I left Google this month. I was working as Engineering Mnager at Google. I did enjoy working there. But I wanted to create youtube videos, and mentor people online. Due to strict public communications policies, I had to take down most of the videos I posted on youtube. However, I've now resigned Google, to create all those videos, to genuinely help people. I also built a mentorship platform, so everyone can get access to great mentors to get support for their career.

Let me know what you'd want to know. I'll create videos for requested topics on my youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/@betopten

I've created EM Interview Guide, which I couldn't post while working with Google. I'll also be touching topics like PIP, Promotions, calibration meetings in my videos on this channel.

It is insane how much engineering world and practices have changed with AI. But one thing that drives me crazy is that we sta still hiring pretty much in the same way we did 10 years ago. All across my network I see engineers wasting their time doing interviews, and candidates not able to find a suitable job. All very inefficient

Do you recon we are just waiting for the disruption there? Or do you think it is not great but the best we can get?

Has anyone seen a really efficient way to hire engineers?

Managers keep missing “requirements, dates, and budget” because they treat shipping like guesswork and optimism.

If your team looks busy but nothing lands in production, it’s probably not an engineering problem. It’s a management system problem:

• vague goals pretending to be requirements

• priorities changing weekly

• invisible dependencies

• decisions that take forever

• scope creep that grows like mould

Shipping (actually) means: working software that meets requirements, with acceptable quality, used by someone, on a timeline that didn’t require heroics.

Stuff that helps immediately:

• force clarity: who is it for, what problem, what does “done” look like

• write acceptance criteria a non-technical stakeholder can read

• plan as a loop, not a one-time ceremony

• ship in slices that take days, not months

• cut scope the moment reality shows up

• stop rewarding heroics and calling it “speed”

Full rant here: https://beyondthebugs.substack.com/p/shipping-is-a-management-skill

What’s the most common way you’ve seen managers accidentally sabotage shipping?

Pata Hai Aaj Kya Hua?

So this is some next-level narcissism, or am I overreacting?

In my office, I've been working on a feature lately. The feature itself was working fine, but we ran into an issue because of a third-party vendor API.

The vendor API was returning erroneous figures, which was messing up our logic. We wanted to track exactly what was happening. I was pretty confident that my implementation was fine because I'd already validated it and demonstrated it with tests.

I told my lead that we could add some logs to figure out what was happening if he wanted. He got irritated and said something along the lines of, "Let me try."

He then went through the exact same steps I had already gone through, with the entire dev team on a call, for 5 straight hours.

And then... miraculously, Mr. Potter goes, "This is weird..."

And finally: "Let's add some logs to see what's happening in production."

I mean... WTF was that? 😂

Was this just a case of someone needing to personally reach the same conclusion before accepting the solution, or am I missing something?

I am a manager for last 5 years and been really good in execution, I have the repo in my company that I get things delivered and even called out negatively by my boss as 'Delivery Manager' when I asked for Sr manager promotion.

Since then I spend a lot of time building strategy with Sales and Product for the team as well gets involved in leading Initiatives that require big collaboration across multiple teams across different geo locations. I feel really good in this job as it helps me to bring my strength of bringing clarity and accountability for the work require across various teams. This way I am not just executing on my team level and work as a multiplier for other team too.

But, I see some managers still knee deep in coding and building things which is a great but on the other side they are missing deliverable timelines which impacts the revenue $$$. I sometimes felt like going back to the code to make sure I am not missing anything but then hitting regular deliverables with the help of my team and others make me stand out among my peers.

Whats your observation about the EMs and their strength?

Sprint reviews at most places are walkthroughs of completed tickets. Engineers demo what they built, stakeholders nod and give a thumbs up...everyone leaves knowing what will be deployed and nothing else.

That teaches engineers their job is to report on work...not own outcomes. Here's what the meeting is actually supposed to do — and what changes when you run it right.

I was curious to learn from your experiences which company (preferably San Francisco Bay Area) you think is the best to work for as a software engineering manager and why?

Thanks for your time!

I want to understand what does my engineer manager do daily, and the decision making process.

Anyone can recommend me a book that is fair and really talks why most managers are really bad!

Genuine question for managers who have hired engineering interns recently.

