Engineering management

Deep dive days

As an engineering manager of several teams, I sometimes worry — and my teams like to remind me — that my technical skills will eventually wither away from doing only management work and no technical work.

I really enjoy management work! I like thinking about the big picture, how everything fits together, and why it sometimes doesn't. I even like doing all the small things that move the needle on that.

But: When I’m good at engineering management, I know that I owe a large part of it to being a developer at heart.

The great thing about engineering management is that it makes you a better engineer, and being a better engineer makes you a better manager, too.

It's a fortuitous cycle. But it goes both ways, and so the worry goes that as technical skills wither, management skills suffer for it too.

So I’ve been doing this thing over the past few months to try and counteract that. First out of fear, and now out of joy. I’ve picked one of our systems to deep dive into each week, and spent some time just trying to understand how it works, and — even more interestingly — why it works that way.

It’s really simple, and I think you’d really like it, too: Just pick a system that you know is important, and that you don’t know very much about. Start reading the code, and try to get it up and running. I generally end up needing to ask someone something within 30 minutes, and git blame is a great way to figure out who.

Sometimes I need to ask about how stuff works, but more often I need to ask why it works that way, and I always come away knowing more about our technology, our people and our organization.