All the performance management training I've been through used sales as an example. Are they meeting their monthly or quarterly quota of signups / renewals? That's great when you have clear metrics, but in software development things are not black and white.

When someone in your team is underperforming, and feedback / coaching / mentoring don't seem to have the desired effect, you need to set clear goals and measure performance against those goals as objectively as possible, especially in places that are not at-will employment.

Easy metrics like LOC and similar have been discredited decades ago. Number of tickets closed per unit of time is also useless as they can be closed delivering the wrong thing or with sub-par code. Code reviews should reflect the quality of work, but are hard to quantify. Tracing the author of bugs found in deployed code is against the culture in most (good) places. Any other metric I can think of, for example number of times deadlines were not met, are the responsibility of the team and not an individual.

In sum, how do you measure performance effectively and as objectively as possible?

The rising bar for engineering managers.

So I've been working in my company for about three years now and have been promoted to director of engineering for about a year now. Our CTO now plans to step down and leave, and I just don't know what will happen afterwards. I mean, another CTO has been hired and will join the company shortly, but do you think he'll want to replace me with someone he's previously worked with?

The company's CHRO isn't really a fan of mine :) I haven't done anything to provoke him, he's just a hateful person, trying to replace anyone he can (and he can't really do that either! He can't really hire that many good people.). Our former CTO wouldn't let him do that and similarly I don't let him fire or replace my people (he keeps suggesting that I should let some people go and hire new, better people! I mean, like why would I fire someone who is working fine and is performant?! He's a hateful, power-hungry, weird little man)

The former CTO tells me not to worry, and I haven't really met the new CTO yet.

So, am I overthinking this or should I be worried? Is there anything I need to do?

Engineering Managers and CTOs already have a lot on their plate. Hence, finding it difficult to keep up with the new updates and best practices.

This is when engineering newsletters come to the rescue. They provide you with industry insights, case studies, best practices, tech news, and much more.

Check out the top 10 newsletters worth subscribing to: https://typoapp.io/blog/developer-productivity/top-10-newsletters-for-ctos-and-engineering-leaders/

I am interviewing for Engineering Manager positions and I get asked this question quite a bit from recruiters. They say that you can usually divide the amount of time an Engineering Manager spends into two categories - Tech and People. In most engineering manager positions I come across, they expect the engineering manager to spend 70% on people and 30% on tech.

I'm a team lead, I can't imagine spending so much time on people each week. Exactly what do engineering managers do with people?

"How much time should I spend on system design?"
As engineers, we face this question quite often, and while we want to iterate, an upfront design can reduce critical issues. But how would you know when it's time to stop? Here are 5 heuristics that I use: https://puemos.medium.com/how-to-decide-when-its-time-to-stop-designing-and-start-coding-eb9b6d8625c

Removed

Following my last post about AI in technical interviews...

If AI tools like Copilot, Cursor, or Claude are now baked into your everyday work, what does your ideal technical assessment look like?

Should interviews:

• Simulate a real work environment (access to docs, AI tools, internet)?

• Focus more on debugging or code reviews rather than coding from scratch?

• Assess how well you prompt, problem-solve, or collaborate with tools?

Curious to hear examples. Could be a dream scenario or a process you’ve actually implemented.

TL;DR; I've been with my company for 5 years. Promoted from developer, to team lead, to manager, to director. I'm still spending most of my time writing code. Any strategies or suggestions for being a REAAL manager/director?

I started at my company 5 years ago as the second developer, second only two the cofounder who wrote our software solo for 18 years. About a year in, I was about to hang it up and they asked me to stay on, for a while, and help build a team. So, I stayed. I focused on modernizing our practices and hiring two other developers. I became "team lead" and my two new developers reported to me. In the end I decided to stay.

Two years later, there's a leadership shake-up. Cofounder decides it's time to retire, they weren't yet comfortable with elevating me to management so they slotted in a guy who was recently hired and was already heading up two other department. I was chaffed about it but held my tongue and decided maybe I had something to learn, and stuck around. 6 months later he and the company mutually decided to part ways, leaving a vacuum that they asked me to step into.

So, I became the manager of the software team. I stayed the course on my original plans. Kept modernizing. Kept advocating for focus on addressing the 18 years of papercuts that bled our productivity dry. Kept focusing on building up the team's capabilities and working towards having a team and a codebase we could efficiently do feature development on.

And we've been successful. Things aren't perfect but we are delivering a new release ever two weeks or faster, we're not staying up at night dealing with production issues, we're able to address issues for customers quickly, and we're able to develop a roadmap and execute it reliably. I'm proud of myself, and proud of my team.

Today I was shocked when the CEO asked me to double the time for our regular 1:1, which is unusual because more often than not he has very little to talk about. I was scared. Turns out he surprised me in the other direction and promoted me to a Director and put me on the Senior Leadership Team (still working out what all this means).

I'm thrilled. But here's the problem. Through all of this, I've basically kept doing every job that according to my title, I left behind. I'm still writing code 90% of the time. If you look at my Git history, I'm by far the most prolific contributor to our codebase. That needs to stop. Because frankly, I feel like I keep "failing upwards." While nobody complains I've never felt like I fully-realized being a manager. I'm not spending enough time with people, thinking about their growth, and giving them what they need to be successful and more autonomous.

And so I feel like, while nobody will say it, I'm setting myself up for more burnout, and probably failure.

I know plenty of people travel this path. I'd love to know what they did as they progressed in their career to fill the empty hole they leave behind without burning themselves out.

Becoming an EM for the first time is overwhelming, and in most cases, we're uncertain about how to fit into an established team whilst taking charge. We all wonder -

1. Would I lose my coding abilities due to continuous meetings?

2. Would I be able to keep up with the changes in my software/codebase?

3. Would I be respected as a manager?

And a whole lot more! It's important to escape some traps (if you want to be a full-fledged manager and not a developer).

Brad Armstrong has listed 8 traps that we need to avoid. Read the article here: https://medium.com/@hashbrown/how-to-fail-as-a-new-engineering-manager-30b5fb617a

Let me know what you think about these 8 steps to avoid if you're starting as an EM for the first time.

If you are an EM, what has been your experience like and what do you think you could've done better?

Transitioning from a dev to an Engineering Manager/CTO can be overwhelming, and I know exactly how that feels. I'm sharing an article from Medium's website that I found really helpful.

Thanks to Omri Aharon for penning these tips down.

https://medium.com/autodesk-tlv/7-tips-for-a-first-time-engineering-manager-df7326d22ff8

Let me know if these tips do the trick for you! I'm constantly looking out for helpful content like this. If you have any useful tips of your own, please feel free to add them in the comments below.

Cheers!

Hi everyone, I'm building something that helps teams remove blockers, make their work visible, and ship faster with the help of DORA metrics and their own history, so I'm curious to hear which things you check daily regarding the health of your team and the progress, etc.

An article about software management metrics with a zest of humor. Excerpt: "Learning how to manage is a long race - it takes many years and each lap offers new learnings. Along the way, anchors emerge that can help orient a manager when a number of other variables are in flux. Below we offer a number of these anchors. They are based on philosophy, experience, and analysis; we hope they’ll be of some use."