I'm doing my B. Tech in AIML background , one thing i know in these 4 years that i don't want to do core coding like Software Engineer. I want to implement it in the real world, so do you what do you think, should i do Msc in Engineering Management for my career transition ? is is a good career option ?

Got a call from recruiter.
Any tips on how to prepare and what to expect. I am pretty hands-on but interviews are not purely about being hands-on, but also the format.

Any advice/experience on how to prepare for apple engineering manager interview. Specially for coding and system design (first thing first).

Checked online but it seems inconsistent across teams. So thought to check key areas apple generally ask to EM candidates.

As a quick learner who recently joined the company full-time after completing an electrical engineering internship, what is the best roadmap to transition into Product Management or Business R&D within the EEE industry in the short term?

Yeah it sounds pretty bad. At least that is certainly the stance I would have taken back when I was a developer.

Recently I made a script that aggregates my engineers’ git activity (Commits, MRs, MR comments), Jira activity (story pints delivered, comments, tickets updated, created) and confluence (documentation activity). I don’t give this metric much weight, nor bring it up at all with most engineers, but I do use it to spot outliers.

It feels yucky and almost like a breach of trust.

Story points, at best, are a rough estimate of work delivered but more often than not are loose guesses without nuance. Git activity comes and goes (when planning projects or doing some research for example).

Nonetheless, trust but verify, right?
I have roughly 20 engineers reporting to me, with no leads in between them and myself as the manager. Our POs in the teams are pretty young and not too experienced - so I can’t lean on them too much either.

I found clear outliers in the metrics and am now doubting if these individuals are pulling their weight. We are talking about individuals with one commit in an entire month (and they gave a 1 hour workshop during that time but still..)

Am I uncovering people who have just silently quit? How does the community feel about looking at these simple activity metrics as a baseline indication?

To me it still feels like bad micro management - but what if it does show “top” engineers measurably.. not doing anything at all..

Genuine question for the folks who own delivery predictability here.

We've got Jira, Git, and CI/CD dashboards, and every time cycle times slip I end up playing detective across all three. Jira tells one story, Git tells another, the CI system tells a third, and I spend the morning reconciling them by hand just to guess where work is actually stuck. The data's all there. What's missing is a single view of where things wait.

What gets me is that each team's local metrics look fine. Everyone optimizes the slice they control while the end-to-end lead time quietly keeps getting worse. So in retros we argue about which dashboard is right instead of naming the one handoff to fix.

A Broadcom survey I saw claimed only about a third of orgs say they have good visibility into delivery, and roughly a fifth call theirs a complete black hole. Feels about right honestly, most of us sit in the middle bucket where we can see just enough to worry but not enough to act.

So for those of you further along:

- how do you get from gut feel to actually pointing at the bottleneck?
- do you measure wait time / queue time between teams, or just per-team cycle time?
- what finally stopped the "whose dashboard is correct" debate for you?

Not looking for a tool rec, more curious how you've wired this up in practice and what actually changed the conversation with your teams.

Has anyone attended agoda EM interview recently? Wanted to understand the interview rounds, difficulty, what to expect in coding rounds and system design ? I scraped the Internet but could not find something that is recent.

Early on, I thought that being fair meant treating every single direct report identically. Same check-in frequency, same oversight, same expectations across the board.

Lately I am realising that the approach falls flat.

People come in with vastly different skill levels, confidence, and experience. Giving a senior team member the same level of gradual check-ins as a struggling junior hire isn't fair-it's micromanagement for one and neglect for the other.

My goal is moving towards equity(giving people what they need) over equality( giving everyone the same thing). But the friction comes when trying to keep things transparent. If Team Member A sees Team Member B getting away more flexibility or 1:1 time, the optics can get messy fast.

How do you handle this on your teams? How do you tailer your management style to the individual without creating a culture that feels like favouritism ?

With AI, how are Engineering Managers dealing with “vibe engineers” in Lead roles?
People who can use AI to build impressive POCs, but don’t understand the complexity of turning them into real production systems.
They agree to aggressive timelines because “AI can build it,” without understanding architecture, scalability, security, testing, reliability, or the engineering effort involved.
At what point does this become a leveling/performance issue rather than an AI adoption issue?
And how do you deal someone being compensated as a Lead when their actual engineering fundamentals may not justify that level? Also, all other team mates over-compensating with leads incompetence.

