Patryk Jabłoński’s Post

Can an Engineering Manager who is 50% hands-on properly manage a team of Software Engineers as well? A conversation I had with an Engineering Lead I was pitching a position to, but he was not interested. He said with that much hands-on stuff in the role they would not be able to manage effectively. And not enough hours in the day. Even if the team of Engineers is quite Senior. But with most Engineering Leadership roles requiring a lot of hands-on work - surely this is not the case? And companies seem to think it is very doable based on the requirements for pretty much every Engineering Lead vacancy out there right now. #Ventellect #SoftwareEngineering #TechRecruitment

I call 50/50 split between management and hands-on involvement a death zone. Something like 70/30 can work well: you're mostly focused on one activity type (be it management or individual contributions) and partially covering another activity. And there's a wiggle room to temporary dedicate more time for one of the areas without another suffering too much. Once it's 50/50, it becomes unsustainable once one of activities requires extra attention. There's a critical technical issue that occupies 100% of your time for a day? You will go back to a pile of managerial issues that will occupy you 100% for a few days instead. You spend a day dealing with management stuff? Now there are deadlines at risk with your hands-on obligations. For this to work for you as an engineering manager, you got to be very conscious what you can afford to commit to at any given period of time. Team is running smoothly → can take on more hands-on work for the next few weeks. Got to onboard new employees or push an organizational change → keep your hands off code except for a few limited things. Pick one chair and put your feet on another one instead of trying to sit on both.

fellow engineers! today #deel is hosting an Engineering Hiring Happy Hour Event @ 6pm CET in case you're interested in Deel’s Engineering Team and how we work on cutting-edge projects at the fastest-growing SaaS company globally, register and join on the following link: https://lnkd.in/dfRM5daR   speakers: Yaron Lavi, Rene Pedersen, Mauricio Santos, Douglas Franklin - Dive into the scope of Deel’s cutting-edge Tech platform - Learn about Deel’s culture, various open Engineering positions and engineering growth paths - Live Questions

I loved this article from Tyke Lewis (I'm hoping he's a true #YorkshireMan!!) The biggest loss of value is a lack of ability to #prioritise, we use prioritisation workshops to support clients with diagnostic interventions. They are very revealing for clients when they may also wish to look at #Purpose and #Strategy alongside #organisationaldesign. The inability to prioritise or even to stick to priorities, especially one that has been clearly decided and properly risk and opportunity assessed can be a great diagnostic for a business and very revealing. Not being a team player is usually the most common reason for personal failure, not creating a team and high performance is the reason most people leave effective working groups, they aren't teams.

My job is to unleash the potential of my team and guide them in mastering their craft in quality engineering. 🥅 Today, I came across an insightful post by Karri from Linear. He shares: “To me, craft is a mindset, and quality is the result. Think about any well-made creation—it’s usually a product of care and mastery. The creators designed it thoughtfully, iterated, and prototyped. They selected the right materials and built it with precision. It’s apparent when someone doesn’t care—sloppiness and errors are visible, and such work breaks down quickly.” Karri also emphasizes the importance of possessing the right skills and ideas, and taking one’s craft seriously. 🧑💻 Our focus is on building a team that values experience, cares for quality output and puts customers first. ❤️ We’re starting small, asking the right questions, and aiming to grow with this mindset. It’s been a fantastic start! 🙏🏼 P.S.: If you resonate with these values, we’re still hiring for multiple roles in Quality Engineering.😄

How to know you’ve hired a GREAT product engineer: They over-communicate about what they’re doing. Engineering leads can become conduits who ensure everyone is working in sync on the right things, at the right cadences. But this requires a collaborative approach from the engineers. So, find engineers who make over-communication the standard. A Players know: The collective output is greater than the sum of individual efforts.

Software engineers are the highest impact employees in the world. There is no other role that allows you to impact the world at scale like a good software developer can. As Tony Summerville recently mentioned to us, "If you think of everyone in the past 50 years who has done big things, it's been someone that had their hands on the keyboard." The only way to ensure that your developers are driving the highest impact is by having effective, high-impact managers as well. But this area doesn't get as much love, training, press, or tooling. This is why we're focused on engineering managers. High-impact engineering managers drive high-impact engineers. High-impact engineers change the world. #softwareengineering #engineeringmanagement #devsaredifferent

Elevate your hiring game with our guide on crafting engaging engineering job descriptions! Learn the art of attracting top talent in 5 key steps. From defining the role to showcasing company culture, we've got you covered! Read the guide here: https://lnkd.in/eVQ4AxjB

Engineering leaders that want their teams to move faster or produce better results should do one specific activity - invest 2-3 weeks with your team time tracking each day and then do a retrospective: 1 - How much time was spent in meetings vs value-added engineering work? (Equally important to define what constitutes the latter!)  2 - How many hours of meetings should have been skipped? Make a guess before you collate the results 🙂 I bet you’ll be surprised. Before you go hiring more people or cost cutting - kill more meetings! Folks that aren’t familiar with Dovetail Product Development may doubt that the value is worth the cost. Yes - we do have best practices, experienced engineers, and specific tools and know how to amplify the effectivity of our work. But even more fundamentally, our team is spending just under 90% of their time focused on engineering, building or testing hardware and doing so in large blocks of time. How do we know? We’ve tracked all our time spent the last 8 months. And we know we win in this category. Plus - why are great engineers talking to us about joining? Because we are hiring great engineers to do engineering 🤯