Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

> How do you approach supporting/maintaining relationships with teams whose work is not the most impactful but who still come to you for engineering support?

If it is a new relationship, I tell them no. I then provide them with my estimation for the impact of the proposed collaboration and my estimation for the impact of the work that we are funding. And I encourage them to escalate through my management if they disagree with my conclusion.

The harder one is if we have already provided something for this team. The way to avoid this is to try to document support expectations as clearly as possible in the very beginning and ruthlessly prevent things from growing beyond that. I've done this poorly in the past and ended up inheriting support for less impactful collaborations that I can no longer deprioritize.

> Also, how do you balance or position for greater long term impact vs lesser immediate impact?

Work with leaders to define their priority balance for short vs long term impact and try to match that. Some orgs really really need short term wins. Other orgs can afford to take a longer vision.

My company tries to go out of its way to be inclusive in the hiring process (including trying to do away with requirements etc) and the hiring pipeline is predominantly white/Asian men, and outside of it the occasional Asian woman. The really rare candidate that falls out of this category interviews alright at best and we have given them offers in the past. Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme.

The poster clearly mentions they want to increase diversity and unless they do something sexist /racist as part of their interview what more are they supposed to do? If they look all white now what are they supposed to do about it? Find the token colored person from some corner of the company and paste them in every page in their website?

I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure).

We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well.

This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down.

I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual.

The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.

These anecdote-for-anecdote hiring threads are often missing crucial elements like location. Even now with most jobs being significantly remote, hiring is very regional. Problems in one job market will often be non-problems in another and, especially where race is concerned, the demographics of different cities can be wildly different.

There’s also other ways the hiring pool becomes fragmented such as area of focus (e.g. game dev vs web dev vs embedded dev) that make employees non-fungible.

I guess the point is that both can be true. There can be a frustrating shortage of qualified under-represented minorities available to companies and it can be hard for qualified under-represented minorities to find work. The job market is not like the financial markets where money can mostly move fluidly to the area of highest opportunity. Job fits are more complex and we should naturally expect a much less efficient allocation of employees.

Totally possible! I'm just going by my own experience. Most of the applicants I've seen have been unqualified, though, at least going by their resumes. I'd love to find some talented women of color to join

more likely they optimize along the same dimensions as FAANG companies, i.e. proficiency in Leetcode and memorizing "system design" templates.

This leads to implicit discrimination against anyone who doesn't spend months grinding for these "exams", with the same distribution of "grades" across races/ethnicities/genders as e.g. math tests in schools.

I would love to take credit for this, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly mind-blowing. I would honestly attribute it to sheer luck. That said, my company has had increased turnover in the last 6 months, but my organization has not. Just to be clear that I'm not claiming nobody is leaving the company. But if the company overall has attrition and my team doesn't, I must be doing something right, right? Not necessarily... again, could be sheer dumb luck that I have people that hate looking for jobs or something.

(Disclaimer: I have fired people, and I have had two people transferred off my team onto other teams, and both of them have left the company, but I don't count those as attrition under me.)

But if I had to pick something as a thing that I do to make sure my teams are happy and want to stay, it's this: I care deeply about the people who work for me. I'm a people-first leader. I firmly and strongly believe that unhappy people do shitty work, and happy people do good work. I believe that you don't get what you don't ask for (eg, raises, promotions, cool projects), and I also believe that most people won't ask for those things... so I pro-actively ask for them. Our 1:1s are their time to talk about whatever they want to talk about. It's not my time to pontificate. But if they don't have anything to talk about, I'll ask them questions! Things like: where do you see yourself in 5 years? Are you happy with the project you're working on? Are there cool projects that you want to work on? Is there a piece of technology that you haven't used that you would like to learn?

And then once I get those answers, I work with them to achieve those goals. If they want to be a manager in 5 years, then we work on that. If they love the project they're on, then I get them more involved. If they want to work on Project X, then I figure out a way for them to transition off what they're doing now and move on to the other thing.

I also spend a lot of time getting to know them as people. I know their partner's and kids' names, their hobbies, where they go on vacation. I frequently ask questions about those, like, "Did [partner's name] get that promotion?" or "Are you looking forward to your next trip to Disney World?" or "Has [kid's name] seen the movie The Mitchells & The Machines?" and so on.

I'm transparent and honest. I make it clear that I support them as much as I possibly can, and that I would rather they be successful and happy than successful and miserable. One of my guys came to me about three months ago and said, "A recruiter from Stripe reached out to me about a role there. Why shouldn't I apply there?" and I just shrugged and said, "You should. You should always have an idea of what you're worth on the market, and if you think that's a better fit for you than here, I support you." And he applied and he got an offer and it was a little more than he was making here, but he declined because he felt like he'd be a cog in the machine at Stripe versus a valued member of my team. On the flip side, the offer clarified some ideas that he had in his mind about where he wanted to take his career, and so for the past few months we've been talking in our 1:1s about how to shift his career into a different direction, and he's been taking advantage of some opportunities that have come up.

