What would a manager as a service look like? What kind of systems a manager would resemble? How can you describe a manager’s responsibility through various systems? Here’s my take. A good engineering manager is like
- An integrated development environment (Idea, Visual Studio, Xcode). S/he helps to maximize engineer productivity. S/he is highly technical and provides guidance where the engineer needs. S/he gives relevant suggestions based on the context.
- A message broker (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ). There are a large number of requests coming to an Engineering manager. S/he will hold the right tasks and take the pressure off so that engineers can focus on their current tasks. S/he implements proper backpressure tactics to prevent burning out the team.
- A metric collector (Prometheus, Nagios). S/he uses metrics to make goals and objectives clearer. Metrics become an alignment tool. S/he mitigates risks and takes action before problems get too messy.
- A Load Balancer (Nginx, HAProxy) – S/he balances the load based on the number of people in the team. S/he implements ways to distribute requests across a group of engineers. S/he has thorough algorithms that capture how each engineer work.
- An orchestration system(Kubernetes). S/he progressively rolls out engineering strategy. If something goes wrong, s/he automatically rolls back. S/he ensures all engineers are healthy by implementing health checks like 1:1s.
