Adapted from manager-README by @molly.
I'm looking forward to working with you! This document is not intended to replace or override the relationship and mutual understanding we will build as we work together. Its intention is to give you an idea of how I think and how I work.
TL;DR: I am here to make sure our team is successful, happy, and working on the things that are most important to help our customers, improve our service, and improve our business.
More specifically:
- I make sure you are both successful and happy. I want you to improve your technical skills, grow your career, enjoy your work, and believe in both our team's and our company's mission. I'm a big believer in servant leadership.
- I make sure our team is successful and pointed in the right direction. Two good metaphors here are aligning vectors and strategic vs tactical thinking; I am here to make sure our team is aligned and pushing in the same direction.
- I write code too!
These are in approximate order of importance. If you are not successful and happy, our team is not successful (or happy). If our team is struggling, writing code will most likely not be my top priority.
Additionally, my job is not to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it. It is also not to be the "official decision maker" for our team. A nice distillation of this distinction is: "I am accountable for the decisions the team make, even when I'm not the one making them."
If you have feedback for me, please give it. It could be something you liked and would like to see more of, something you thought I could do better, something you thought I totally screwed up, or something that doesn't fit in any of these categories. Even if you think it might not be the case, I do want to hear it. And if you think I don't want to hear it, I'd love to hear why you feel that way.
If you can give me this feedback face-to-face (in person or on Teams), that's my preference. If you're only comfortable kicking off a discussion with an email or a DM, I would rather you do that than not bring it up at all.
If you're not comfortable giving me some feedback yourself, I'd love for you to give it to someone above me in the management chain so they can anonymously relay it to me.
Similarly, if you have feedback for a team member or colleague, I encourage you to give it to them directly; if you're not comfortable doing so, let's chat and I can either get the feedback to them or we can figure out a way to deliver it that makes you comfortable.
I will put time on our calendars each week for a one-on-one. If you need more time, let me know and I will adjust. One-on-ones are your time. I will probably have some things to discuss with you, but this is first and foremost your opportunity to let me know how you're doing, what you need, what you wish could be different, how you feel about our team and your teammates, what your career goals are, etc. These times are for the conversations you might not necessarily have with me when we're sitting at our desks amongst coworkers. If you'd like to give me a brief status update on things you're working on or that you're stuck on, that is fine with me, but those are generally better-suited to a quick chat while I'm at my desk, an @ in a Pull Request, a DM, or a separate meeting.
I encourage you to write down some things throughout the week that you want to chat about if you think that will help, since it can sometimes be hard to think of or bring up things in the moment. If you have things you want to talk about but struggle with bringing them up, feel free to send me a vague agenda ahead of time. If you don't know what to talk about, say so. We can use that as a topic.
These are some interesting articles I've read about one-on-ones, though I don't necessarily agree with all of the points: 1, 2. If you have thoughts on either, that might make a good topic to include in a one-on-one.
I will give you feedback on how you're doing continuously, including in our one-on-ones. If I'm worried about your performance, I will let you know. My goal is for you to never be unsure about how you're performing (and how I think you're performing). If you ever feel unsure about either of these things, please let me know.
I don't like to dictate how anyone works, but in the interest of transparency I do have some biases in how I work day-to-day that are worth sharing.
Whenever possible I prefer to work in the open. That means using team-wide or public Teams / Slack channels, versus private chats or email. Private communication is more difficult to share and somewhat exclusionary. Similarly, if a change or idea is broadly applicable, contribute it upstream versus keeping it private to our team. There's a time and a place for each, but my default option is to work publicly.
I prefer to keep code, docs, designs, and discussions together. That means I prefer to write docs in Markdown and check them into a repo over using Word shared via OneDrive / Dropbox. As engineers, we work daily in git, Markdown, and pull requests for collaboration. If these tools are insufficient for our needs, let's improve the tools rather than bypass them. For instance, if you'd like to add diagrams to your docs, consider tools like Mermaid which are supported in GitHub and Azure DevOps. Furthermore, docs that are kept separate from the code tends to rot quickly.
I will try to get a sense of your normal working hours as we begin working together, and I will make a strong effort not to message you outside of these hours because I know many people have notifications sent to their phone. I will sometimes send emails outside of your working hours (especially if we're in different time zones), as emails don't tend to notify people quite as intrusively; you should not feel obligated to respond until you are working. With Teams I tend to use the "schedule message" functionality if I am sending a message outside of your usual working times, since it tends to trigger a notification. If you are receiving after-hours messages from me frequently, please let me know—it may mean I'm misunderstanding the hours you normally work.
Similarly, if you email or message me outside of my working hours, I may not respond quickly. I do try to keep up with notifications in case there's anything urgent, but if I read a message and it's non-urgent, I may leave it until the next working day. If you have something non-urgent you want to tell me and it's outside of my work hours, I don't mind if you message me, though I always appreciate an explicit note that it's non-urgent!
- Message me or set up an impromptu meeting.
- Throw something on my calendar. If I am scheduled for an interview or something else I can't reschedule and you invite me to a meeting, I may chat with you and reschedule. If you see that I've blocked off the day or time block as "meeting-free", that does not apply to you—it's more to discourage folks outside the team from scheduling non-urgent meetings that day that could be scheduled otherwise. If you need to talk, schedule over this as much as you need.
Even when I work from home you can expect me to be as available as I would be if I was in the office. Although it may feel weird to schedule a brief meeting when you'd normally just swing by my desk for five minutes, please do so without hesitation if you think chatting face-to-face or screen-sharing will be more useful than textual communication.
Take this document with a grain of salt; I wrote it! I have never experienced having me as a manager. If something here seems off, open a pull request or issue, or bring it up to me in one-on-one or over DMs.
This document is meant to focus on how I work and what to expect from me. We will discuss expectations I have of you and the rest of the team soon after we begin working together.
Here are some things I enjoy. If you ever want to strike up casual conversation and don't know what to talk about, these are good bets!
- Running / hiking. Probably the hobby most people know about me is I enjoy running on both roads and trails, and have raced most distances from 5ks on up. Here's a race report I wrote a few years ago about the Squamish 50/50, and love talking all things running or hiking.
- I'm a wannabe power grid nerd. I'm fascinated by the transition that's underway to remake the power grid we all rely on to one that's distributed, clean, and equitable. If you're interested in learning more about this space, I can highly recommend the podcasts Catalyst, DER Task Force, and Volts. I'm always available to nerd out.
- Writing. A huge portion of my life has been spent trying to clearly and concisely communicate with others. While for me that's mostly been in the non-fiction and business space, if you've found good writing of any type, I'm interested.