When should someone think about trying out to be an engineering manager? It's difficult to understand the complexity of software unless you've seen a number of different scenarios worked with different types of teams. What I do see quite commonly is spending some good time being an individual contributor. That means that you can better empathize with the challenges your team are going to have.
“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it sustainably over time."
Today's clip is from episode 94 with Patrick Kua. In this clip, we discussed Pat’s latest course, Engineering Manager Essentials. We discussed what an engineering manager role is, how it differs from a Tech Lead role, and the common manager versus IC career track. Pat also shared his view on why being an engineering manager is not a promotion.
Listen out for:
- Engineering Manager Essentials - [00:00:50]
- The Role of Engineering Manager - [00:02:46]
- Difference With Tech Lead - [00:05:43]
- Manager and IC Paths - [00:07:53]
- EM Is Not a Promotion - [00:12:27]
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Patrick Kua’s Bio
Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with almost 20 years of experience. His personal passion is accelerating the growth and success of tech organisations and technical leaders. He has had many years of hands-on experience, leading, managing and improving complex organisations and software systems as the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany) and as a Technical Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is a frequent keynote and conference speaker, author of three books including “The Retrospective Handbook“, “Talking with Tech Leads“ and “Building Evolutionary Architectures“ and runs the free popular newsletter for leaders in tech, “Level Up” and the “Tech Lead Academy“, offering online training for technical leaders, or running his very popular “Shortcut to Tech Leadership“ workshop.
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/94.
