How I became an Engineering Manager

19-minute read

The Job Link to heading

What does an Engineering Manager (EM) do? The job of an EM can be easily described with two sentences:

  1. Taking care of the employment experience of your direct reports
  2. Being a remover of uncertainty in your organisation

Practically, as an EM you have to do:

  1. Line management: look after your direct reports activities and mental health, do 121 sessions, performance objectives, career progression
  2. Metrics: properly measuring the success of your organisation with DORA metrics, OKRs or whatever fits the bill
  3. Hiring: getting new people in or letting people go, write job descriptions, conduct interviews, finding the right time or person to hire
  4. Team structure: Know people’s strengths and weaknesses and make sure the right ones work together on the right goal; resolve conflicts
  5. Processes: write policies and instructions for anything that’s not well defiled, review and improve existing documentation
  6. Communication: passing down the company strategy to your teams or gathering feedback for other team members
  7. The most important one: anything and everything that does not have a clear owner, until you find such a person

Sometimes you might be needed to act as a Project Manager, Product Owner, IT specialist, Sales Representative, Jira Admin, and every role in between. If you come from a Software Development background you might need to spend your time developing alongside your team as part of your normal responsibilities.

Contrary to vast popular belief, a good EM is not simply promoted from a Senior Engineer, in fact software engineering has nothing to do with being a good EM as you’re sacrificing all the technical skills you’ve mastered over your career so far to delve into the arcane art of instructing people. Software knowledge let’s you break the ice but it’s no guarantee you’ll survive in the cold deep waters. Becoming a EM is a sideways career move, not an upwards one. To move up the chain you need to be better at managing, not engineering.

What you need is a well defined goal: why do you want to be an EM?

For me: it’s the skill that I was lacking the most during my attempt to co-found a company previously to trying to get this position and when I’ll inevitably try again, in 5-10 years, I want to be better prepared. Therefore I’m willing to put in all the effort required of me developing these skills if I’m given the opportunity to do so, no matter how difficult. This is what I’ve told all my interviewers as well, it is no secret.

To achieve this you also need to set boundaries: you can do anything and everything you’re asked to do, but that’s just you acting in short term disaster recovery mode. The end goal is to delegate everything to specialists within your team.

Process Link to heading

Start date: February 2022

Steps:

  • Gather a list of leads
  • Filter for the good ones and contact them
  • Get offers
  • Choose the best one
  • Put in effort
  • Have luck
  • Profit!

Target end date: March 2022

I wanted to have a job within a month and start working immediately after.

Search for companies Link to heading

Made a list of all potential companies, searched on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and HN. There’s no point in going anywhere else on job boards as the above, in the order presented, have all the quality leads you need and the rest are just lousy duplicates at best (it baffles me how such job boards even exist anymore considering how bad they are).

In total I’ve gathered a list of 123 companies that could fit my criteria from the sources previously mentioned. Obviously I’m not going to divulge them, unless it’s the one I ultimately choose, or I absolutely need to shame them for illegal activities.

Templates Link to heading

Obviously contacting so many companies needs some form of email template. So here is what I had for my cover letter, containing my CV:

Hello <NAME>,

I'd like to schedule a chat with you to talk about my potential career at <COMPANY>.

What I'm interested in is an Engineering position in the UK, mainly dealing with
Ruby, although I could fit into a SRE role as well, with the transition to an
Engineering Manager role in the next 6 months to 1 year time. Reason why I
applied through this job form in particular. Of course I would love to start as
an Engineering Manager directly, but since I have very little experience in this
area, mostly from my role as a Co-Founder in my previous company, I thought a
transition role, where I can prove to you my capabilities, would give you more
confidence in how serious I am about this, and allow you to benefit from my Tech
skills as well.

My CV can be found here: https://www.codrut.pro/cv/

If this sounds good to you please let me know via email so we can arrange a
Google Meet call, there are a lot of questions I'd like to ask you.

Cheers,
Codruț

www.codrut.pro

A/B Test Link to heading

I tried contacting people at these companies in multiple ways:

  • Direct message the CEO/CTO on LinkedIn
  • Direct message another manager or engineer at the company
  • Direct message to a company recruiter
  • Send an email to the company contact address
  • Apply through their job board
  • 3rd party recruiters

While I did not track this in a pure scientific manner, what I found out was the following:

  1. By far the fastest way to get an interview scheduled is direct messaging people on LinkedIn, C*Os in particular.
  2. By far the worst way to get an interview was to apply through the job board.
  3. The best quality interactions I’ve had were with the companies that I contacted via the contact email address on their website.
  4. 3rd party recruiters were so clueless, disrespectfully, and gave the worst interviewing experience, so much that I vowed never to interact with a 3rd party recruiter in my life ever again.