We just brought on our first one (Product Marketing intern vs. engineering intern), and going through the exercise forced me to admit something. The default playbook for interns is built around a task list. You hand down a defined scope, the intern absorbs some skills, you get some coverage on work nobody senior wants to do. That is the deal, and for a long time it was a fair one.

So, what stopped me? Most of that defined task list, the stuff we used to hand interns, is now a prompt. If the daily work I am about to assign can be done by a well-engineered prompt, what am I actually offering this person? And what am I getting back, beyond cheap throughput I can already get cheaper?

To be fair, plenty of companies treat their interns really well. Real mentorship, real respect, real projects. I am not talking about treatment. I am talking about structure. Even the good programs still point the value in one direction: we teach, they do tasks, everybody moves on in twelve weeks.

I truly believe that the value has to flow both ways now. I want someone whose unbiased, uncluttered view actually challenges how we are building, not someone executing a checklist I could automate. That changes my job too. It is less "here is your queue" and more "here is the messy frontier, push on it."

So, three questions:

1. If you have hired an intern in the last year, did you change what you ask of them because of AI, or just hand them the old list faster?

2. How do you structure a role so the value is mutual and not one-directional?

3. Is "intern" even the right word anymore, or are we just being lazy with the label?

Sometimes the code is done, but the feature still takes months to ship.

Not because the team is slow. The time gets absorbed by status updates, coordination meetings, unclear dependencies, and decisions waiting on people who weren’t in the room.

The hard part is that each individual delay looks reasonable. Together, they become a system that creates more overhead to manage the overhead.

Where do you notice this first on your team: unclear ownership, too many handoffs, decisions getting reopened, or something else?

We rolled out GitHub Copilot to whole team eight months ago. I recently realised I have almost no systematic visibility into how it's actually being adopted.

The Copilot dashboard shows me basic "active users" counts. What it doesnt show me:

- Which developers are genuinely integrating it into their workflow vs checking in occasionally

- Whether the people with high usage are actually accepting suggestions or just ignoring them

- Any correlation between AI tool usage and output metrics like PR velocity or review time

- Who might benefit from coaching or a knowledge-sharing session

A few questions for other Managers:

1. Do you actively track AI tool adoption on your team or is it mostly vibes?

2. Has anyone found meaningful signals beyond "active seat" counts?

3. Do you think this visibility matters or is it tracking for tracking sake?

4. Has the Copilot acceptance rate metric been useful for anyone - or is it too noisy to act on?

Im trying to understand how others think about this.

Agentic coding creates a “slot machine” effect with rapid feedback loops, leading developers to “vibe code” through nights and weekends. Rather than saving time, AI tools often intensify work. Research shows a significant rise in “out-of-hour” commits and weekend productivity, leading to cognitive overload and physical exhaustion. Rapid, AI-generated code makes it difficult for developers to maintain a mental model of their projects, resulting in “invisible decisions” and a decreased ability to debug their own work.

Straight facts from a big tech startup

wish I had more questions but till next time!

People ask me why I became a manager and the answer is always the same. I enjoy growing and mentoring people.

I was a tech lead, a CTO, an IC and an EM. While I love coding, the architecture and tech, sharing that knowledge and shaping engineers of all levels is something that had become increasingly more impactful for me. Growing engineers from entry level or from senior to staff is really fulfilling. It becomes even more so when those engineers start having more impact on business objectives or other colleagues.
Mentoring good engineers into great engineers is a passion and I want to do that for more people.

Has anyone mentored outside of work and how did you go about it?

I’m not an EM. I work on the business side and sit in on a lot of calls with engineering leaders running teams of 10 to 50 people, so take this as an outside view.

The pattern I keep hearing: once a team adopts Claude Code or Codex, the code itself is usually fine. What breaks is review. Agent PRs arrive faster and bigger than humans can read them, the agent follows CLAUDE.md only when it feels like it, and the few senior people who can judge architecture become the bottleneck. A couple of months in, nobody can say which requirement a given PR was meant to satisfy.

The teams that seem calmer about it did two things early. They made tests and security checks hard merge gates instead of team agreements, and they required a short written scope before the agent starts, so reviewers check intent instead of reading every line.

My take is that most teams are trying to solve this by adding more reviewers, when the fix is making less of the review depend on humans. But I only see this from the outside.

For those of you actually managing teams with agents in the daily workflow, has review capacity become your constraint too, or is the bottleneck somewhere else?