(NOTE: Despite the above scenario, I would never ever suggest to your boss that you are looking elsewhere, no matter how good your relationship is with your boss. It puts us in a very difficult position regarding certain decisions around pay raises and bonuses and promotions and hiring and so on. I did give this feedback to this engineer.)

So if I had to claim credit for anything, it's just that. The soft skill of treating people like people, trusting them to do their jobs well, and giving them the space to make mistakes, learn, and grow along with me. After all, I don't know what the hell I'm doing either. :)

(I really do think I got lucky with a team of rockstar engineers.)

This is a great question.

Diversity is the solution to groupthink. From the book Surrounded By Idiots, the author demonstrates that people with different backgrounds and behaviour models come together to make stronger teams.

As engineers become more senior, they have a hand in design, in product etc. they bring something of themselves to their software solutions. Making software with only a team of white dudes means you miss the mark on issues important outside that group.

Also, inclusion goes hand in hand with diversity. People from all ethnicities and not just cis males can code, but if your team is mainly white guys, you have to work twice as hard convincing others that they'll be welcome and fit right in otherwise it becomes a self perpetuating pattern.

Also, "abilities" is subjective. If your exemplar for software engineer progression is a path that fits a majority white man route into the industry, and plays to the strengths of the people you promote, you'll over-index on those abilities. It's a good question to ask, what skills are we missing out on because our lack of diversity leads us to self selecting?

For transparency, I'm a white cis male manager, who manages a team of almost exclusively white cis males. I'm working on some long term strategic projects to help foster diversity in engineering in my city.

Someone else answered the second part so I'll just focus on the first part. The 30-40% might be a little hyperbole, but napkin math says it's not terribly far off. The reason I spend that much of my time on hiring is because we always have more work than we have engineers, and we have yet to fill our headcount quota. There's ALWAYS a position open. It just never ends. Fortunately, I like the process, so it's not a burden on me!

Our comp isn't the most competitive in the SF Bay Area. It's competitive, but if you really want more money, there are other places to go. We're fine with that, generally. Our HQ is not in SF at all, and neither is our parent company, so there's some weirdness at the really high levels of the company about how much we should be offering people. In fact, there are some states that we hire in people make a KILLING. SF is not one of those. That said, we are competitive enough and I rarely get offers declined because of pay. Most folks don't even try to negotiate much, even though they should! [0]

I actually have a great closing rate! In other words, when I make an offer, people accept! I'm very good at selling people on the team and the company! If you get to the stage where I make you an offer, I am generally pretty confident that you're going to accept and that you're going to be a great fit.

But getting a candidate to that offer stage is fairly hard. My standards are a little different than most of my peers (a thesis on which I'm not sure I could elaborate coherently nor in the space allotted here on HN... maybe a future blog post), and so I suspect I spend less time actually interviewing than you might think. But "time on hiring" is not just the interviewing process. It's figuring out what the best process is, looking at our funnel and identifying bottlenecks, sourcing high quality candidates. Is our technical screen a good one? Does it evaluate what we think it does? Do our candidates that are rejected walk away feeling frustrated rather than challenged? Is it a fair and equitable hiring process? Is the interview panel a diverse cross-section of the company and representative of the types of folks the candidate would work with? Are we giving them adequate time to learn about us as well? I could go on...

Then there's the looking at resumes. Most of my peers are almost exclusively looking for senior roles, whereas I'm usually willing to have more of a mix between senior/intermediate/new engineers. This willingness depends on the composition of the team, but I actually really enjoy converting interns into full-time employees (75% success rate on that so far!). But we get SO. MANY. APPLICANTS. for every single role, that for me and my recruiting team to go through them and figure out which ones are worth taking 30 minutes out of my day to talk to, that takes time and energy. And I feel bad about every single person that I decline to speak to, but I just have to manage my time more efficiently or else I'd be spending 100% of my time on this specific part of the hiring process.

This part DOES take a lot of time, but truthfully, it's like 2-3 hours a week on any given week, and sometimes 4-5 hours on my worst weeks, and it's easily the worst part of the whole process.

The actual interview process, for me, is about 30+15 minutes per candidate. I do a 30 minute phone screen at the start, and then I'm usually the one who makes the offer at the end, since I have one the best closing rates in the company. The actual interview process is not a huge time sink for me. In fact, the interview process is pretty streamlined and at this point is kind of a well-oiled machine. I average about 1.5 offers per month, and I'd say we interview 3-5 candidates before one of them gets an offer, so this isn't tremendously burdensome.

Then there's the post-offer phase, where we need to coordinate with HR and recruiting to get the new hire onboarded, get them a laptop and some swag, make sure all of their credentials are set up, set up a welcome happy hour, and perhaps most importantly, make sure we have a well-defined project for them to start on day 1! There's nothing worse than starting on day 1 and twiddling your thumbs because nobody knows what you should be working on. It's the wooooorst. On average, my org has a new hire start every 2-3 weeks, so this isn't a trivial process, though it's far more streamlined than it was when I started.

Then there's the follow-up, which falls outside the "hiring" definition, but my managers and I absolutely spend time with the new hires for their first week or two to make sure they get up to speed quickly and become productive quickly. Especially since our primary programming language is Go and most folks don't know Go, so there's a short training class that we do to get them onboarded quickly.

