How to Take Great Engineers & Make Them Great Technical Leaders • Courtney Hemphill • GOTO 2017

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2017
gotocph.com
Courtney Hemphill - Fostering Technical Team Leadership at Carbon Five
ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
The Engineering-Manager Transition: How to take great Engineers and make them great Technical Leaders
ABSTRACT
From mentoring team members to aligning engineering efforts with business priorities, today's companies are in dire need of great technical leaders. There is no management school for this and most organizations lack access to guidance or a mentorship framework that can transition their most talented core contributors into contemporary engineering [...]
Download slides and read the full abstract here:
gotocph.com/2017/sessions/151
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[@matijag2]

I kept pausing the video to take notes.

[@aman__toor.]

Amazing presentation - I never watch full lengthy videos but this one had me hooked.

[@uma_r]

Good to share own experiences and knowledge. Nice talk

[@islamtaha7687]

Thanks for sharing

[@TheodoreRavindranath]

Really good talk for newbie leads. Lot of interesting points which generic leadership talks don't touch upon!

[@amitpadgaonkar8830]

I will listen to this again and again

[@justin801228]

really useful talk

[@beedeeuniko]

finally a well structured, well presented, charismatic talk

[@PedroOliveirapcbo]

Great talk, thanks :)

[@ricmrodrigues]

For me the key takeaway was the 2 paths at the end. The manager path and the maker path and both of them have a future a way to progress. This is great! A lot of companies push great technical people into management to be able to advance their career when they don't want to manage people, is pushing them out, creating a bigger problem by pushing reports out and even losing great value in their technical skills!

[@amitpadgaonkar8830]

She is my hero

[@StewartBairdPhoto]

Excellent preso

[@kapilshekhar]

Looks like she has read a tonn of blogs and is simply dumping them in the talk. Sorry, this talk didnt do justice to this important issue. From my person experience : 1. Technical Leaders take away management BS in dealing with people. 2. They are honest, upfront & rewarding , just as technology is. Mentees feel that. 3. They are bold, "have their back", standup for truth, standup even when they may be pulled down because of it by the "pure managers". 4. They will NOT shy away from getting involved in fun part of team. They are not bosses, they just are engineers with more experience and acceptance that they can take responsibility of humans. 5. They should be willing to sit down with engineers and solve issues with them, and make a developer realize good practices, technology patterns so that the mentees have that sweet comforting feeling that they are learning. 6. Organization should assess if the person who are responsible for humans are actually qualified. Qualified in terms of what they think and do they know what it means and takes. Becoming managers is not a temporal progress of engineers. This is one of the diseases that IT world has been suffering from. 7. Managers should be assessed based on the reverse feedback from their team and not by their bosses. Managers worth lies in how happy their team is, and not how their bosses "perceive" their handling of people. Again, this talk is bunch of names and jargons...… exactly what managers and mentors should not have. sigh !

[@seidenada526]

Kapil Raina, by your points I can see that you perceive an organization as the developers vs. management. The tech lead should stand up to what? To protect the team from pure managers. Because engineers are not managers, and don't want to progress onto managers, and thinking about this it's a disease. What toxic environments you must have been exposed to. But there is hope. If you can imagine that the attitude the tech lead has to their team - a responsible and mature guidance - can be the attitude of a real manager, the "us vs them" picture could be changed. And you could have the sweet and comfortable feeling of building an awesome and successful product together. The talk though, no idea. Just started.

[@move1649]

I noticed at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="234">3:54</a> there's no amazon, prob because amazon tenure is much higher than other companies?

[@EnterANameReal]

They’re notorious for burning through people

[@jeffreychongsathien]

You don't need a specific book for software management. It's just leadership, applicable everywhere, and the role models are everywhere: Dick Winters, Captain Picard, Winston Churchill ...

[@black_baron_net]

☠BLACK BARON☠ ... and where is the Team "007" in Mänätschment 101 testing the code ... all day ... monday to sunday? Do you have "iRobots" for this in America?

[@wtfhej]

Right

[@PoppySeed84]

sounds like a very cookie cutter approach to leadership. from my experience, the best leaders in the software industry were ones who didnt ever really talk about "leadership"... they were the ones who got there by understanding the technologies and products so well, they just naturally became a resource of knowledge that people went to. all of these cookie cutter approaches to leadership end up driving the wrong people into management... "oh im more of a big picture person, im not really interested in the code..." these people have not developed their skills as an engineer nearly enough to become a leader of engineers. its ridiculous. im not saying this lady is like that, but she paints a cookie cutter approach to leadership and i just dont think good leaders follow any specific formula. i think they are a product of their environment with dedication to being great from a ground up approach. if they are truly great at what they do, combined with a good attitude that people feel comfortable approaching, then they naturally become good leaders. scrap the cookie cutter approach. focus on becoming truly great at building software along with being an approachable person with a good attitude. these people are kinda rare, and for good reason. its HARD WORK to be truly great. there is no cookie cutter approach.

