Becoming an Engineering Manager Without Losing Your Technical Soul
summary
Argues that an engineering manager can stay deeply technical by doing strategic troubleshooting and building lightweight observability: atomic accumulated timers, per-module heap counters and thread tracking that run always and surface regressions. Describes debugging a cross‑platform TCP signaling bug where an anti‑malware held on to repeated 'S' bytes, forcing vendor fixes and code tweaks. Cites scale: 9,000 developers, a ticker plant handling billions of updates per day, UI latency at P90 35 ms, and compile/link time cut from ~20 minutes to ~1 second.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:22From coding to high-performance systems
- 8:20Bloomberg Terminal data mystery
- 19:23Losing technical identity
- 22:09Value of engineering managers
- 25:43Empowering teams
- 34:36Staying technical
- 39:19Strategic troubleshooting
- 47:32Measuring performance
- 51:10Career growth
- 53:36AI and leadership
- 57:33Passion projects
- 1:00:02Closing thoughts
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