This is clearly a good EM. Agreed with pretty much everything, being on the engineering side. Stuff that seems trivial and obvious but that a lot of EMs miss.
I wholeheartedly agree with point 7 Your goal is for your team to thrive without you.
I spent a lot of time also playing a Scrum Master role in addition to my regular duties. So much so that some managers asked me to pursue this full time. I always explained that my goal is to be there just as a point of contact and that the team should be able to manage itself.
Sadly, I see so many managers, scrum masters, or even regular engineers consider this as a dumb approach to make yourself replaceable. If you don't hoard knowledge then you'll be laid off when the company's numbers look bad.
Whoa an EM that talks to clients? A rare treat. I just got a browbeating because I (an IC) didn't jump at the chance to do more (that) for ~free~ growth. Ahem.
Mind you, we have piles of both kinds of PMs: product, project. Best I can tell, they play video games between calls/status updates. Forgot the blur on more than one occasion. Clownshow, myself included.
Why do people espouse goals like “not to be needed?” I never understood that. It sounds like LinkedIn virtue signaling. It’s a capitalist talking point along the lines of “I seek to be good and inexpensive capital for my corporate masters.”
My goal is to help my team succeed in such a way as to keep my job or else get a better one. Being “not needed” hardly serves that goal.
Look around you. We are in a world that is turning away from middle managers. Don’t play into their hands.
The way I read it is not to be needed for normal functionality of the team, not to "not be needed" at all. Akin to a ship's captain - for the most part a ship works without a captain just fine, but that doesn't make the captain's job redundant, it's just he's needed for specific occasions, otherwise, he's just making sure the crew works as a well oiled machine.
Because it's a good heuristic for a functional and resilient team. People don't usually means it literally, more like "if I disappeared it should be pretty painless for the team to continue along for a month or so and to find and onboard a replacement".
Damn, this person looks like a good manager.
These are all things I have seen in my good managers over the years when I had them.
Yes, he has a lot of accumulated experience!
This is clearly a good EM. Agreed with pretty much everything, being on the engineering side. Stuff that seems trivial and obvious but that a lot of EMs miss.
I wholeheartedly agree with point 7 Your goal is for your team to thrive without you.
I spent a lot of time also playing a Scrum Master role in addition to my regular duties. So much so that some managers asked me to pursue this full time. I always explained that my goal is to be there just as a point of contact and that the team should be able to manage itself.
Sadly, I see so many managers, scrum masters, or even regular engineers consider this as a dumb approach to make yourself replaceable. If you don't hoard knowledge then you'll be laid off when the company's numbers look bad.
I've always told my engineers that their job is to get me fired for redundancy.
I always say that a job without an end date is a lifestyle.
I completely agree with point 9
Whoa an EM that talks to clients? A rare treat. I just got a browbeating because I (an IC) didn't jump at the chance to do more (that) for ~free~ growth. Ahem.
Mind you, we have piles of both kinds of PMs: product, project. Best I can tell, they play video games between calls/status updates. Forgot the blur on more than one occasion. Clownshow, myself included.
Why do people espouse goals like “not to be needed?” I never understood that. It sounds like LinkedIn virtue signaling. It’s a capitalist talking point along the lines of “I seek to be good and inexpensive capital for my corporate masters.”
My goal is to help my team succeed in such a way as to keep my job or else get a better one. Being “not needed” hardly serves that goal.
Look around you. We are in a world that is turning away from middle managers. Don’t play into their hands.
The way I read it is not to be needed for normal functionality of the team, not to "not be needed" at all. Akin to a ship's captain - for the most part a ship works without a captain just fine, but that doesn't make the captain's job redundant, it's just he's needed for specific occasions, otherwise, he's just making sure the crew works as a well oiled machine.
Because it's a good heuristic for a functional and resilient team. People don't usually means it literally, more like "if I disappeared it should be pretty painless for the team to continue along for a month or so and to find and onboard a replacement".
I think the points made at mostly for a front-line manager though, not so much for a middle manager.
cause it means: I lead them so good that I do nothing and still get my salary.
the coder's equivalent is not get paged (or bug reports). the system run's itself with no dramas, so I get to work on improving it.