The Engineering/Management Pendulum with Charity Majors

Charity Majors is CTO and co-founder at Honeycomb, book author, speaker, and a person unselfishly sharing her views and lessons from both leadership and engineering perspective. I talked to Charity about engineering management and platform engineering, how long you should sharpen your technical saw before thinking about a management role, and whether it is ok for managers to feel useless sometimes :)

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This interview is featured in 0800-DEVOPS #44 - The Engineering/Management Pendulum with Charity Majors.

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(6:37)
"The greatest technologists in the world that I know have all done some time as managers. They all have that skill set. But they are never too far away, never too many years removed from being an IC themselves, because there is wisdom you get from dealing with the technology that you can't get from sitting several layers away."

(11:55)
"As a manager, you can't make decisions in a vacuum the way you could as an engineer. There is no such thing as a good decision independent of other people because all decisions involve other people."

(18:14)
"Engineers don't typically go, "I'm done with coding forever. I wanna be a manager ". They want to try things. They want to go back and forth. Most organizations haven't figured out how to incentivize this or how to support people in doing it."

(18:55)
"You want to optimize not for people becoming more powerful in one role but for them staying curious and engaged."

(23:10)
"Management is just a bunch of skills. People don't have to become managers in order to learn those skills."

(25:35)
"People should have some agency in what team they want to go to."

(29:55)
"Platform Engineering is a form of operationally focused software engineering where your customers are internal instead of external."

(31:20)
"You give them all these tools so they can own their own code in production, not so you can own it for them."

(34:52)
"The experience of running software is one that has been consistently devalued and marginalized when it comes to software engineering teams. They typically don't give enough respect to just how difficult and traumatic it can be. There is a sense you get from having run big complex systems for a long time. You can sense where the holes are."

Text me what you think.