Moral of the story: skip 3rd party recruiters forever and cold email companies is the best strategy.

Here’s how the story unfolded:

Total companies: 123 Link to heading

This is the total number of companies I’ve found. Put them in a markdown file and started categorising them. Obviously I did not just apply to all of these, they were top of the funnel leads after all, an initial quality control needed to be performed.

For every company I browsed their LinkedIn and website to determine if they were worthy of my attention at all.

Out of those I concluded:

Body shops: 27 Link to heading

It’s clear as daylight, body shops are a big NO. Been there, done that, scrubbed myself clean, and will never again. I want companies that actually build something useful, not companies that sell people.

Bullshit: 23 Link to heading

These are companies that make you wonder, how could anybody with a sane mind want to work there? I’m talking crypto scams, pornography, gambling, forex, antivirus/security. If I smell bullshit I call bullshit and carry on.

Irrelevant: 33 Link to heading

The search “algorithm” inserted them in the listings, most likely as sponsored content or ads, but they were clearly not relevant to my criteria, not having to do anything close to my past experience and clearly not even hiring for EM positions at that time. Plus their business models were in other industries most of the time (tech for them was a cost centre). So no, obviously I will not work for companies like these.

International: 2 Link to heading

Nothing necessarily wrong about them, but I wanted a strong presence in UK, and there were all over the place, they also would discriminate on my pay based on my location. Only reason they are not in the next section is that they are open about it.

Scumbags: 10 Link to heading

These are companies that have engaged with me and gave me such a horrible experience that I will forever blacklist them. And I will be extremely careful around co-workers that have come from those companies. I’m talking about:

  • Horrendous recruiters that treated me poorly
  • Being give psychological assessments, the type of thinks you expect from a fourth grade Kangaroou maths competition (anybody remember those? I used to do them back in primary school, fun when you’re a pupil, useless and insulting when you’re an adult).
  • Wanting me to move out of UK to a poor 3rd world country so they pay me less salary.
  • Simple, automated, almost instant rejection, without reason, and without even a semblance of human speech in the template email sent.
  • Take home exercised that I’m supposed to spend 4 hours on, and a reply that “it’s not good enough, do it again, 4 more hours” at the end. This prompted my “No more Take Home Challenges” rant and email templates.
  • Take home challenge when throughout the interview I was assured by everybody there was none
  • Already using their product and had to deal with horrible customer support, so there is no reason to even apply here, even if the company appeared in my searches and met the criteria. They can’t just expect to treat me poorly as a customer then be glad to work for them.
  • Scumbag interviewers on a power trip trying to prove themselves high and mighty in front of me, always interrupting, and dismissive of everything that did not fit his world view.
  • Would not forward my email to recruiters even after I expressed why I don’t want to engage with their potentially illegal job application form (more about this towards the end).

Rejections: 4 Link to heading

Simple, straightforward rejections:

  • No actual open positions (understandable, have a great day).
  • Won’t cancel take home challenge as that’s their process (their loss, they won’t hire any good people like this).
  • Won’t hire for EM position without experience.
  • Poor performance on the interview (this is fair).

Wanted me for tech, not management: 3 Link to heading

They were happy to proceed with a Senior Software Engineer position. Obviously that was no that I was aiming for so I had to tell them no.

Did not reply at all: 17 Link to heading

Why even bother… oh well, they get blacklisted.

Inactive: 2 Link to heading

They were simply too slow in the interview process, even though I had a few sessions with them, and by the time they were ready to proceed with the last round, I already accepted the offer and started working. Better luck next time (or not, I don’t apply to the same place twice).

Offers: 2 Link to heading

I was expecting there to be more, but anyway, got 2 offers and accepted one (duh!)

Now I work at Link to heading

They had it all:

  • A business model that made sense and was useful
  • Proper funding and runway management, not going bankrupt within the next year
  • Went through the interview process fast and smooth
  • Actually treated me like a EM candidate, even had a EM tailored challenge session (no other company did this)
  • Straightforward technical questions, no beating around the bush
  • Understood that I did not want to do a take home challenge
  • Actually read through my website, CV, and my FOSS projects
  • Made me a proper offer, not trying to low-ball me with a wage lower than a mid level engineer’s (like the other offer I had)
  • Agreed on the copyright clause I wanted in my contract

6 Months later Link to heading

Probation ended, and now I’m a full time EM in an amazing company.

