Episode 12
Engineering Management, with Director of Engineering Sam Jones
February 24th, 2025
1 hr 18 mins 21 secs
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About this Episode
We've got Director of Engineering Sam Jones talking all things Engineering Management. How to get into it, how she stays organised, great books to learn from, and how she approaches the challenges of the job.
- Michael prepares for putting together an event on developer experience
- Sam helps merge 2 companies together
- RIP duolingo bird
Who is Sam Jones?
loosely...
Frontend Dev
-> Team Lead @ gamesys
---> Eng. Manager @ Monzo
-----> Director of Eng. @ Benifex
Quickfire Questions
- One to ones, all in one day or evenly spread throughout the week?
- Best new joiner swag you’ve ever had?
- Scrum or Kanban?
- Longest probation period you’ve ever heard of?
- Ever failed someone’s probation? Ever failed probation yourself?
- Interviewing off camera – yay or nay?
- Best team building activity?
- Slack or Teams?
Breaking Prod
The near miss that could've topped our leaderboard, working on trading systems
Big Topic
- How do you get into it? What does training look like, for an engineering manager?
- Skip levels – do you do these? How often?
- Best way you’ve improved your abilities as an engineering manager?
- The danger zone! What it is and how to work through it?
- Is AI coming for your job?
- How do you see signs of burnout in people you’re managing?
- What are your KPIs as an engineering manager?
- Stack ranking employees – necessary evil?
- How do you make the jump from managing engineers, to managing managers?
## News
- Alphabet drops a longstanding ban on AI being used for developing weapons (BBC)
- ELON MUSK act (TechCrunch). The proposed bill is called the ELON MUSK Act, which stands for “Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy”
- Asahi Linux Hector Martin project leads resigns – maintainer burnout (The Register)
- Apple Lamp - Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot research paper (Apple)
- Hauwei release tri-folding phone (Youtube - Marques Brownlee)
Recommendations
Engineering Management Books
- Resilient Management, Lara Hogan
- Management 3.0
- The Manager's Path, Camille Fournier (O'Reilly)
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, Will Larson (Stripe Press)
- Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager (Good Reads)
- Managing Humans: Biting and Humourous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, Michael Lopp
- Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson (Stripe Press)
Non Engineering Management Books
- The Staff Engineer's Path (O'Reilly)
- Platform Engineering, Camille Fournier (O'Reilly)
Music
- I Love You, Honeybear - Father John Misty (Apple Music). Royal Albert Hall Event
Movies
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (IMDb)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (IMDb)
Miscellaneous
Canada vs. USA ice hockey match, 3 fights in first 9 seconds of play (YouTube)
Next Time
Rax talks about Scaled Agile frameworks
Listen to the end to hear this episodes bloopers!
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