The Manager's Guide – #82

Weekly Hand-Picked Collection Edition

The Manager's Guide – #82
Photo by Ethan Hoover on Unsplash

3 Critical Skills You Need to Grow Beyond Senior Levels in Engineering

  • 💡 Advancing beyond the senior level in engineering requires developing critical skills like scaling yourself, navigating ambiguity, and influencing without authority
  • 🌟 To scale yourself, focus on maximizing what you can do on your own by prioritizing, pushing back on low ROI activities, and teaching others to delegate effectively
  • 🔍 Navigating ambiguity at higher levels involves turning the unknown into known, making tradeoffs, and isolating uncertainties to systematically solve problems
  • 🤝 Influencing without authority is essential for career growth, requiring building credibility, personal connections, and learning to negotiate and find mutually beneficial solutions

Levels.fyi Gender Pay Gap Report Q1 2024

  • 💰 Approximately 16% of software engineering compensation data points in the US were submitted by women
  • 📊 Representation of women in STEM fields in the US is around 24%
  • 🏢 Percentages of men and women in tech roles at large companies globally vary
  • 💼 Men generally earn higher median salaries compared to women in software engineering
  • 📈 Gender pay gap tends to widen as employees progress through their careers
  • 🔍 Gender breakdown of submissions shows a higher percentage of men at every career level
  • 🔍 Societal practices and fewer women in higher positions contribute to the gender pay gap

How to embrace the never-ending leadership journey

  • 💼 Leadership is a never-ending quest with always more work to do
  • 📊 Leaders need to constantly improve themselves and their teams
  • 🔄 Teams should run retrospectives and conduct engagement surveys for improvement
  • 🛠️ Technical leaders must set expectations for a certain amount of "toil" budget
  • 🚀 Celebrate progress and success regularly to avoid feeling demotivated
  • 🦅 Great leaders operate strategically while staying connected to their team
  • 🧩 Find a low-risk approach to experimentation for innovation while maintaining consistency
  • ⚖️ Finding the right balance is crucial for leadership success

Who pays you? And why?

  • ⭐️ Engineers get paid well because they scale their impact across machines
  • 💡 To maximize impact, engineers should solve impactful problems and build simple, efficient code
  • 🧠 Success as a software engineer involves understanding who pays and why, navigating job descriptions, and aligning personal goals with organizational goals
  • 💼 Differentiate between software companies and companies that use software
  • 🔄 Career success often involves switching teams, jobs, or even careers to find personal alignment
  • 🏗️ Reimagine past experiences to showcase understanding of vision and contribution
  • 🔀 Embrace career pivots and take risks to find better personal satisfaction in tech jobs

How to send progress updates

  • 💡 Understand the importance of your role in providing progress updates
  • 🔄 Add randomness to the cadence of your updates for better reader engagement
  • 📰 Focus on headline-driven development for effective updates
  • 🌟 Include pleasant surprises in your updates intentionally
  • ⚠️ Handle unpleasant surprises by informing individuals privately first
  • 🔄 Acknowledge changes explicitly to maintain trust
  • ❌ Avoid insulting anyone in your updates
  • 🎙️ Maintain a steady and professional tone in your updates
  • 🤝 Make updates about the work, not about personal evaluation
  • ❓ Identify and address the top questions your audience may have
  • 💭 Include a section for worries and failures in your updates
  • 📊 The goal of updates is to keep your audience informed without them needing to ask

How to share your point of view (even if you’re afraid of being wrong)

  • 💡 The more controversial the idea, the higher the burden of proof.
  • 🧠 Update your assumptions about how you add value.
  • 🤔 Share where your hunch is coming from—because it’s coming from somewhere.
  • 🗣️ Describe why the problem matters, so people understand why you’re speaking up.
  • 📜 Don’t rely on your credentials. Your idea should make sense on its own.
  • 🛡️ Use language that accurately reflects your level of certainty.

That’s all for this week’s edition

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