1 Year later Link to heading

Still an EM, still amazing!

Conclusion Link to heading

From all of this I’ve learned the following:

  • 11 interviews in one week is too much, especially if the week starts with 4 interviews that Monday.
  • There’s no point in getting upset with how you’re treated, blacklist and carry on.
  • Create a blacklist of companies and people you had poor interactions with and simply not apply again at those companies or where those people work* Create a blacklist of companies and people you had poor interactions with and simply not apply again at those companies or where those people work. This will make future job searches way more easy, and higher quality.
  • If you’re desperate, do whatever is needed, without remorse, but if you’re not, take your time.
  • Yes, the recruiter fee (that can be as high as 30% of your first year salary) matters to the employers, and it comes out of YOUR salary. This is another nail in the 3rd party recruiter’s coffin. If you want to be able to negotiate better wages, go direct!
  • If your “main programming language” does not match what the company uses, they will use this to low-ball you, so don’t even bother applying unless you at least match the criteria for a SWE position perfectly.
  • Yet again it was reinforced to me that mentioning my desired salary is a horrible idea.

Now I have a great job and a blacklist with over 100 companies that I can skip next time I apply for jobs in the UK. But by the looks of it I won’t need to do that as the way current things are progressing I have a two sigma chance of spending my entire tenure at this company before jumping out to found the next.

An interesting excesses: going through this list of companies one year later and seeing which ones are now doing better, or are bankrupt. I definitely dodged a lot, and I mean A LOT, of bullets.

Appendix Link to heading

Illegal Job Posts Link to heading

Something I’ve noticed in the application forms for some companies, part of the application form you’re presented on their websites, they demand you give them extremely private and confidential information, practice which is illegal, goes against human dignity, GDPR, and civilised society.

They request to know:

  • How would you describe your gender identity?
  • Do you identify as transgender?
  • What are your pronouns?
  • What’s your sexual orientation?
  • Which age group do you belong to?
  • Are you a carer?
  • How would you describe the majority of your education?
  • Do you identify as having a disability?
  • Do you consider yourself to be neurodiverse?
  • How would your describe your ethnicity?

How is this a practice? never mind that… How is this legal and allowed you might ask?

I can tell you, it’s not. Yet they get away with it for some reason. This is beyond my ability to understand, still to this day, these companies:

  • Have these forms on their job posts
  • Require you to fill them in
  • Make decisions based on these results
  • Send this data to a foreign country that falls outside GDPR
  • Send this data to a random company nobody has ever heard of to act as the data processor
  • You can not opt out of this process or provider, you either fill those in or they reject you for not following their standard process

I’m surprised they don’t ask you about your marital status, pregnancy plans, and address, as these are the other questions missing to complete the list of discriminatory questions that you should never ask during interviews, as I was trained by previous companies in which I acted part of the hiring team. HR made it extremely clear there would be great consequences if we broke those rules.

Obviously, it’s perfectly fine if the candidate mentioned all of this unprompted, but according to my training, as an interviewer I was forbidden to ask or even hint at such questions when doing in person interviews. And now, somehow this is perfectly fine to do digitally, in mass, before even interacting with a human, and the data forwarded to a company that does not fall under GDPR protection, in a foreign country, outside the UK/EU, and have no visibility on what they actually do with that data or how they use it.

Here are some of the companies that I’m talking about (there are more but I just couldn’t bother to look them up again as I think I’ve wasted too much time on this already):

Simply go to their “Career” sections and browse jobs. You will be as disgusted as I am!

Obviously they claim that “we track these metrics to ensure a fair process” and of course they claim such a thing. But riddle me this: how can you ensure a fair process if you give the people that have the ability to discriminate the exact tools to discriminate and no oversight?

And remember, you can not opt out of this, as when I’ve mentioned that I don’t approve of the process and would like to not got through the form, sending my cover letter and CV in an email, I was replied to, every time, that they would not proceed unless I filled in the form.

I am not sure what the proper course of action would be here, but people, this is not OK, this is… I don’t know what it is apart from disgusting. And to think they can so easily justify this under the veil of non discrimination, the mental gymnastics some people can go through is unbelievable.

