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management is important in all Fields but especially engineering it's a strange position to be in between the engineers who spend their lives in code and almost anyone else be it your CEO the product team design your users anyone else and the role of the manager is to try and smooth out all of the roughness between all of these different things and more importantly it's to set up their Engineers for Success I've met a disappointing number of engineering managers who don't really think about their Engineering Management at all much less in a way that's cohesive and conductive to growth for their engineers and I want to talk a bit about how management can set up their Engineers for Success both on the management side so if your manager definitely watch this but also for the people who are being managed so if you're an employee an engineer whose manager may be helping you or maybe isn't helping you enough I hope what we talk about here can help improve that relationship and help you find success one of the most important things you can build as a manager is Trust and almost every decision I make as a manager is to help build trust across the companies that I work at when I'm running a team it's my job to make sure everybody on the team is bought in and gets what's going on and feels like they understand and are trusted in the work that they're doing in contributing and if any person on a team has reservations about the way something's being built that's something that we as a team should discuss I'm really big on strong opinions weekly held where someone on the team can strongly commit to a thing doesn't matter if they're the principal Tech lead from Amazon that's worked there for eight years or if they're a brand new intern that we just hired if someone has a strong belief that something should be a different way and they can back it up everyone should listen and learn from it and it can go many different ways they can be right and we all learn from it they can be wrong and we can teach them or this is an underrated option we can know they're wrong find it hard to convince them and let them go be wrong for a bit one of the best things you can do as an engineering manager is let your engineers fail especially when you know they're going to fail and you know the constant one said that failure aren't very big if you know some tech that some engineer wants to adopt isn't going to work and it's going to fail pretty early on you can say that they might not listen if they don't let them go do it it shows that you trust them and honestly they might be right in which case you get to adopt the better solution that they proposed or you have to let them learn and they build trust and capability in that time and now the next time they make a recommendation or push for something to be different they're going to have that much more experience making decisions around what they push for and obviously if they consistently push bad things and consistently are breaking stuff that's a different conversation but I find most Engineers aren't given quite enough leash especially when the engineering manager has a technical background something that's been hard for me as an engineering manager is I've been on teams that I'm managing Engineers for where the engineers know more and are more tuned in than me it's hard to believe like I'm the YouTube channel everyone's learning from but honestly I'm consistently surprised by just how capable and tuned in the engineers I work with are and if you're watching this video right now you might be one of the more included people on your team I think it's worthwhile for more managers to recognize that and help build into the people who care more and look into these things in their free time and want to keep learning and bring what they learn to the team it's one of the most valuable ways to grow as an engineer but more importantly it gives you one of the most valuable resources any team can have energy if I've learned anything about the devs who hang out in my chat and watch these videos as soon as they drop and are out here learning for fun it's that they have the energy your company needs to thrive code bases don't live or die on the technology choices they don't live or die on how good the engineers you hire are it comes down to who has the energy to make sure [ __ ] moves and do they have the energy for long enough to keep it moving through maintenance Windows through hard problems and through all of the pain any project will have until it finds the users in the state it needs to be in and it's so easy for engineering managers to just throw all of that away and to see a person on the team who's really energized with this better way to do something and say no because it doesn't immediately line up with business goals there is no business goal that isn't accelerated by a team that's energized by the work they're doing even if the thing bringing their energy is in a different direction from where you want to be that energy means you can get where you want to be way [ __ ] faster and honestly I'm a little thankful so many companies don't get this because it's the only reason startups can exist in the first place there's no reason a company like twitch shouldn't be able to run circles around around the stuff that I'm doing with my roommate and co-founder but they can't because every time someone has the energy to make something real happen for the users they get burnt out before they can apply it and it's your job as a manager to find the people who are bringing this energy and give them everything they need to maintain it and share it with the team it's so important to manage and help your team manage their energy levels