Learn concepts like management skills, working with different people, and working out who our team is and what they do.

Become an Effective Engineering Manager

The technology industry is facing a skills crisis. It’s because we don’t know how to manage people. This module aims at improving our managing skills. In this module, we’ll start with learning concepts like managing ourselves, interacting with humans, having one-on-one meetings with managers, and choosing the right person for the job. Next, we’ll learn how to deal with different people and projects. In the end, we'll touch upon the modern workspace concepts and life cycle of startups.

Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager

Regardless of how organized you are, various forces act against you feeling happily productive. As a programmer, I could look back at the code that I’d written at the end of the day, point at it, and say “I did that.” I could also point at our ticket tracker and say, “I did those tickets.” Even on frustrating days where there was a production issue or something gnarly to debug and fix, we would eventually solve the problem, commit the code, and again I could point at it and say, “I did that!”

Several reasons explain why it's often hard to find this satisfaction as a manager:



* _You're primarily working through other people_, so there's less to feel that you have tangibly done by yourself.



* _You do dozens of little tasks_ rather than fewer substantial ones.

* _You are context-switching throughout the day_, which can be tiring and frustrating.



* _More of your time is spent in meetings and discussions_, which do not produce a concrete document, block of code, or production deployment.



* _You're more likely to be interrupted_ and just end up not being able to get your work done anyway!




If you’re unable to frame all of your managerial work in a way that makes you feel productive, with time, you may feel like your job is happening around you rather than feeling like you are doing your job.

There is, however, an answer. One of my managerial heroes is the late Andy Grove, who was one of the founders and long-term CEO of Intel. His #key# advice: Andrew S. Grove. High Output Management. Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1995. #key# for tackling this problem was to categorize the managerial activities that you partake in daily into four buckets:

1. Information gathering

2. Decision-making

3. Nudging

4. Being a role model

If you apply these categorizations to your activities within the day, you'll see how there's more meaning in your work than you may originally think. You can also keep these categories in the front of your mind to better choose how to spend your time.

Let's take a look at them in turn.

# Information gathering

As you may have gathered from the need to have a system to capture, record, and complete  tasks, which we introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the information that you hold is critical to your success as a manager. Your knowledge base is what you use to understand what is going on in your team and the wider company, and it is fundamentally what you form your decisions on. The activity of information gathering feeds this knowledge base.

Learn how to categorize your activities so that you spend most of your time productively.

How to Categorize Your Activities to Feel Productive

Feelings of satisfaction as a manager