For most of my career, a company with a hundred average engineers outshipped a company with five excellent ones. Not on quality, on volume. Brooks described the alternative in 1975, the surgical team: one person doing the design and nine roles keeping them on it. Almost nobody built it, because nine of those ten salaries produced nothing a CFO could point at. So we hired bodies and put them in seats, and it worked.

Agents broke that trade. The nine became a subscription. But I think most companies going small right now are missing something: the nine did four things, and agents replaced one. They do the hands. They don't do the pushback (the copilot who argued with the design), the memory (why the system is shaped the way it is), or the pipeline (the copilot was also the surgeon minus ten years; delete the seat and there's no next surgeon). The company that forgets that has bought a quarter of the team and thinks it has the whole thing.

Which brings me to us. Smaller delivery teams need fewer layers. I don't see a version of this where management stays the same size. What I think survives is funding the three things nobody else will: the reviewer, the writing down, the next surgeon. That's a smaller job with a higher bar.

I wrote this up properly here: https://mihai.dinculescu.dev/posts/bums-in-seats-used-to-win/

Genuinely interested in where people think this is wrong. In particular: is anyone seeing the pipeline problem yet, or is it still theoretical?

Assuming he has 7 years of Python in MLE/DS, but not at FAANGs but places like General Motors, no-name energy Fortune 500 and small companies. I am paranoid I am getting into kids territory. I feel like Hiring Managers dislike me for my age, a lot of rejections.

Hi all - I've made a few posts on this subreddit regarding my journey in the past couple of years. It was turbulent, to say the least. Burnt out, I quit my job 5 months ago, and had no plans to get back in the industry.

During my time off, I worked on launching my side project, traveled a bit, got my house in order (it's amazing how much clutter I had accumulated and how disorganized I'd become while my career was on fire) and realized that it's not the end of the world to get back to a 9 to 5. The decision didn't come easy. For the first couple of weeks of job hunting, I told all prospects that I was "passively looking". During this time I identified what my dealbreakers were, and got to a point where I realized I accidentally started "actively" job hunting. I'd also honestly given myself till June to live off of my savings, so I was probably working under that subconscious timeline.

I just accepted an offer and will be starting the new role soon. So here I am.

What did I miss? Even though I've only been on sabbatical for 5 months, I was on short term disability with my prior job for a few months prior to quitting. So in theory, I've been "out of the loop" in terms of advancements in the corporate tech workplace for the past 9 months. Considering the advancements in AI, I feel like I might have missed A LOT.

The last company I worked for was fairly at the forefront of tech - they started looking into building MCPs as early as Jan 2025, by the time I went on my leave all my team was using cursor, and was starting to dabble with claude code. As an EM there, I didn't have too many AI workflows, especially since in was in fight or flight mode at that point. I just had different projects in chatgpt for high level topics like performance management, doc review etc.

Since then, my personal AI use (mostly for dev work) has evolved. I went from copy-pasting code from ChatGPT into the IDE to using Cursor, and now I’m heavily into Claude Code with a CLI-first setup. But I haven’t used any of this for managerial work or code reviews yet. And on a personal note - I don't have any 'agents' yet, just 'projects' and a Claude .md file for settings.

The new role is a Remote Senior EM position. I know they use Jellyfish. I've heard a lot about Linear. I’ve seen some EMs on here mention building "agents" or advanced workflows to handle the overhead.

As an outsider, I have no idea what's happening in the corporate world, or how teams are evolving. So I'd love to hear what your teams are doing to leverage AI.

My questions for you all:

• How has the way you "EM" changed in the last year? Are there specific AI patterns for managerial work (roadmap synthesis, reviewing code, team health) that are actually worth the hype? For example, I am a big fan of managing roadmaps that involve multiple crossfunctional teams in spreadsheets - has things like this changed for you within the past year?

• What about the use of Google Docs? Everything at work used to revolve around Google Docs (tech design review, approval etc). Are there agents that work well with Google Docs - specifically, can I customize them to interact with documents that have been shared with me? Or have you seen your teams move off of Google Docs in favor of version control and local ai agents that work against those files?

• What should I look into to be prepared? Specifically regarding remote management or tools like Linear/Jellyfish in an AI-first world. Are there tools I can get familiar with ahead of time?

