Last month, I conducted a fun social experiment with this article:
If you haven’t read it already, I give a stripped-down version of my Outlook meeting schedule of a somewhat average week as a new engineering manager.
Take a look and form some opinions. I ask in the article:
Are you an engineer and think I’m wasting time?
Are you a manager and think I’m terrible at time management?
You’re likely thinking “yes" to both and if you read some of the comments (both on Medium and Reddit), most people strongly think so too.
Now take a step back, and see the content for what it is. It intentionally leaves out specifics about what cadence, context, purpose, and agenda of most of the meetings. It also leaves out what my role is as a manager for these teams and how I fit into the larger organization as a whole.
I’m sure you’re wondering what the point of this is. I promise you it’s not a feeble attempt at trying to save face on the internet. For me, as a new manager, I learned a lot about the most common pain points engineers experience which has helped me positively change my habits and routines at work (thanks!). For you, I’d like to leave you thinking about how in these pandemic times, our increased lack of context due to remote working environments could adversely affect our understanding and judgment.
My “real” schedule isn’t perfect by any measure, and in fact far from it. Yes, I am fully admitting that I have much to learn on my road to being an effective manager. I even took advice from the comments, like changing my direct report 1 on 1s from weekly to bi-weekly, which was well-received by all of my engineers and freed up another 2 hours for me every week. However, I didn’t write the article because I’m a masochist for harsh internet criticism, but to gather some insight on the inherent biases of those in tech.
Based on the contextless data presented, what opinions and suggestions could I gather from the comments knowing that they are heavily biased by their own experiences? Hence, the slightly controversial “The Office” screen grab and caption from the original article:
Paint me in the image of those around you.
Let’s take a look at the masterpiece, shall we? I went through all the comments on that article from Medium, Reddit, and HackerNews (thank you mooreds for sharing with the community) and collated the themes:
The first pie chart shows how many people explicitly mentioned that they were either a manager or an individual contributor (engineer).
The second pie chart counts how many of the respondents had a positive or negative opinion about the article. To be clear, positive meant they said I was doing a great job, negative meant they said I was an absolute dolt, and neutral were people who didn’t specifically say I was doing a particularly good or bad job but still had suggestions or opinions about the content. To clarify, most of the “neutral” respondents did imply I was a bad manager but didn’t explicitly call it out.
Now before you start going up in arms about the “scientific gold standard” of analysis, I’m telling you right now this data is just for fun! This isn’t proof, this isn’t statistically valid, this isn’t reliable data. To clarify again, what I’ve collated here is just for fun! Let’s call it “food for thought”.
Now, for the common themes of advice:
I won’t go into any sort of analysis because, as I said, this is not a statistically valid or scientifically sound experiment, nor am I a perfect manager to be giving advice on the internet.
What I do want to point out is the number of people who called out the inherent lack of context in the article (8) and how their opinions might be skewed due to their own pre-existing biases (5). It’s also important to note that almost everyone who mentioned the lack of context also called out their own biases. Of the total 90 respondents I recorded, approximately less than 10% of them mentioned the “void” in which the article was made.
The original article was supposed to invite harsh criticism, so I’m not here to try to make you feel guilty or to try to redeem myself (as I said, I still have miles to go). All of this is really just a long winded way of saying, examine the context and the limitations of our understanding before making brash decisions.
That, folks, is what we think an engineering manager should be doing.