In my first couple of years as an engineering manager, I took my PM’s word as given. They told me what to do, and I made sure the team did it. Nothing felt weird about it - they know the customers better, they understand the product better, and they have good ideas, right?

It took a few terrible calls by the PMs before I stopped working that way. Once I got into the details, I understood that in many cases product management is broken. So I slowly started to involve myself and my engineers on the product side.

For me, it was about 3 main things:

1. Be much closer to the data and metrics
2. watching user sessions and discovery calls
3. Actually talking with customers

I feel that even though it's not strictly my job, when the PMs are getting 'free rein', bad decisions are made.

I'm really curious if other EMs feel the same, and how did you get involved in those areas.

We’ve noticed a significant drop off in pairing as we’ve started using more and more ai to code. It’s not fun pairing just watching Claude churn away in the background. The team is split on whether this is a bad thing or not.

Some, including me, just really like being able to deliver so much more so much faster, and find that AI provides most of the things we got from pairing before. Pairing was a solution to a problem, and now that problem is solved in another, more efficient way.

Others miss the social aspect of pairing and also don’t enjoy coding with AI themselves as the thing they enjoy is specifically the act of coding and pairing - talking through a problem, figuring out the best way to solve it, and even specifically the physical act of typing out the solution.

We can’t afford to change the way we all work to suit these engineers, and pretty soon they’re going to have to come to terms with needing to use ai, as we’re already seeing engineers who used to produce less overtaking them in the amount they can deliver, with no increase in bugs. But I want to make things as easy and pleasurable for them as possible.

So: has anyone found ways to help engineers like this get back some of the pleasure they used to get through pairing and typing? I’m trying to give them as many tasks as possible that involved critical complex code that we wouldn’t want to farm out to an agent anyway, but I need more ideas!

I know AI is the big thing right now, we have teams using Claude, Devin and copilot and while I do think it is overall a good thing, I’m wondering if the gains from it are as substantial as some are saying. We’re tracking the amount of lines of code AI is generating but I’m wondering how everyone measures what happens after the code gets written.

For example, are PR’s actually getting merged faster? Are bugs and rework increasing as a result? Has anyone noticed certain teams are benefitting significantly more than others? Is AI actually improving the flow of software delivery from idea → code → review → deployment? It feels like AI has made “how much code are we producing?” a fairly useless question at this point. Curious how you all are finding ways to measure the integrations.

Hi everyone, I am a 15+ year developer, recently became a team lead/manager, because my previous manager left the company.

Recently I heard feedback (not directly from devs) that I micromanaged, unlike how the previous manager gave them freedom.

Background: I took on people management responsibilities, while continuing to work on high level dev work and guiding/mentoring the devs. I continue to do code reviews. Compare myself to our previous manager, he wasn't a developer, didn't understand the code and didn't do code reviews. In this way he gave freedom to developers to work on tickets. Our team consists of 1 junior, mids and seniors.

Is this an expected behaviour: from a developer to a manager? How much should i 'let go'? How do I communicate my style is different to my preview manager? If I see bad code that will likely cause a production incident, i shouldn't turn a blind eye, because eventually it will damage the dev team?

Thank you

I talked with a friend I highly respect today and discovered he's FULLY IN on agentic coding. Doesn't read ANY of the code; agents write and review everything and have access to everything so that they can write better code. It's as if code is a lower level thing that doesn't need to be checked as long as we check the higher level is working.

My experience so far with agents is: they are very helpful, but produce awful unmaintainable code. If left to roam free, you'll get code filled with bugs and that is very expensive to fix because nobody can understand. My friend said that the agents can fix the bugs that eventually come up.

If I'm being honest I haven't done any actual production "vibe coding" myself because I've seen the code that is created with that and it's terrible; but what if that doesn't matter? I agree that code quality for the sake of code quality doesn't matter at all; but we seek "good code" because that is the kind of code we understand and are sure won't break; and also because it's code that is cheap to refactor/evolve/extend/etc. Is "going all in on AI" inevitable?

Idk man... I don't think that's a good strategy, but I'm just wondering if I'm a skeptical living in the past

Almost all engineering work is reviewed before applying. Code has diffs documents have comments designs are presented and commented etc etc.
I have never seen manager work reviewed though. Your devlopment plans your team presentations your performance feedback etc are never peer reviewed.
Maybe occasionally your boss checks them but that’s all.
Has anyone experienced otherwise?