Me personally, I vowed to never apply to such companies, never implement something like this or allow anybody in the companies I work in to do this, and whenever I will interview people from these companies in the future I will bring it up in our discussion, to hopefully get them to understand why this is wrong and why I can’t hire them for their horrendous past actions.

If you work for a company that still does this, and want a job from me, you’ll have to come up with a really good excuse to change my mind.

How to Negotiate Salary Link to heading

This is simple, you let them be the ones that make an offer. Don’t ever tell them your expected wage.

If asked, you state the following:

I will not divulge a sum and expect you to be the one that comes with an offer
first. This is what I've done in the past for all the job offers that I've
accept and I want to do the same with you.

If they insist, say:

My position is firm, I will happily drop from the interview process if you don't
respect this choice I've made.

Decent human beings will respect your choice, so don’t worry about dropping off, you’re dodging a cannonball. Simply blacklist the company and the person that kept insisting and carry on.

At the end, choose the biggest offer, and message everybody else to bump theirs with at least 20% more that this one. Repeat this process as many times as needed to get the maximum amount available.

As a bonus note: make sure to ignore anything else apart from salary. This is the only thing you need to care about.

NOTE: I might extract this in it’s own rant and link to it instead!

One thing that I made clear in my first interview session was that I wanted to have a copyright clause in my contract which stated that I own all code I write in my free time. Here is how it ended up looking:

COPYRIGHT AND AUTHORSHIP

The entire copyright, design right and all rights of a similar nature in
relation to any systems, data or other material made by or created by you whilst
performing your duties, during employment with $COMPANY, are owned by the
Company where appropriate. Employees will warrant and acknowledge that the
Company shall be the first owner of such rights.

Due to the nature of software development as a practice, the Company recognises
that you might have personal projects that you develop in your spare time, for
learning, personal development, charitable reasons like contributing to free and
open source projects, or other such reasons. $COMPANY will not attempt to
claim copyright, intellectual property rights, nor patent right to any creation
done outside of working hours, and not using any company owned facilities or
assets, as long as any such creation does not relate to the employee’s current
duties and responsibilities (including any instructions given to the employee),
as long as it does not compete with our business model and business activities,
and as long as such creations do not infringe on $COMPANY’s intellectual
property, design rights, or any rights of a similar nature. You must promptly
inform us of any such projects if you have knowledge or suspicion of any
infringement, for further review and approval; if no such infringement exists
you are free to carry on with your activities.

In the eventuality that one of your personal projects is tested and then
approved for use by $COMPANY’s Direct Manager while you are employed here, we
will promptly inform you, discuss, and sign a document detailing the terms of
use and support, as to clear out any possibility of a conflict of interest.

SECONDARY EMPLOYMENT AND SPARE TIME ACTIVITIES

You may not enter into any secondary occupation or employment, nor conduct any
trade or business in your spare time, without the prior written approval of
$COMPANY. Approval will not be given for any outside work which might
interfere with the proper performance of your duties. You must not be engaged,
whether directly or indirectly, in any other business which provides the same or
similar services as $COMPANY.

This is fair because it’s a give and take. I only use my spare capacity on my own work, so I can be productive in my working hours.

NOTE: a reply from FSF states:

Unfortunately, this approach puts us at a disadvantage. Even if your
employee agreement says that they will not claim your outside work, it would
require us to seek out legal counsel in order to verify accepting the employee
agreement instead of an employer disclaimer is legally sound for protecting the
GNU Project. Please understand that the Free Software Foundation is a small
non-profit with limited resources, especially around access to legal counsel for
this type of review. This is why we rely heavily on the use of employer
disclaimers.

I have included the standard disclaimer template below.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

So if you want to contribute to FSF this clause does not help, you still have to go through their process. I am yet to finalise mine, due to time constraints, and when I do I’ll write up a separate rant.

Feel free to use this in your own contracts from now on.

Note: you won’t be able to add this to an existing contract, only chance to get something like this is when you switch companies, since for your existing employer you have no negotiation power towards changing anything in your contract, and even threatening to leave just because of this will not work. You will just become and outcast, troublemaker and pushed out of the organisation.

Speech Link to heading

I speak directly, unapologetically, without bullshitting or fake political correctness, and this is a persona I embody in it’s entirety within this website and in life in general, so if you don’t like the words above, I advise you to first check the website URL to see what category this post is part of. If that still did not help then IDK, close the tab and carry on with your life (like I currently do with mine).

Toodles, don’t forget to feed your poodles!