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

You guessed it. The other track is **management**, the track that this whole book has been about. We've repeatedly revisited how we measure the output of a manager, which is the output of their team combined with the output of the others they influence. So, we've got that down. You’ve also learned several techniques for managers to increase their output and become more effective.

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# Output of the manager

Generally speaking, however, the most surefire way for a manager to increase their output is for their team to get bigger. You can only have so many direct reports before it starts to become overwhelming. Teams become too large, and the amount of time that's needed to spend with each individual becomes prohibitive. A rule of thumb is that a manager should have a maximum of around seven direct reports. There doesn't seem to be any hard science that proves this theory, but if you're spending an hour with each direct report in their one-on-ones, that's already a day booked out each week.

Therefore, as managers gain more responsibility, they typically gain more people. For example, a large team can be split into two, with the manager promoting another manager to run one of the small teams while still running the other team. . This provides the team room to grow and prevents the primary manager from becoming redundant. With time, as an area grows and grows, a manager may find themselves running multiple teams, thus increasing their output. They may have explicit accountability for a functional area, like a collection of infrastructure teams). Alternatively, an experienced manager could be hired into an organization to manage a division, consisting of many teams.

This course has been about becoming a manager and running one team, so we won't go into the details of managing managers or trying to apply for these kinds of roles. However, running larger organizations is covered in _#key# High Output Management : Andrew S. Grove. High Output Management. Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1995. #key#_ and _#key# The Manager's Path : Camille Fournier. The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 2017. #key#_. Do you see yourself on this path?

# How to observe the seniority of the manager

So, as a manager increases in seniority, they will typically:


- Be increasingly effective at delegation: As they progress up the organization chart, they move from delegating development tickets to delegating the output of an entire team or multiple teams. This requires abstracting, defining goals and outcomes, and implementing them throughout their staff.
- Have more people reporting to them: The higher the position in the organization chart, the more staff that branch downward underneath that particular position. This can go from teams to multiple teams, to a division, to a whole department.
- Own larger and more important strategic areas: Typically, a subsection of the organization chart will be dedicated toward some purpose. A team may work on one specific area or outcome, but a division may work on a whole application or piece of infrastructure. The CTO runs the whole engineering department. 


# Levels of management track

The job title progression may look something like this. We define levels as before, but with respect to how these roles line up with the IC track in terms of experience. It's highly unlikely that a company would have an engineering manager who hasn't had a reasonable amount of experience in the industry first.

* _L3_: Engineering manager
* _L4_: Director of engineering
* _L5--6_: Vice president of engineering
* _L7+_: Chief technology officer

To create more steps of progression and increasing areas of ownership, the initial three job titles may be preceded by **senior**, such as senior director of engineering. Chief technology officer is an exception because it's the top of the management chain and typically entails being a company director. Although in huge companies you can have CTOs of large divisions, but that's rarer.

> **Compensation**
> 
> Ideally, there should be no glass ceilings in either track and no interdependencies. For a technology company, an extremely experienced individual contributor and extremely experienced manager both contribute at a high level. Thus, at a similar level of contribution, they should be rewarded similarly.
> 
> This may not always be the case in some companies, and you can detect senior leadership bias here. A “pure” technology company may lean toward paying principal engineers more than senior managers. A more corporate environment may value leadership over technical skills, and the higher ends of the average pay bracket may favor those in management positions.
> 
> If you have easy access to the senior leadership in your company, this is an interesting discussion to have with them. What do they value? Which skills do they think are irreplaceable?

Learn about the management track and what are its stages.

Management Track