Hi! I'm Steve, known in some online communities (and github) as honestbleeps. I've been a software engineer, an engineering manager and a director of engineering. I've worked for companies of varying sizes and shapes, and worked on a few open source projects, as well. My most well known open source project is Reddit Enhancement Suite - a browser extension that makes the reddit browsing experience more powerful/intuitive.
I've had a long career in software engineering, and I've had a variety of managers who I'd rate anywhere between great and, well, not great. Having learned most of what I know about managers by trying and failing on my own, I'm sure I was occasionally not so great. In my experience, even in 2022 a lot of companies don't put a focus on hiring or developing great Engineering Managers. Instead, often times engineers are "promoted" to engineering managers whether they want to be or not.
There are a lot of great books that can help you with the basics and even the more complex and nuanced aspects of Engineering Management. However, the user experience of reading a 200 page book and then trying to retain and apply that information over the course of the next several years of your career simply doesn't work for me. There's too much depth and too much to remember for me to feel like I'm realizing the full benefit of that information on a day to day / week to week basis.
I decided that what would be more useful to me is a toolkit, of sorts, with a few key sets of tools:
- A list of questions to ask myself and things to check in on during my downtime so that I can check in on the health of my team(s) more easily
- A set of reusable but flexible/adjustable templates that I could carry with me between jobs to help me get to know and run new teams without reinventing a bunch of little wheels over and over at each new job and with each new team
- Miscellaneous notes and documentation to codify the things I've learned over my career to help me avoid making the same mistake twice (or thrice)
First and foremost: I'm interested in helping current and aspiring engineering managers be better at their jobs. Having seen the effects a not-so-good manager can have on one's mental health and career, I simply want to increase the odds that fellow software engineers have a skilled manager. If me sharing some knowledge helps make the life of a small handful of software engineers better because their manager uses an idea or two from this repo, that's a success to me.
Secondly, even with my 20+ years experience in the tech industry, I still consider myself someone who is learning every day. I feel like I can learn a lot more by sharing my knowledge and hearing feedback and differing perspectives on it.