and their excitement about the work they're doing and you should be willing to take some big risks and get into some fights with your Executives in order to do that for them if you're the manager in this position I wanted to talk a bit about one of my favorite engineering managers you all might already know you might not even think of him as an engineering manager talking about Luke lafrene from Linus Tech tips he just became the CTO of all of LTT and he was scared shitless because he's never been a real engineer he never worked on code for a living never had an engineering manager of his own he just wanted to build things for LTT and ended up being the person in charge of building float plane so pretty much every engineer he works with and is hired is a better engineer than him and he knows that and Embraces it and uses it to make himself better too and with linuses the CEO running the business and with Lucas the CTO running the tech the expectation is the tech side will run the same way that the rest of the business does where you have a deadline and it gets hit and in Tech we all know deadlines are imaginary and a lot of Luke's role is translating between developer speak and timelines and how his team needs to work in communicating that with the rest of Linus Tech tips to make sure the engineers have what they need as such he's kind of taking the role of exploring new things and I know he's become a regular viewer of the channel because he wants to find things to bring to the team he notices thing the team needed and brought them energy and started doing it himself and he's now bringing versel and next.js Technology to his company at float plane and at Linus Tech tips he found out about these things and he thought they'd bring value to the company you know what he was absolutely right not only did doing that research and finding those Technologies give his Engineers excitement and motivation to keep iterating on these things it also significantly widened the pool of new people they could bring in and increase the level of energy those people will come in with I personally now that he's reached out to me am excitedly referring Engineers his way for the next era of Linus Tech tip stuff and honestly him reaching out to me to talk about this stuff is one of the coolest things he could do as an edge manager here realize he didn't have other engineering managers to talk to about these things so he started watching my channel and talking to me more when he knew I kind of had that role a few weeks ago we had a four hour Discord call just talking about all this stuff because he wants to do as well as he can for his team and he wants to make sure he understands what that is and honestly most of the call was me just reinforcing what he was already doing which is so cool he just wanted to set up his team for success and because he's been through the YouTube grind he knows how important energy is and he really pushed to maintain that energy on the team and the result is incredible things happening so yeah I wanted to shout out Luke in particular for being a stellar example of what successful Engineering Management looks like it doesn't always look like somebody who's been coding for 10 years and I wanted to reinforce that point there's one more thing I bring up and I kind of need to do another video about this in the future I have a rule I often enforce when I bring on new teammates that I'm working with I call it the dumb question rule I set a minimum number of dumb questions a new teammate has to ask every day for their first couple weeks like you have to ask minimum two dumb questions every work day because otherwise and we've all been there feels awful to be stuck on something you you feel like you should know the answer to it should just be in a dock somewhere or somebody said it before and you missed it and you feel stupid for it you need to feed into that because a big part of development is feeling dumb and it's your job to help people get through that because feeling dumb for too long makes you lose all your energy and if you can provide a comfortable way for developers to work through that moment and maintain their energy when they do it then by the end of their first week they're way more excited to contribute because all the dumb things that would have held them up getting their Dev environment set up figuring out which GitHub account they have to sign in with when and all of the things that most Engineers are scared to ask about if you can help them through that if you can force them through that they come out way more excited to contribute and I've seen this take month plus long onboarding windows and knock them down into a few days so if you take anything from this it should be let people fail build trust and feed into the people who are bringing energy because those are the things that make your team successful not how many tickets you close every week or how good your top engineer is at typescript the value comes from the cohesiveness the focus the trust and the energy the people on your team bring and it's your job to make them comfortable and excited to bring all of that to the workplace I hope this is helpful I'll talk about the Engineering Management stuff as much so let me know if you like this and I'll do more videos of this style I really want to see Engineering Management improve and don't get me started on interviews it's a whole separate problem go build some trust energize some engineers and ask some stupid questions because it is so important for the growth and success of your teams thank you guys as always I'll head another video about Edge management and team stuff here probably my interview video because I like that one a lot hope this was helpful these nerds