Engineering Management on Justin Carmony

Engineering Managers: Don’t Forget the Individual Contributor’s High

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 19:09:11 +0000

I was having a conversation with one of my engineers, and they were pretty worked up. They felt frustrated about a hiccup in one of our processes resulting in a minor delay of finishing their feature.

I empathized with their plight and reassured the hiccup wouldn’t have any major effects. The team was still on schedule for their deliverables, their boss (me) understood why for the delay, and I knew it wasn’t the fault of the engineer. We also had a good plan in place to prevent the same issue in the future.

Talk: Making the Switch to Engineering Management - Utah PHP Usergroup

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 20:00:35 +0000

I gave this talk at the Utah PHP Usergroup. It was a quick turn around to make the presentation, so not my best slides, but they got the job done.

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/making-the-switch-to-engineering-management

Video

Note: the quality isn’t the best, but it’s what they had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyuAWOfR6Ek

Details

Making the Switch to Engineering Management by Justin Carmony

The first part of an engineer’s career is pretty straight-forward: learning the skills and technology to code. Then, one day after being a senior developer for a few years, you find you need to make a decision: do you want to become a manager? Are you ready to make the switch to management? Do you even want to? What would it be like? How do you know if you’re ready? How do you prepare? Ahhhhh!

Manager’s First Rule: My Expectation Is…

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 08:00:53 +0000

Learning how to be a manager can be tricky. Many times I’ll talk with other managers and inevitably, at some point, the subject of a team member’s performance comes up. Let’s say we’re talking about a fictitious people of Mal the manager, and Don the developer.

“Don is a great guy, but sometimes he can get lost in the weeds and take way too long to solve a problem. What should take a few hours can take days, and it never seems like he is making any progress.”