[@BrennHill]

There's a difference between technical leadership and people management. Great technical people aren't always great leaders, and leadership isn't just about tech. Moreover, many of the demands on the time for leaders (company/business strategy, aligning different teams, etc) have nothing to do with the underlying tech at all. I went down the maker path and now I've gone down the management path and past the "line-level" engineering manager the underlying tech quickly fades in importance in the day to day. The leader/manager needs to understand how it works, but they won't be hands on at that point nor should they be.

[@PoppySeed84]

@@BrennHill ya i agree there are positions that are truly people management and they are important. but im more talking about the direct engineering managers. ive worked at a few tech places. big and small. it can be frustrating from an engineering stand point when direct managers haven't mastered the craft they are managing and when things go wrong, they have no idea how to help except to have another meeting to discuss what went wrong over and over. when u have a manager who truly understands the tech, they really shine in those crunch time moments. they understand the work thoroughly. they understand the other engineers strengths. and they know what actually needs done in order to finish the project. they are a rare breed, but ive seen them in action and they do exist. ive also had a good "people manager" who made an impact on me, but i think what made him great was his willingness to jump into the tech and at least try to understand exactly what people were working on.

[@PoppySeed84]

so ya, at the end of the day, good managers come from all different backgrounds, but imo, the most effective ones choose to embrace the struggles with the engineers rather than place the problems "below" them because they are just focused on climbing the corporate ladder.

[@BrennHill]

@@PoppySeed84 A good manager needs to know what's going on, but they don't need endless meetings. The right way to handle this is just "What happened? OK, got it. What do you need from me to get this solved?". Then they go make sure those things happen. That might mean anything from resources to late-night pizza delivery. If they can dive into the tech, that's great as well. But I've seen that go wrong where the manager tries to dive into tech they don't know well. In multi-functional teams it's unlikely the manager is an expert on ALL aspects of the stack, so just admitting they can't help directly and doing what they can is the best.

[@PoppySeed84]

@@BrennHill i dont disagree. im just an engineer so im biased hah. whatever works at the end of the day!

[@aidenkim6629]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="640">10:40</a>

[@prolific9002]

of course it's "super important"

[@enokoner]

So what if your "human" self doesn't fit most of the cultures on most of these tech teams?

[@prolific9002]

McKenzie. this is what you pay for. "consulting"

[@cabc74]

"Does anyone know...?"

[@dachr2]

It's a good talk but agreed; that doesn't really bring anything to the talk.

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

If you think that knowing more about the historical figures and associated history of the software industry is not valuable then you have a lot to learn.

[@dachr2]

Jeremy Anderson Then tell people about them instead of constantly asking the audience, making them feel stupid when they have no idea who she's talking about.

[@matijag2]

I think she is doing that to gauge how deep she should go into the subject. If a lot of her LIVE audience knows about it, why should she go into details? Doesn't do anything for the youtube audience, but her primary audience is live, at the conference.

[@AntonMochalin]

@@JeremyAndersonBoise The problem is that they aren't historical figures but just random names no one gives a shit about

[@lewis6590]

Not really a very cohesive talk. Lots of little pieces of information taken from a range of places but I don't know what principles they're supposed to add up to.

[@tomgcolemangoplayer]

Ya know, great content, right? I learn a lot, right? Try adding some silence now and then, and slow down for emphasis.

[@AntonMochalin]

It's funny how she keeps asking the audience whether they know about people no one knows (and gives a shit) about

[@move1649]

presenter: does any one know *** from ***? audience: ... presenter: has anyone heard ***? audience: ... presenter: does any one know *** from ***? audience: ... presenter: has anyone heard ***? audience: ... presenter: does any one know *** from ***? audience: ... ...

[@theuglynovember]

charismatic opening, fine i'll listen to a talk about gross humans

[@chalchalamchal]

very boring not getting a point what she wanted to convey actually

[@BuffNerdInCa]

Stopping at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="900">15:00</a>. Long winded waste of time consisting of name, and jargon dropping. Little to no useful content. Someone wanted to stroke their own ego as opposed to giving a usefull presentstion.

[@Natasha-re1kt]

This is what happens when a person who has no computer science/engineering back ground or people leaders qualification and skills are promoted to those positions. No sure about engineering or management but her networking skills may have been strong ;)

[@omeryehezkely3096]

When your manager doesn't understand that code is NOT reversible you know you can't expect much...

[@TheFremenChick]

git

[@prolific9002]

what a load of splank, Rambled on and didn't deliver anything.

[@sakcee]

A bit stupid talk to be honest., stupid, all developers are introverts , non introverts are managers and mba , after all the coding and engineering skills you didn’t learn anything