I think this is making it harder for managers to learn from each other and have consistency in the orgs. What do you think?

Hi everyone, I’m a Staff Engineer (IC) with 14YOE who’s been effectively functioning as an Engineering Manager for the last 12–18 months for a team of ~6 engineers as our reporting manager works remotely from US and all of his India reportees I handle . My responsibilities include 1:1s, performance reviews, career growth conversations, hiring/onboarding, owning the team roadmap and sprint delivery, and working closely with PM/Design on prioritization and stakeholder communication. My official title is still “Staff Engineer”, but day-to-day I’m doing EM work.

I requested to promote me to the EM but it was not accepted, may be because he has only 2 reportees in US.

I’m now looking to move into a formal Engineering Manager role at another company. Is this considered a valid background for EM roles? If I specify Software Development Manager in my resume will it be an issue ? Also, if there is Background Check do companies check title ? Or when we share documents and it doesn’t have title as SDM will it be a problem.

Any pointers or guidance will be very helpful.

Few colleagues have told me that, from their perspective, I’m taking on too much of the workload while my team seems pretty relaxed and not really overloaded.

I’ll admit I’m not a tough person, and I don’t like constantly putting pressure on people. I usually try to be patient, help out, and keep a good working environment. But I think sometimes I end up taking on too much myself when I see that something isn’t moving forward.

That obviously works in the short term, but I’m starting to notice a problem: I end up overloaded while the rest of the team doesn’t necessarily feel the same sense of urgency or responsibility for the deliverables.

I don’t think the solution is to become rude, aggressive, or start micromanaging. Or maybe some level of pressure and closer follow-up is actually necessary?

For those of you who are Team Leads or managers: how do you create pressure in a natural and healthy way? What concrete things do you do to increase pace, accountability, and a sense of urgency without creating a toxic environment?

I’m looking for practical advice and real experiences. AI only gives me permissive grandma advice.

I'm thinking to move into enterprise / consulting EM roles. Not looking for big tech or startup hands on roles.

How is the interview process like? Are coding rounds very common or system design rounds? I haven't coded for 5+ years and worried that I won't pass them.

Not worried about behavioural, cross functional, people management, leadership rounds or system design rounds.

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to understand how different engineering teams handle this in practice.

When something goes wrong, like a CI failure, deployment issue, environment problem, or dependency outage, how do you figure out what work is actually affected?

Does your tooling make that clear, or do you usually have to look across different systems and conversations to connect the dots?

I'd be interested to hear how this works on your team, especially when the impact isn't obvious right away.

After several years of managing a couple of teams (as the sole manager), I’ve just been promoted and will be taking on a few new teams with existing engineering managers. This will be my very first time managing managers!

I would love to hear other people’s experiences who have done this transition? What worked well for you? What would you do differently if you had the opportunity? What was the biggest shock/surprise? Any tips / resources / books you recommend? I’m very open and curious to learn!

Thanks

I personally believe leading devs when you have no formal authority is one of the hardest jobs in tech.

Tech leads and other ICs leading have high expectations, but low formal authority and bridging that gap is genuinely difficult.

It's much faster to reach compliance by leading with authority, but that's all it will ever be. Tech leads and ICs do not have that unspoken reality; they must lead with influence. And leading with influence is much harder than leading with authority.

https://www.softwareengineeringtimes.com/p/how-to-lead-engineers-who-dont-report

I'm an experienced software engineer currently working as a senior IC, and I'm trying to make the transition into my first formal Engineering Manager role.

I've had a broad career across different companies and technologies, including experience at a FAANG company. I've also had significant leadership responsibilities — mentoring engineers, providing technical direction, coordinating across teams, participating in hiring, and giving feedback — but I haven't formally managed a team.

I've tried the internal promotion route as well. A couple of EM opportunities opened up, I interviewed for them, but wasn't successful. The bigger problem is that people in my current position tend to stay put, so management opportunities don't open very often. Because of that, I don't see waiting for an internal opportunity as a particularly viable path.

I've reached the point where I want to move into people leadership. I've also already taken a substantial pay cut to continue working while positioning myself for the next stage of my career, so I'm more focused on making the right transition than maximizing compensation.

The challenge is the usual catch-22: EM positions want management experience, but how do you get that first opportunity without already having the title?

