Challenge your Engineering Manager
It is expected and you will grow!
Don’t take what your Engineering Manager tells you as a mandate or absolute law. Challenge her/him; it’s expected and you will grow.
That would be the main takeaway for today’s issue.
On this occasion, I will share a history that happened to me, so you do not make the same mistake I did.
🙋🏻♀️ What happened?
Once upon a time, my Engineering Manager told me:
Marcos, please, take look into this issue, the Release Team is saying our services are crashing in the brand-new production environment.
To give more context, the Release Team was deploying all the services of our product in a brand-new cluster. That cluster had some characteristics that made it special in many dimensions.
The services that my team owned at that time were crashing, and not able to back to life. This meant that the features that our services provide were not available in that cluster.
🫡 What did I do?
Aye-aye captain!
I just jumped into the cluster to take a look.
I found the issue pretty fast, actually. The problem was a configuration property that was wrong set in our services due to the special characteristics of that cluster.
Solving the issue was pretty fast as well. In a matter of 10 minutes, the issue was solved, and our beautiful services were purring like a charm.
But… but, should have solved that problem?
🧐 What I would have to do?
Wait a minute…
What Marcos from the past did not have loaded in his memory at that time was that, in that special production environment, our services should not be working. Actually, our services should not be on the list of applications to be running in that cluster at all. It was a decision made, and agreed upon with the Release Team, sometime before this issue.
What I should have done at that time was think about whether that issue was something expected. Stopping to think would have led me to remember the decision made some time ago.
As a Software Engineer, you are expected to think critically and challenge decisions from upper management, especially if you hold a role with more responsibilities. This is part of why you were hired. Try to not be a pain for your manager though, and target properly your challenges.
By doing so, you demonstrate that you care about the company’s goals and the balance of efforts, which increases your credibility with peers and managers, helping you grow as a professional.
✨ Takeaways
I hope you enjoy this short and stick-to-the-point essay.
Let’s wrap up with some takeaways:
Think before doing anything.
Think again, and question: does it make sense? Does it bring value?
Your Engineer Manager expects you to challenge the status quo to improve systems and processes.
This is a good mechanism to grow in your organization.
Photo David Clode in Unsplash
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𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘦𝘯𝘫𝘰𝘺𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 💜. 𝘐𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘴!
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Thanks for sharing. To add to it, I think this situation is best described as identifying the real problem vs symptom. The symptom makes it look like a technical issue, but the real problem is the misalignment between teams. Just some thoughts.