripple the company. So we started preparing ahead of time and load testing the fall.
After we’d load test most internal services and ensure they’d cope, the next failure vector: 3rd party services.
We knew what would happen on NYE and were on standby. They had no clue and though assured over email they can take a 10x load... let’s say it wasn’t always the case.