After almost 8 years of working in tech as an engineer, I still don’t understand what managers do.

I’ve had a fair variety of managers in my career, ranging from a startup founder who had zero skills in managing any humans to a corporate manager who was as clueless about my job as I am about his. For the most part, I have felt apathetic towards my managers, even when they didn’t understand my work or had no desire to promote me or when they were just straight up misogynistic (digression: the worst offenders of misogyny I encountered in my career have or had an Asian female partner.. and I am an Asian female 🤔).

My apathy does not mean that I have no wants, though. Over the years, I couldn’t help but think about how to build a productive and efficient team, one that I’d love to work in. While I could have an impact on this as an IC, some of my ideas are better implemented by a manager. So this is just my rumination on that, the kind of rumination where you chew your thoughts over and over, not the deep introspective thoughts… 🙃 Before I delve into my specific wants, here are my assumptions/beliefs:

  1. The ultimate goal of any team is the team’s output, as opposed to an individual’s fancy pants success. An individual’s success should be promoted only to the degree that it helps the team’s output.
  2. Everyone can achieve more and better than they do currently, if put in the right environment or guided appropriately.

Based on these beliefs at core, here are my wants. (It’s written like one post, but I broke them down into multiple posts because it was so long…)

Write More Effectively

Writing is wonderful for engineering teams for many reasons. For one, it is a great way to scale the team by not having your engineers verbally deliver tribal knowledge multiple times. It also makes your engineers a little more expendable by making the tribal knowledge everyone’s knowledge. Also, written forms happen to be a great support material for promotion (no one’s reading your code during the promotion reviews, but they might skim the documents you authored). However, writing is often not done enough. The frequent arguments against writing are that they take so long, get outdated soon, are not effective forms. I agree writing is not a panacea for all, but these arguments are more reflective of other practices than whether writing is effective. For example, if you think writing takes a long time, does it imply your the bar for clarity is lower in other formats? If the problem is things get outdated soon, why is it easy to communicate the new information periodically in a different format but hard to update the documents? Even when there is some practice of writing, it’s often underappreciated because 1) what people choose to write are not on very productive topics, 2) reading and writing experiences are not great.

What to write

In general, I think writing how-tos and explanations on how systems work is important. Initial design docs, proposals, and plans, i.e., future-focused docs, are good, but not as important in terms of building the long-term efficiency. I’m not saying you should write fewer of them, but people tend to put a lot more effort than they should in these, because they are the documents you write to “flex” your intention and ideas. In contrast, describing how to do something or how things work now is past-focused and can be written by anyone who is familiar. There is clearly some conflict of interest between present me who would prefer writing about my new ideas and plans and a future new hire who would prefer me writing about what I have done already, especially because the details always change during the implementation phase. More written materials to help many, not a few current decision makers, will help foster more productive writing.

Writing Experience

Where

Companies usually use several different forums, e.g., emails, instant messaging like Slack, document sharing like Google Docs, and internal websites and more! (At one of my previous employers, the document platforms we used ranged from Google Docs to Quip to Dropbox Paper in the true libertarian fashion 😆.) Trying to find a piece of information usually requires me to search in multiple of these platforms, regardless of the depth of information! I acknowledge these different forums serve slightly different purposes, but centralizing where information stays as much as possible encourages people to search and explore on their own, whereas if the cost of asynchronously discovering information is high, people will resort to private conversions/direct messages. I suppose Silicon Valley would approach this problem with a startup idea that searches across platforms, but I have never used such a thing yet, so consolidating where things are written is the analog solution I suggest.

Beautiful, easy, online-, sharing-first

Creating a readable and beautiful document should be easy, and sharing and collaborating should be considered default. This means a modern document sharing system, not one that has been retrofitted to be like one, such as Google Docs. When my previous employer deprecated Dropbox Paper in favor of Google Docs to save money, my colleagues complained, and I thought they were nitpicking… until I experienced the pain myself! There is a plethora of subtle differences, e.g., ease of formatting, pleasant format by default, shortcuts, and markdown support that elevate the writers’ experience. Unless it involves some private matters, information should be available by default. I have had unfortunate experiences where the materials I wanted existed already, but just not public to me yet, for no good reason. When lots of things are available, maybe the information I’m looking for isn’t directly there, but oftentimes I can piece together what I need from multiple sources. Building a big catalogue is important in and of itself.

Discovery and Reading Experience

If I had to choose one quality of the writing forum, it’d be good search. One of my previous employer had lots of good documents to self-serve my learning, but even then, search was horrendous and I often ended up asking my coworkers for document links. Searching within the internal platform is inherently hard, because there probably isn’t enough data to train a model to rank these documents well. I did see some improvement in this domain recently actually, and I hope it gets even better.

Once you land on some page, the format, font, space between paragraphs, they all matter for reading experience and productivity. It’s surprising when a company emphasizes so much on creating inspiration with the most subtle changes, measured by a tiny improvement in the number of clicks, it cares so little about how inspiring their employees’ communication experience is. If you want your team to get more things done not just this week, but for this year, pick the best online document sharing platform and have ICs write, especially the kind of materials that will generate a stable revenue of clicks and engagement.