Leading in Software Engineering

 

Aspiring software engineers are often keen to understand how they can progress in their career to a leadership position within their team or their organisation.

Clearly a certain level of technical competence is going to be a requirement but there is also a number of soft skills that are often the make or break factor. 

If you have the correct aptitude then correcting any omissions in technical knowledge can be easily addressed, but developing the softer skills can often require a more conscious effort.

Software within Context

The majority of the companies you will work for aren't in the software engineering business. Software is instead a tool being employed to achieve other business goals.

Understanding the business context within which you are creating software is important, the software itself isn't the end goal, the things it can achieve are. Allowing this context to influence the engineering decisions you make will increase the effectiveness of your engineering output.

You don't necessarily have to become an expert in how your company operates. But an understanding of its source of profitability, its customer base and its goals and motivations will enable you to become a more rounded operator.

Don't just see yourself as an engineer, see yourself as someone with engineering skills working towards a common goal.

The Reality of Technical Debt

Many engineers will frequently become frustrated at business decisions that they feel are impinging on the quality of their software.

This passion to be involved in quality engineering is an asset and is much better than a "that'll do" attitude. But a pragmatic outlook is going to be required to avoid becoming too disheartened.

It is unlikely to be the goal of your company to produce quality software, that will probably never be stated, but going back to the idea of business context, the business will have goals that are wider than pure engineering excellence.

This means decisions will be made, for legitimate business reasons, that are counter to what you might like to see within an engineering context. This means technical debt is just a reality of life, but there are good and bad ways to deal with and manage technical debt.

Technical debt is only technical debt if you understand you are incurring it, if you are oblivious to it then you're just writing bad software. Often the skill as a leader is to identify where technical debt is unavoidable, trying to limit its scope, making sure a plan exists for paying the debt back in the future and ensuring the fact it is being incurred and its impacts are properly communicated.

Being a zealot and refusing to compromise or co-operate with the business is going to make you less effective. 

Helping People Help Themselves

When you move into a leadership position its often tempting to think you have to do everything yourself, this lack of delegation can lead to a tendency to do rather than teach.

As a leader others will often come to you with problems they are struggling to solve. It may be tempting to simply solve the problem for them, but in doing this you are restricting their ability to learn and grow.

Sometimes a problem might be urgent or have severe implications meaning you need to take ownership of the situation. But on other occasions rather than solve the problem for somebody you can instead guide them to the right solution and give them the skills to repeat the process in the future.

This will also extend to letting other know it's ok to not know the answer. Others will often assume that you know the answer to all problems, making them understand that you don't and in fact you just have developed a set of skills to help you find the answer will help those individuals acquire the same skills.

It's tempting to think that a leader in a software engineering team is equivalent to the chief geek and the best engineer. While it's likely that someone with the aspiration to lead will also have strong technical skills that is not the only qualifying factor in being an effective in a leadership role.

There are other softer factors that can require us to re-think the way we view our role but will ultimately make you a more well rounded engineer and successful leader.