So if you take the phrase "hiring" to mean only the interviewing process, then sure, 30% of my time seems like a lot. But when you add all the other stuff in, it's not really that bad. And in recent months, I've been training some of the managers to do it My Way (TM) and we're seeing some good results, so maybe it'll drop down to 15% soon! Ahh, a person can dream...

Thanks for the questions and the suggestion!

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Yeah, at my company, our CEO and half of our C-level execs are women, but less than 20% of our engineers are women.

To your point, every team in my org also has one or more... but it's not enough to have one in each team. More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. And when talking about people of color, the stats are even worse. It's less about whether we have any and more about whether our team composition reflects the population accurately.

To your other point, one of the reasons our teams are composed inequitably like this is because of exactly what you described: we have to take ANYONE who is qualified and accepts an offer, because otherwise we'd never even come close to our hiring goals! (Not that we ever meet those, anyway...)

I do attend a number of Women Who Code meetup events and I've been to two HBCU career fairs in the last few years. It's definitely something we do, but as you suggest, we could always do better. I'm a big advocate of this, but our recruiting team is the one who does most of the sourcing efforts and it's been tough to get them to think outside their traditional high-yield tech-bro mindset. I'm working on it!

I haven't seen that myself, but I don't think it's particularly surprising. We do get a lot of fresh college grads applying for jobs that I wouldn't normally consider them for, but we just either redirect them toward more junior roles or don't even process them altogether. I also have a fantastic relationship with our recruiter--we talk almost daily--and our minimum requirements (vs what's posted on the job ad) are clear enough that I normally don't get a lot of low-quality resumes sent to me directly.

You might be incorrectly conflating "underrepresented" with "marginalized." While it's true that the marginalized groups that we're talking about (women, people of color, people with disabilities) are also underrepresented, those are not the same things at all, and I chose the word "marginalized" intentionally.

Here's a link to what seems like a decent definition of "marginalization" to me: https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization

They meant "marginalized" in a far broader context than hiring. Just because someone is in high demand for a job doesn't mean they aren't marginalized in other aspects of their life.

> Surely you're a lot more valuable to a company with two years' of experience in a codebase vs. a new company with no experience.

You're not paid your value, you're paid the least amount a corporation can get away with paying you - which is a very different number. (Not that I resent it, it's part of doing business)

Generally people are wired to need a push rather than jump. This works both ways in hiring. Employers will try get away with lower salaries until the employee shows they have leverage and employees won't make the effort to get leverage.

I don't completely disagree, but to take the other side:

When you're being hired both you and the company are taking a bet. The company is betting that you're worth $x+$y/year, where $x is the salary and $y is bit extra to accommodate the risk that you aren't, you're betting that it's worth working for the company for $x-$z/year, where $x is the salary and $z is a bit extra to accommodate the risk that you aren't. I.e. both sides price in risk.

After a year or two, the risk on both sides has largely evaporated. The company now knows that you are (or aren't) worth $x+$y, and you know that it actually is (or isn't) worth working for the company at $x-$z.

There's now a delta between $y and $-z (assuming the initial estimates were accurate) where it "makes sense" for you to stay, the company could pay you more, but why would they? If it wasn't for the fact that shrinking salaries is a negative experience for the employee (more negative than the dollar difference) they could also pay you less. Splitting the difference by not changing the salary at all seems fair, and nicely lines up with the agreement you already have in place.

Over the past 4 years, my salary more than doubled. And my role is two rungs lower on the "career ladder". Every time I switch companies for a reduction in job title, I get a 50% raise. At the current rate, I'm looking forward to being an intern while making an executive salary.

My other comment here was cheeky, but I think what happens is the following:

Applicant A has the precise set of skills Business B needs desperately at that moment. Business B is willing to pay whatever needed to get Applicant A ASAP (because they are growing quickly, or in crisis, or just need that role filled fast). This is normally what causes salary bumps in job switches... because A would not accept an offer if it _wasn't_ substantially above what they make now.

My salary went up 60% by changing job twice.

The first place could have kept me by offering me fair market rate for the role I had.

The 2nd place couldn't have kept me with a bar of Gold every morning but it was a pay bump which levelled me into the salary I'm on now.

If your biggest issue is recruitment then it seems pretty obvious you pay your existing staff fair-market rate because replacing them is more expensive than just paying them (and because it's fair though fairness doesn't appear to a motivation).

Some companies (e.g. Amazon) have a policy to fire the lowest performing x percent every year, even if the whole team is good, which makes churn inevitable. It also leads to odd situations like hiring low quality talent just to provide the rotating foundation your real team rests on. And of course constant in-fighting to stay out of the bottom x percent by sabotaging rivals if necessary.

I am relatively new to the workforce, but I am struck by the amount of time spent reporting estimate, redoing estimates, and planning work.

I'm not writing code anymore for work, but I think engineers being replaced by the GPT-3 of coding is inevitable and happening, and ever-more-granular observability of (human) developers is just part of that process.

So you can run to a less anti-human org, but eventually we as a society are going to have to decide if humans deserve any dignity/freedom at all.