Engineering Management is a Mess/Nightmare to deal with
Pros
Engineers and other folks outside of management are great. Product managers are great and easy to work with.
Cons
I want to caveat this review with saying it is only applicable to the engineering management layer at Level Data. I don't have enough knowledge of the other departments within Level Data, and the actual engineers themselves at Level Data are very intelligent, great people. It is only the management side that is an absolute mess. We started doing daily stand ups with a 3 developer team. There were multiple VP-level people, director level folks, and product manager on these stand ups. Six total management level people in every daily stand up, on a THREE developer team. Let that sink in. Think management bureaucracy similar to what one would see in Office Space. Only the product manager had any business being in our stand ups. She was great and easy to work with, and our productivity showed that. The new VP-level management would preach for developers (including myself) to trust the new processes being put in place. During stand ups, it was a regular occurrence for the director or VPs to pop in late or sporadically, re-iterate what we had already discussed when they weren't there (because they showed up late), and have the audacity to override the meeting and interrupt my team CONSTANTLY while the developers would try to give an update. As the tech lead for the big selling product, this enraged me. I tried to subtly hint numerous times that we had already discussed this or that item, or we were already planning on doing this or that. But what you see a lot from engineering management is very little listening, lots of talking, lots of heavy opinions. So if I am to "trust" this new process, you need to trust the team to do their job and get things done. I found it incredibly frustrating that the director of engineering had no problem constantly interrupting me or my team and overriding decisions. For a bit, I tried to give him benefit of doubt and just assumed that was an unintentionally abrasive personality trait. However, I noticed he never did those things to VP and up level folks, and that's when I realized he and the other engineering VP-level folks applied respect to people on a case-by-case basis based upon corporate ladder rank instead of also having a mutual respsect for their direct reports. Let me share what you can look forward to as a developer. When updating your user story, you might get reprimanded for putting discussions in a comment thread to the user story instead of adding it as a bullet point list in the user story description. So silly. I had another situation where I gave the director a heads up that I would be out during lunch and he told me to put it on the calendar. I did so, and put "Away" or something like that for the calendar event. He reprimanded me for that, saying it should say "Out of Office" or something to that degree, for the 1.5 hours during lunch I was away. And if your first thought is "Wow shouldn't these management folks have better things to do?". YES. You're absolutely right. And that's just my most recent memory in the last couple weeks, there's been plenty annoying, overbearing ticky-tacky things like that in the past. After management basically derailed our sprint planning, they completely killed our productivity and tried to run things with a bullying/dominant style that I'm not a fan of. I believe you should treat all folks, including direct reports, with the same respect and try to bring a positive vibe to the team you're in. Trying to run a team through intimidation will not achieve those results long-term. The truly ironic thing about this is how heavily opinionated the director and VP folks were on the product we were working on, but they have NO idea how any of it works. If you asked them to just draw a simple four or five box flowchart of any of the product's reports that they have a heavy-handed opinion on processes for, they would have NO IDEA how to do it nor did they ever reach out to have a 1-on-1 with me to understand the intricacies of it in order to enable them to make better judgment calls with the technical direction. When it was my last day, I was trying to help some folks with a sales demo to get a couple issues ironed out in the product and streamline some scripts for doing deployments to make it easier for whomever was going to take it over. Literally, while I was working on changes, and without warning, my access to everything was cut off. I had to reach out to a few folks via my personal phone to let them know "Hey sorry I can't help you get that ironed out since my access was cut out of nowhere" just a little bit before their sales demos. Absolutely crazy. Needless to say, my heart goes out to the actual engineers doing the coding as this new layer of engineering management bureaucracy gets shoveled onto them, because those engineers deserve better.
