As a manager I learned to keep my senior engineer pre-informed the hard way. Personally, when I was an IC, I was totally fine not being kept in the loop because I was impervious to such news or changes. So I just assumed that’s how it’s with everyone. Clearly I was wrong.
That said, it is important to release that pre-information in an informal fashion lest they start acting on it before it’s formally announced. Especially ones that impact the immediate peer teams such as re-org.
Also, I don't really see the point in hiring supposedly intelligent engineers and then cutting them out of the decision making process.
Btw I'm not even a senior engineer, I'm a _junior_.
In a biggish company you will come to learn that ICs's opinions doesn't matter; at best they will be heard to be ignored later. So as an IC the best thing for me was to focus my energy and skill to create the value the best way I could i.e., shipping software and helping my immediate neighbours unblock their work whichever way I could. Once my line manager noticed that I was indeed creating value through my primary skill he began seeking my opinion once in a while and I could see that it did have a bearing in his final decision.
There were a few vocal engineers who would regularly vent out their frustration over mailing lists, lunch tables etc., But as far as I could see it wasn't very useful in the sense it wasn't actionable. It takes quite a bit of energy and time to influence an outcome in a meaningful manner. You first need to build up sufficient social capital and then start pushing your opinion either directly or through others (i.e., "influence the influencers" as they say). Obviously it is a useful skill that can be acquired, the question is will you enjoy this in the long run.
I'm also more interested in understanding and being involved than simply being frustrated and venting.
To be explicit, there is absolutely a place to “shield the team”, but I’m talking about a pattern I’ve observed that many managers will use that as a pretext to avoid keeping people in the loop and essentially get to boost their own career by holding others back. Real shielding is when you politely tell team Y that their proposal is going to require your team to have to own and operate a net new production service, not when you make critical decisions without consulting some of the biggest stakeholders - your own team.
That's clearly not done. What I referred to was decisions that were taken outside the control of the line manager; such as re-org, change in promo process. The line manager will not be part of such decision making process they are mostly taken at director level or above. The line manager though will be kept informed/warned of such changes about a few weeks in advance which is when I would start warning senior engineers in my team.
You will be surprised to learn that line managers have very little influence or say in most of the critical decisions taken. One of their responsibilities is to keep the team pacified i.e., to ensure the "shield" works both ways ;-)
It is infeasible for literally everybody to be involved in a decision. So then the question is, how do you communicate a decision and when?
If you communicate "we are thinking about doing X" then this often causes problems with interpretation. People read these as big shifts in direction and experience whiplash or get overly excited and then disappointed when X doesn't happen. If you communicate "X is happening in 3 months" then the people negatively affected by X just get more stressed for more time even though they can take no action.
This can be different for different individuals. If somebody is especially bothered by not knowing things ahead of time you can adjust. But I find that if information isn't actionable then it is often in appropriate to share it way in advance of an actual change.