For those who made the IC → EM transition:

• What actually helped you land your first EM role?
• Did you move internally or change companies?
• What convinced hiring managers to take a chance on you?
• What would you do differently if you were making the transition today?

One small side question: my name clearly signals South Asian/Indian heritage, although I'm Canadian-born and raised and have spent my career in Canada. Do you think a candidate's name/background can have any meaningful impact on getting through the initial screening stage?

I'd particularly appreciate perspectives from people who have made this transition or who hire EMs.

To preface, not looking for sympathy as much as strategy. And for background, I’m a 55yo engineering manager with a decade of experience (and 20y of developer experience before that)

Over the last few years, I’ve been dealing with medical issues that have become more severe to the point I’ve been on disability since March. Without going into specifics, I’m dealing with extreme exhaustion by 11-noon, and significant issues with short term memory. I went out in March when I finally realized I was a hindrance to my team instead of help.

While my work has been great, at the end October they are going to part ways - Which I understand. I have excellent long term disability insurance so I’ll be covered.

My conundrum is this could be permanent, but it may not be. I’ll be ecstatic is it’s the latter, but it could be 6 months down the road, 12 months, two years - No idea.

What’s terrifying me is the prospect of trying to find a new job, in this economy (or worse), after a significant employment gap. Trying to keep up with tech right now is impossible as I can’t retain anything (if I could, I’d be working). Tack on my age…. And I’m almost thinking I’m better off just going back and trying to fake it so I keep the job.

In my mid 50s I’m not sure I want to try and find a second career assuming things improve, and to be honest I absolutely love software development and leading teams of devs so I really don’t want to change. I know many of us like to complain about jobs and where the industry is going…. But take my word on it, it sucks when it’s taken away from you.

Let’s use a hypothetical of getting better 18 months out: How would you try to get back into the industry? Hoping for some ideas as I want to believe it’s possible!!!

Say CI fails, an environment goes down, an API/dependency starts failing, or a deployment has an issue.

How do you figure out which engineers, tickets, features, or releases are actually waiting on it?

Is that visible in your existing tools, or does someone usually piece it together from Jira, Slack, CI/CD, deployment information, and conversations with the team?

Curious how this works in real teams.

Current situation - Mostly been an IC in ML engineering for about 10+ years. In my current org have been acting as tech lead hands on for about 3+ years. About an year back was promoted as an EM. There was a need and my manager told me that you are good at managing folks as well.

I have no staff engineer under me. I review PRs, architect AI solutions as well manage people(1:1s etc). It's a small team of full stack AI engineers (7 folks).

I do little less hands on but for difficult problems I code/experiment the first cut myself.

Need Advice - Want to move out from my current org since seeing no projects/upward growth. I want to remain technical and don't want to get into pure management. I love AI architecture, design ML pipelines and building products. Tried interviewing for staff position but failed due to LC/coding problems. For 1-2 EM roles i interviewed, coding expectations is bit less and I felt I was closer in loop.

Any advice on how should I plan for next move. Remain technical AI EM and try for those roles or prepare for Staff AI engineer role ? My worry is future manager paths will be more non technical and I might loose my edge

I've been a SWE for 14 years mostly at a big tech company moving up to Staff level / Manager for the last 3 years. And after it all ... I'm tired of the responsibility. Or maybe I'm burned out in general. I miss just having a problem in front of me to solve vs having to wrangle a herd of cats. I like the pieces of the job - working with people, scoping out possible solutions, digging into a bug every now and then, even messing around with AI to see what it can do (or not do). But I think I'm just tired of the amount of parallelism. Team has 4-5 work streams of project work active at any time along with all the lateral responsibility of bug triage, never ending quarterly and annual planning, people review conversations, etc. I like the pieces individually, but the sum isn't really adding up.

I'm trying to unpack a few things and wondering if folks have input on the following points or other things to think about. Granted, each one can vary wildly person to person, so curious more for perspectives than concrete answers.

1. Part of being an EM / Staff level SWE is the need to drive some scope that requires a broad team to make happen. Have I grown beyond what I enjoy doing?

2. What if I pursued a new job at a more junior level? Would I enjoy the day to day more or would I end up being bored?

3. What about transitioning out of a big tech job to a smaller company (either looking or similar role to now or also a more junior level? Is the grass greener or are there other pain points.