Below are some shapes of engineers I’ve managed in my career and what I’ve learned about them. Pattern matching based on experience is important in an experiential field like management.
| Trait | Behaviors | Lessons learned |
|---|---|---|
| Brilliant, unfocused | Extremely productive and helpful, spends time on the wrong thing and spreading their impact too wide | Reduce quantity of extracurricular activities, taking on tasks outside of the team should meet the ‘uniquely capable’ threshold |
| Unproductive, un-engaged | Has the skills, but not delivering enough impact | This is very difficult to recover, move them off to another team or manage out |
| High output, needs to be pointed at the right problem | Highest output on the team, but needs guidance on applying that raw output to be effective | Defining the right problem on their own can be difficult, identify the right altitude of problem for them to work on to unlock their abilities |
| Technically focused on a product team | Tends to raise the importance of building higher quality or new abstractions not taking into account the context of the product, market, or user | Set a decision framework for incremental code improvements, avoid rewrites, coach on the business needs and product thinking |
| Hard working, low skill | Works really late, always busy, but low output or low quality | Improve hiring bar, don’t overvalue hard work and avoid spending large amounts of time with low-performers |
| Learned helplessness, blames others or codebase often | Avoids accountability, low quality output or slow, very unhappy or pessimistic | Tends to be an environment mismatch, deliver strong and clear feedback and move quickly to manage out |
| Self-righteous, dogmatic, disruptive | Strong opinions tightly held, thinks everyone else is wrong or doing a bad job, teammates complain about code reviews | Coaching can work, but if there is any negative impact (e.g. people don’t like working with them) need to act very quickly or top performers will leave |
| Higher ownership, generalist | Tend to act as the founders would act, with a wide range of skill they are company builders | Nurture by giving stretch opportunities, encourage stepping out of role, build a better framework for measuring their success |
| Disagrees in private, disruptive to management | Talking to them everything is fine, even when addressing a disagreement, but shares resentment privately | Disruptive for the management team, can be difficult to address. Address directly, if there’s a pattern then move on |
| Low output, says all the right things | When given feedback they say all the right things, some immediate improvement made, but same issue recurs | Recurring low output feedback is a big red flag, especially for senior engineers |
| Highly skilled, entitled | Doesn’t feel fully utilized, complains about compensation, moves around a lot | Ask if they really want to be here, turn their feelings into a challenge and action |
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