A week in the Jungle with Florian, Engineering Manager
We are 3 engineering managers at Welcome to the Jungle (WTTJ), each managing 10 developers split into 2 squads. We all started our careers as developers, but our professional experiences went in different directions from there, which means we now complement each other in terms of soft and hard skills. Now that I’ve set the context, let me introduce myself, your humble narrator for today: My name is Florian. After several early experiences as a software engineer, I entered the world of technical support and worked my way up over time to a few management positions. I have been a full remote engineering manager at WTTJ for more than a year now and I wanted to share with you my everyday work life. So now, if you’re ready, I’ll walk you through a recent week to give you an idea of what it means to be an engineering manager at WTTJ!
Monday
8:30 AM
After a good breakfast, I head to the weekly video call I have with my fellow engineering managers every Monday morning. This is an informal discussion and I take advantage of this time to share my feedback about Swarmia, a tool I have just finished testing to see if it could help us monitor the average time of code reviews and pull request merges.
11 AM
Just before lunch, I attend a daily stand-up meeting with each of my squads. Luckily, there are no blocking points or emergencies this week, so they go pretty smoothly.
2 PM
I start my series of one-to-one video meetings with the front-end developers I manage. One of these calls is quite challenging for me as a manager because I have to let one of our senior developers know that we are going to end their trial period. I arrange a dedicated meeting with them on Thursday so that we can go into more depth about the decision.
4:30 PM
My one-to-one meeting with Kevin, the CTO, is canceled because I have to help one of my squads deal with a critical bug in production. As an engineering manager I am totally hands-off, so I don’t code myself even in these types of situations, but I make sure I am there to give moral support and write up the postmortem documentation.
Tuesday
9:30 AM
My day starts with a placeholder meeting with my first squad that we use to review the roadmap or the next JIRA tickets to prioritize.
11 AM
My usual daily stand-up meetings with my two squads. A lot of bugs were reported in one of our products yesterday by the business team. We need to roll back as quickly as possible to restore a stable version of the product.
2 PM
Time for the engineering manager chapter, which happens twice a month. This is dedicated time that we use to harmonize our practices as engineering managers. Today, we choose to focus on how to animate retrospectives — the ideal day and time to plan them, their duration and frequency.
3 PM
During one of my one-to-one meetings with my back-end developers, I’m told that the developer has been contacted by a recruiter and they are questioning their professional future. Tough news! But nothing is happening yet and so I see it as an opportunity to work with them on their evolution at WTTJ.
4 PM
A Jungle Workshop has been organized this afternoon (these usually happen once every two weeks). It gives each member of the tech team the opportunity to present one topic to the rest of the team. Today, the focus is on the engineering part: There is a presentation of the tool Backstage and a useful lesson about how to use type definition in Elixir and why we do.
Wednesday
8:30 AM
I have no recurrent meeting planned today. This is what we at WTTJ call a focus day. So, headphones over my ears, I take most of my morning to deal with the information I have collected over the past two days.
11 AM
One-hour coaching session with my mentor to improve my management skills.
2 PM
I usually use my Wednesday afternoons to anticipate the next tasks and do some deep work on larger tasks that need my complete attention. Today, I am dedicating my time to a presentation I am going to give during an internal event called Tech Days next week. It’s a team-building event that is being held for the first time. My presentation is about how to give constructive feedback, an exercise that we practice a lot as engineering managers but that everybody should be able to have the opportunity to do for the sake of the team. People often hold back from telling the truth about things in order not to disrupt the harmony and good vibes of the team, without understanding that it causes more damage than good in the end.
4 PM
Last week we organized an internal bug fest for one of the products, during which several bugs were reported by the business and marketing teams. It was a useful event that allowed us to find out about numerous new bugs and stabilize the product. Consequently I am now busy designing funny mugs as awards for the 3 bug fest winners. Is “Bug Busters” funny enough?
5 PM
I end my day watching videos of meetings I was not able to attend. Indeed, we have a rule that every meeting is either video-recorded or minuted so that everybody always has access to the same level of information.
6 PM
I take the train from Nice to Paris for our monthly IRL gathering.
Thursday
9 AM
I arrive at the office and have a coffee with the other developers (including the full remote ones) who have been able to attend. It feels good not to be behind a screen and to see everybody IRL!
9:30 AM
Important discussions are held during the product and tech managers’ bi-monthly meeting about the next round of fundraising. We also discuss the strategy and the budget.
10 AM
Time for the dedicated meeting with the senior developer we are about to let go. I explain to them what went well and what went wrong, as we saw it. Just after the meeting, I send a Slack message to the whole tech team to inform them about the news and I initiate a postmortem document so that we can outline what happened. We need to understand what went wrong on our side during the interview process and/or the onboarding process so that it doesn’t happen again.
11 AM
I attend the usual daily stand-up meetings with my squads.
2 PM
During the placeholder meeting with my second squad, I take 5 minutes to congratulate the team on how the technical debt is decreasing on the product. One of the KPIs I follow is the number of updates for the packages that we use. In our case, we tend to do them more often, which is definitely the right direction to be taking!
3 PM
One of my squads needs an extra person. We make a quick decision during the engineering leaders’ weekly meeting, which is attended by all the engineering managers, the CTO, the lead software architect, the principal engineer, and the lead developers, to switch one of the developers between squads. This meeting is the perfect time to discuss what has been happening in each squad lately and prioritize topics.
3:30 PM
I have meetings with the different product managers I am working with to check that there are no blocking points.
4 PM
I attend a meeting with the Talent Acquisition team. On the agenda is a discussion about the rewriting of a job post for a senior engineering manager open position and a follow-up on the progress of the reviews of technical tests done by candidates.
7 PM
Spending a day in Paris is also an opportunity to have a few drinks with the tech team when the sun goes down. It means we are able to do some team building and also have informal and longer conversations among the team. It’s important to stay available as much as possible and this time can be spent discussing complicated topics or just talking about the weather.
Friday
10 AM
It’s my day off today, so no work for me. The only thing on the agenda is to do a 20-kilometer bike ride. I maybe answer 1 or 2 Slack messages to make sure no bottlenecks build up for my squads and then I can start enjoying my 3-day weekend!
So…this was intense!
I hope you enjoyed the ride! As you can see, being an engineering manager at Welcome to the Jungle involves no coding at all, so that you can focus purely on management. We try to harmonize our practices as engineering managers as much as possible to make sure we are as efficient as possible. Communication is key and we really try to work as a team and help each other, even if we manage different people. Interested in joining the team? We have several open positions, so check them out!
Written by Florian Demaria, Engineering manager @ WTTJ
Edited by Anne-Laure Civeyrac
Illustration by Clara Dupré
