How to Take Great Engineers & Make Them Great Technical Leaders • Courtney Hemphill • GOTO 2017

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2017

Courtney Hemphill - Fostering Technical Team Leadership at Carbon Five

ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
The Engineering-Manager Transition: How to take great Engineers and make them great Technical Leaders

ABSTRACT
From mentoring team members to aligning engineering efforts with business priorities, today's companies are in dire need of great technical leaders. There is no management school for this and most organizations lack access to guidance or a mentorship framework that can transition their most talented core contributors into contemporary engineering [...]

Download slides and read the full abstract here:

#Teams #TechLead #TechLeaders #TechLeadership #CourtneyHemphill

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Question for you: What’s your biggest takeaway from this video? Let us know in the comments! ⬇

[aman__toor.]

Amazing presentation - I never watch full lengthy videos but this one had me hooked.

[ricmrodrigues]

For me the key takeaway was the 2 paths at the end. The manager path and the maker path and both of them have a future a way to progress. This is great! A lot of companies push great technical people into management to be able to advance their career when they don't want to manage people, is pushing them out, creating a bigger problem by pushing reports out and even losing great value in their technical skills!

[matijag]

I kept pausing the video to take notes.

[uma_r]

Good to share own experiences and knowledge. Nice talk

[kapilshekhar]

Looks like she has read a tonn of blogs and is simply dumping them in the talk. Sorry, this talk didnt do justice to this important issue. From my person experience :

1. Technical Leaders take away management BS in dealing with people.
2. They are honest, upfront & rewarding, just as technology is. Mentees feel that.
3. They are bold, "have their back", standup for truth, standup even when they may be pulled down because of it by the "pure managers".
4. They will NOT shy away from getting involved in fun part of team. They are not bosses, they just are engineers with more experience and acceptance that they can take responsibility of humans.
5. They should be willing to sit down with engineers and solve issues with them, and make a developer realize good practices, technology patterns so that the mentees have that sweet comforting feeling that they are learning.
6. Organization should assess if the person who are responsible for humans are actually qualified. Qualified in terms of what they think and do they know what it means and takes. Becoming managers is not a temporal progress of engineers. This is one of the diseases that IT world has been suffering from.
7. Managers should be assessed based on the reverse feedback from their team and not by their bosses. Managers worth lies in how happy their team is, and not how their bosses "perceive" their handling of people.

Again, this talk is bunch of names and jargons...… exactly what managers and mentors should not have. sigh !

[TheodoreRavindranath]

Really good talk for newbie leads. Lot of interesting points which generic leadership talks don't touch upon!

[beedeeuniko]

finally a well structured, well presented, charismatic talk

[jeffreychongsathien]

You don't need a specific book for software management. It's just leadership, applicable everywhere, and the role models are everywhere: Dick Winters, Captain Picard, Winston Churchill ...

[PoppySeed]

sounds like a very cookie cutter approach to leadership. from my experience, the best leaders in the software industry were ones who didnt ever really talk about "leadership"... they were the ones who got there by understanding the technologies and products so well, they just naturally became a resource of knowledge that people went to. all of these cookie cutter approaches to leadership end up driving the wrong people into management... "oh im more of a big picture person, im not really interested in the code..." these people have not developed their skills as an engineer nearly enough to become a leader of engineers. its ridiculous. im not saying this lady is like that, but she paints a cookie cutter approach to leadership and i just dont think good leaders follow any specific formula. i think they are a product of their environment with dedication to being great from a ground up approach. if they are truly great at what they do, combined with a good attitude that people feel comfortable approaching, then they naturally become good leaders. scrap the cookie cutter approach. focus on becoming truly great at building software along with being an approachable person with a good attitude. these people are kinda rare, and for good reason. its HARD WORK to be truly great. there is no cookie cutter approach.

[move]

I noticed at 3:54 there's no amazon, prob because amazon tenure is much higher than other companies?

[bondys-video-kucing]

I feel this talk is more a sum-up and collection of citations from various self-help books of management. The energy that the speaker sent imho about list of to dos (tactics) while i believe the rizz of leader that should be built should be more to wisdom (strategy).

My 2 cents

[black_baron_net]

☠BLACK BARON☠ ... and where is the Team "007" in Mänätschment 101 testing the code ... all day ... monday to sunday? Do you have "iRobots" for this in America?

[paulcernuto]

I was wondering why the software industry went down the tubes. Not anymore.

[prolific]

of course it's "super important"

[enokoner]

So what if your "human" self doesn't fit most of the cultures on most of these tech teams?

[lewis]

Not really a very cohesive talk. Lots of little pieces of information taken from a range of places but I don't know what principles they're supposed to add up to.

[cabc]

"Does anyone know...<insert name here>?"

[BuffNerdInCa]

Stopping at 15:00. Long winded waste of time consisting of name, and jargon dropping. Little to no useful content. Someone wanted to stroke their own ego as opposed to giving a usefull presentstion.

[tomgcolemangoplayer]

Ya know, great content, right? I learn a lot, right? Try adding some silence now and then, and slow down for emphasis.