Tips from 30 years in Big Tech, for Managers
Managing engineers is hard, especially in big tech. I spent about half of my 30 years as a software engineer managing people. Three things stuck out to me as both important and counter-intuitive, here I share them with you.
While this is aimed at Managers, it can also be useful for software engineers, especially if your manager isn't doing these things.
Why listen to me? I spent 30 years in Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other places, 13 as a software engineering manager, and 15 as a principal engineer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
00:00 Introduction
01:17 Accept "good enough"
03:02 How I learned this
04:35 Manage fairly, not equally (identically)
05:51 Let things fail (safely)
06:45 How I let things fail
07:31 Summary