Skip to main content

Think like a Engineering Manager

Off-boarding

Members can leave the company for various reasons, and as a manager, it is important to take action. Hoping for the best is not a strategy. In the case of a low-performing member, I can kindly issue an official warning, set clear objectives for improvement, and re-evaluate the results. If there is a conflict between members, I need to be mindful and go beyond the situation to list our expectations with corresponding actions. Finally, if a member has a big chance to grow at another company, I can have an honest discussion with that member about the trade-offs.

Balance at Work

As an engineering manager, it is important to balance involvement in meetings and getting your hands dirty on some topics. The goal is to become a companion to teams. Here are my two actions to deal with the situation:
  • Dedicate time for important-but-not-urgent tasks and prioritize them daily.
  • Categorize work into four lines including management, project support, OKRs, and self-study.

Management

  • Conduct interviews
  • Evaluate candidates after interviewing
  • Conduct sharing sessions
  • Onboard new members
  • Onboard teams to projects
  • Plan resources by assigning teams to projects
  • Develop strategies for teams
  • Off-board team members

Project support

  • Review code
  • Review documents
  • Get my hand dirty on several issues

OKRs

  • Write guidelines
  • Enhance DevOps toolchain
  • Provide training sessions

Self-study

  • Read Hacker News
  • Experiment with new technologies
  • Take courses to learn new skills
  • Read books to expand my knowledge
  • Conduct research on emerging technologies


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

Java Core - Top 10 Questions Every Developer Should Know

#RandomlyPickedByMe What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer? Why do I get "SomeType@a3fde" when I print my code? Why is String immutable? Why "equals" method when we have "==" operator? Is List<Dog> a subclass of List<Animal>? Why shouldn't we use raw type? Is Java “pass-by-reference” or “pass-by-value”? What's the advantage of a Java enum versus a class with public static final fields? Why "double x = 0.1 + 0.2" and result of print(x) is 0.30000000000000004? 1. What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Holy crap! (Vietnamese: Thế quái nào lại có câu hỏi ngớ ngẩn vậy chứ?) "Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar." - Greg Hewgill (on StackOverflow) 2. Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer String is immutable. StringBuilder and StringBuffer are mutable. StringBuffer is thread-safe. String...

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .

Regex - Check a text without special characters but German, French

Special characters such as square brackets ([ ]) can cause an exception " java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException " or something like this if we don't handle them correctly. I had met this issue. In my case, my customers want our application should allow some characters in German and French even not allow some special characters. The solution is that we limit the allowed characters by showing the validation message on GUI. For an instance, the message looks like the following: "This field can't contain any special characters; only letters, numbers, underscores (_), spaces and single quotes (') are allowed." I used Regular Expression to check it. For entering Germany and French, I actually don't have this type of keyboard, so I referred these sites: * German characters: http://german.typeit.org/ * French characters: http://french.typeit.org/ Here is my code: package vn.nvanhuong.practice; import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util...

Why Functional Programming Matter

What issues do we concern when implementing and maintaining systems? One of the most concern is debugging during maintenance: "this code crashed because it observed some unexpected value." Then, it turns out that the ideas of  no side effects  and  immutability , which functional programming promotes, can help. Shared mutable data is the root cause Shared mutable data are read and updated by more than one of the methods. Share mutable data structures make it harder to track changes in different parts of your program. An immutable object is an object that can't change its state after it's instantiated so it can't be affected by the actions of a function. It would be a dream to maintain because we wouldn't have any bad surprises about some object somewhere that unexpectedly modifies a data structure. A new thinking: Declarative programming There are two ways thinking about implementing a system by writing a program. - Imperative programming: has...