I’ve been an Engineering Manager before. Ask me anything.

yes please, how do you see tech in India. As far as i read, Indian tech business 60-70% comes from usa, europe and we are just cheap resources. Day they get alternative, they will stop outsourcing here. Also let us know ur views on AI hype

45 L. That’s one of the reasons why I’m on grapevine. 🙂

There’s enough content available on internet for free. YouTube videos are best and they are free.

Start with building some full-blown apps for your own learning with some guidance from YouTube and internet. Slog and work hard to get hands-on on the tech stack that you aspire to work on. Trust me, once you get a hold of it, you won’t look back. You will turn from hard-worker to smart-worker and things will automatically start falling in place.

PS: I did my engineering in a non-computer science discipline.

Any pitfalls to be aware of?

I had my own share of deliberation. I suggest not to resign from a job for any reason whatsoever until you have one offer. I generally play safe than going aggressive.

And should I take an offer which is lower than current but gives what I want?

Too many questions, but let me attempt to address those:

I was at the receiving end of office politics & there were moments I wanted to quit, switch job. But I asked this question to myself. “Where will you not see politics?”. I decided to stay & fight it & managed to surpass it.

Tech stacks: I’ve worked much longer in Java, then .NET & JavaScript before a flurry of tech stacks arrived. I had much apprehensions adopting to AngularJS, React & AWS but there was no choice.

I slogged & struggled and that was the time I got an opportunity to switch into Manager role. Manager role was no less a challenge but figured out the formula to lead a team and I can say I genuinely contributed to taking some big projects to finish line.

A Software engineer’s needs has no bounds. I wanted to get back to coding and wanted to make amends on things I left over in my previous tech role. I became an architect & I am responsible for design, coding and architecture of a product line assigned to me.

I take care of building frameworks and coming up with e2e solution for the lifecycle of the product line assigned to me. I code, I deliberate on design, I set standards that developers can follow, I define communication protocols between systems in a distributed setup, and blah blah. 😃

Take regular water breaks. Get up from your chair and walk up to the water dispenser. I do it every hour. Set a reminder on your mobile.

There are two advantages.

1. You’ll not hurt your back.
2. It’ll help you break from beating around the bush looking for a non existent solution to a non existent problem.

3 advantages to be precise.

3. You’ll remain hydrated.

1. Oh yes, there are so many actually. Will try to mention a few.

a. If I had known to gather courage to strike a conversation with my manager back then, I would be earning a salary at par with the industry.
b. If I had learnt to realistically say ‘no’ to a certain ask from leadership team back then, I would have been a better decision maker. c. If I had known the importance of writing unit tests back then, the code I wrote back then would have been far better.

2. I have been having regular interactions with PMs for quite a few years & my present job also requires me to meet them once a fortnight, if not more. Product Managers must always have a great eye for Key Performance Indicators(KPIs). They must be adept at the field of statistics.
   Follow some famous cricket analysts and you’ll see how they look at the KPIs in the game of cricket to lead their team to win a game.

PMs should also be keen in getting the best UX from the team. The number of user actions on screens plays an important role in deciding the user journey.

Lastly PMs must fix performance requirements & identify the projected scale.
Eg. A page load time should not exceed x seconds.
Or The projected peak time of website traffic would be 8 PM(PST) that can potential see x number of concurrent requests.

I wish I could type more…

Wow this was amazing. You can come back to this maybe once a week 😂 some of it was gold 🥇 thanks for this

What you’re doing is not people management. Making you lead a bunch of people, presenting their work status, making you attend meetings is merely a trap laid by managers above you & I don’t blame them. That’s how majority of corporate industry works. Everybody works to save their ass & they find you as a tool to execute their plan.

By the way, taking up this role with as low as 2 years experience might not be a good idea. You can’t justify this role unless you yourself know enough about how a work is done the right way. People working under you might be smart enough to play bluff.

I suggest you get some more hands-on before getting readied for starting a company. People management will happen automatically.

Thanks for the suggestion, I had discussed this with my manager as well. He told me that there's more scope in managing direction in my company because recently two managers left us.

I have been the unofficial goto guy for the frontend at least so I do know how things are done at the frontend side. That being said, I have no clue about backend (somewhat I know). For frontend I have been the most hands on person in the company so much so that there hasn't been a single major feature which didn't my help to release but with backend I've just done two three commits.

In this case is my manager bluffing saying that there's not much growth in individual contributor role.

The fact that you realize the importance to become a better engineer is itself a starting point. Not many I have seen have any realization as close to yours.

I always emphasize on keeping things simple.

1. Ask ‘why’ and ‘how better’ type of questions in your work.
2. Think beyond coding. Think quality, think performance even when you write your first line of code.
3. Familiarize yourself with e2e requirements. Do not take requirements at face value. Challenge the status quo(in a polite way)
4. Think yourself as the first user of the software that you’re building. You’ll add a lot of value if you imagine yourself as a user.

Thanks, these are pretty good advices.

I wish I could answer everyone. But it’s so overwhelming that I’m finding difficult to go thru’ each and every questions. But I’m happy I could make some people equip with better information.