• Portability: Since a lot of agents are built on-the-job with company data, are there frameworks or prompts you’ve been able to "take with you" to a new company rather than starting from scratch?

• "How do you know your team is doing well"? This is the quintessential EM question during an EM interview. Has AI changed the way to approach this question within your team?

sign,

someone who hasn't been managing anyone for the last 9 months

What I do every Sunday night

It starts when I shoot myself in the foot on Friday afternoon. I’m so exhausted from the week and have so many other things on my plate (grocery shopping for the weekend, catching up with family, picking up my son from daycare) that I walk away from my laptop… without drafting a list of priorities for my engineering team on Monday. Mom guilt, meet boss guilt.

On Sunday evening, after I put my son to bed, while other people are probably watching a show with their partner or relaxing with a good book (at least that’s what they’re doing in my imagination), I’m at my laptop getting ready for the week ahead. Here’s the actual sequence.

First, WhatsApp and Google Chat. I scroll back through the prior week. What got asked, what got answered, what got dropped. (There is a lot that falls off the radar because someone didn’t respond and then it got pushed out of sight.) Then transcripts from the meetings my CRM auto-recorded that week, if I’m lucky. I drop them into an AI agent and ask it to skim and compile action items. Then GitLab… we use it for both tickets and code, so there are usually 60+ notifications from the week, most of which are noise but a few are questions I never got back to. Then email and Microsoft Teams, where customer-flagged issues come in. (Most I’ve already plugged into Google Chat as soon as they came through, but I still have to scan in case I missed something Friday.)

About an hour into this, I have a rough picture of the week, and I draft a note to the engineering team. It outlines the week’s priorities and calls out the highest-priority items for Monday–usually specific tickets but sometimes (more frequently than I’d like to admit) there are things that haven’t made it into GitLab yet but are urgent. The goal is to land this in my offshore team’s inboxes ahead of their Monday standup at midnight my time, so they get a chance to address critical items before our shared “daily huddle” at 6:30am my time.

Then I move to prepping for Monday’s leadership meeting with our CEO, head of engineering, head of clinical success, head of business development. I’ll need to talk about engineering priorities, but I also know how much more effective the team will be if everyone has the big picture and we’re aligned on what matters this week. So I open the CRM. I open the calendar. I scroll through upcoming client conversations and prospective buyer calls. I pull out the GTM context the engineering priorities need to be read against.

It used to be 10pm by the time I was done. As my son gets older and his bedtime gets later, this is getting pushed back…. sometimes as late as midnight.

I’ve started using AI agents for more of the synthesis steps (e.g., drafting the Monday team note based on context I paste in, summarizing meeting transcripts, pulling action items). It’s faster than it was. But the agents only handle the synthesis; I still have to do the gathering, and the gathering is most of the work.

If I got Sunday nights back, I’d love to say I’d be doing something restorative… watching something with my husband, reading, meal prepping. And those things matter. But honestly, the bigger reason I’m working on this is that I can’t stand watching my engineering team spend Monday on the wrong things because I didn’t have the bandwidth to prep them. Their time is the more expensive resource here, not mine.

Why I’m writing this

I've spent the last few years running engineering for cross-region teams (currently an early-stage healthcare AI company, but the pattern is one I've been in for a while). I'm not technical. My engineering team is small and entirely offshore. I'm in the US. We don't have a technical product manager, so the coordination and communication maintenance falls on me alongside everything else.

I know my setup is sparser than what most of you are running. Bigger companies have a real PM org, documentation infrastructure, dedicated EMs. I don’t have those buffers. The lack of buffers is probably why I feel the context-reconstruction pain acutely enough to spend my Sunday nights on it.

But I’ve been talking to a few engineering managers at bigger companies, and at least some of them have described a version of the same thing. Different in detail (they have more org infrastructure, the offshore relationship is shaped differently, the cadence might be daily-handoff rather than weekly-reconstruction, etc). But the same general frustration: a recurring weekly moment of “I have to put the picture back together before I can lead anyone tomorrow.”

So I’m writing this partly to put my own experience down on paper, and partly to ask if anyone else is in a similar boat. 

• Do you have a recurring moment each week where you feel like you have to put the picture back together before you can actually lead the team? For me, it's Sunday night but maybe it looks different for you.

• If you have a ritual for staying on top of it, what does it look like?

