Your manager has many reports, but you only have one manager
Plus, when do you peel back an abstraction vs trusting it?
When you join a new team, what’s your strategy to ramp up on the codebase as a software engineer? We chatted with several of you and pulled out a common theme: the best engineers are able to ship products and make improvements even if they don’t fully understand the code.
Fundamentals are important, but high-impact engineers don’t burden themselves with understanding all the nuances of a codebase. The decision to choose when to dive deep into something vs “trusting the abstraction” is a difficult one, and the topic of my most recent video on the topic.
Management Qualms
One of the most frequent sources of anxiety for employees is their manager. This makes sense given the importance of a manager in your career. However, most engineers usually only have a handful of managers across their career.
The result is that engineers are not calibrated around the quality of their relationship with management: what distinguishes a good vs bad manager? Our next session is about what SWEs should look for in their manager, happening 10am PT on May 28 (tomorrow!): LinkedIn event. A few of the topics we’ll cover:
What are the incentives for managers in big tech companies?
How involved should you expect your manager to be in your work?
The challenge with management is that the definition of a great manager will depend on the team and even the individual. Our goal is to provide a framework through which to evaluate a manager, so you have some baseline to compare against.
Given how important a manager is to your career, spending some time reflecting on the relationship is a high-leverage activity. The content will be available in Taro within a few days of the session.
By the way, Taro just crossed 6K users and we added a few nice features to make content more discoverable. We’re adding new video lessons every week, which you can now easily find by tapping into the “newest” pill.