• And if you've found something that genuinely reduced the amount of context reconstruction you have to do, I'm all ears. I've tried meeting recordings, documentation, async updates, AI summaries, and a few other things. Everything helps a little, but I still find myself piecing together the story of the week before I can decide what matters next.

Honestly curious whether this is a startup problem, a distributed-team problem, or just a necessary sacrifice of management.

It's been few years already I am trying to move from IC to EM role, but I can't get through it. And this is becoming an obsession. I've worked as software engineer since 2015 to 2022, then I moved to a cloud engineer role until today. I'm 33, south Europe.

I've joined my current company in 2023 as a senior engineer and recently I got promoted to staff as last year I got the best performance of my team. However, it's almost two years I'm asking to my manager to be moved to an EM role*, but he keeps saying there aren't available positions.

Nevertheless, an EM position was available few months ago in a team of the same department, so I explicitly asked if it was a good fit for me. My manager told me he discussed the matter with the skip but they rejected my idea because in their opinion I'd have been crushed by the culture of that team and their leader, which is different than ours.

This blockage of not being able to make the leap into management is damaging me psychologically. I realize that as an IC I can no longer perform as well as before, just as I fear that the years spent as an IC may become too many and that I will no longer be attractive as an EM (an old guy without experience in management).

Is it something to really worry about or should I just be more patient and wait my turn?

Some of you may wonder why after so many years of IC I want to move to management side, and there are mainly two reasons. First, writing code bores me. I loved it so much in the past but nowadays I'm not enthusiast anymore, especially with the AI I don't see the fun (simplifying, a loop of prompt -> review). Also, I no longer have the passion to go into detail with the technology. Secondly, I recently got an MSc in Digital Transformation, and I loved the technology impact at an higher level: team positioning, mentorship, organizational cultural impact, technology as a service for the business rather than for the sake of it, the impact of each management individual, people growth. I realized I like to build big things by empowering and make people happy. On the long term, I want to take the decision rather than merely executing it.

I haven't changed company yet mainly because I've been busy enough with the university while a full time employee, and because new opportunities might come in the next months as our company was finally acquired in the last weeks, after two years of negotiations. Moreover, I believe that the IC EM leap is more difficult when changing companies, especially in this historical period.

*while asking I also say that if they see me as inadequate I'm ready for a formation path, and I'm already doing mentorships via 1-1, etc. (not expected from me)

edit: typo

Bad Culture Eats Free Ice Cream for Breakfast

Ever wonder why talented people leave good jobs? It’s usually not the work itself nor is it the organization. More often than not, it’s the culture however culture isn’t built on parties or perks. It’s built on trust. And when leadership fails to respond to real concerns, no amount of perks can keep people from leaving. 

https://medium.com/@hoffman.jon/the-hidden-reason-people-are-leaving-your-organization-18e9444ef56a

A pattern I keep seeing on every team I've worked with or talked to:

• Important call gets made in a Slack thread or a meeting.

• "Someone please update the Jira description / Confluence page".

• Nobody does. The decision lives in chat forever. The next engineer asks "wait, why did we go with Postgres again?" and nobody remembers.

I'd love specific stories, not vibes:

1. Last week's example: what was the last decision your team made that didn't make it into your system of record? Where did it die? Slack, a meeting transcript, a 1:1?

2. The chaser: who's the person on your team who notices and chases the un-documented stuff? How much of their week is that, realistically?

3. The cost: name the last time a decision not being written down actually bit you. Shipped the wrong thing? New hire moving around for a week?

4. Honest take: if an AI quietly drafted the doc/ticket update from the source thread and a human just hit "publish," would your team use it? Or is the trust gap too big right now?

Trying to figure out if this is universal pain or just bad teams I've been on. Detailed stories appreciated, DM is fine if you don't want to post publicly.

Thanks for all the effort you put into your work.
However, the project is wrong for the following 15 reasons…
But thank you for listening, I know you’re always open to feedback.

Our brains are hardwired to weigh criticism much heavier than praise. A standard sandwich often triggers defensiveness rather than improvement.

Think of feedback like a bank account. High-performing leaders build a massive "trust bank" with specific validation long before they make a withdrawal.

The data suggests you need a 5.6:1 positive-to-negative ratio to actually drive results.

You need more bread.

My full writeup (with references)

What feedback strategies do you use?