# Hubert Huang's Manager Readme **Director of Engineering at RetailMeNot** # Motivation for this document Managing people is a privilege. You are literally taking responsibility for one's career. Communication is sneakily hard to debug. There are always unknown unknowns lurking in the space between the lines of dialogue. My hope with this document is to make my perspective and biases a bit more clear. This in turn can help build a foundation of trust and a desire to work together to accomplish great things that will benefit your career when the day comes that we no longer work together. # My role Ultimately, this job can be boiled down to two big buckets of work: Clarity and Support. My teams should always be clear on the why for what they are working on. This does not mean they will always agree. In fact, there will certainly be times when we do not all agree. In these cases, I encourage individuals to challenge me, but ultimately be willing to disagree and commit once the matter is decided. I subscribe to the philosophy of servant leadership. My job is to to grow and develop the people who report to me. Often, this means finding "stretch assignments" to help the individuals grow their skill set. It also means supporting and unblocking these folks when obstacles arise. I will give straightforward feedback. I will ask you what your preferred way to receive this in our first 1:1. This can be behaviors that are not acceptable, missed opportunities, and praise for things that I would like to see you continue and build upon. I do not expect you to always agree, and when you do not, I ask that you consider my vantage point as a way of expanding your understanding. We will have a discussion about your goals and career every two months. This is not the only time we'll talk about this but this is the minimum cadence we need to be talking about this since you only get one. The goal of this is a shared understanding of where you want to go as well as things we are doing and/or lining up to continue your progress. I believe in 360 feedback for people I manage. Because of this, there will be times that I speak to others about how they work with you. This is to round out my thinking and try to minimize blind spots as I know my perspective as your manager is not the same as your teammates, peers, external stakeholders, etc. This is not to collect dirt. It would be an obtuse way to go about it. I'm fully aware that some or even most would let you know that I've asked about you.  # What do I value most? I encourage all members of my teams, regardless of title, to pitch ideas for how the team can improve. I expect that members of my teams to continue to educate themselves to get better at their craft. This is both engineers and managers. I expect for team members to step outside of their job title to do what's needed to make the team succeed. We all have specialties but the job is to make the team successful, not only what our job titles indicate. This is what leadership looks like. I value individuals who deflect credit to acknowledge other's contributions. Conversely, I do not tolerate credit taking. # My Expectations I keep an odd schedule because I have a young child at home. My family is priority #1 so my schedule operates around his. My hours are typically 930am-530pm and then 9pm-11pm. I also will usually work for a couple hours on Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening. I don't mind responding to messages outside of those times. I do not expect that others work evenings and weekends on any sort of regular basis. This includes responding to email or slack messages. If I need an immediate response, I will declare that in the message or I will contact you via text or phone call. However, there are exceptions. Some examples of exceptions: - You are on production support and there is a serious system issue. - There is a high profile project with a true deadline that has real consequences for being missed. You will know this deadline in advance as well as the consequences. My calendar is the source of truth for when I am available. If it's open, you can book it. My operating philosophy on mistakes -- especially technical ones-- is that they are not the fault of the individual but a shortcoming of the system that made it too easy to get tripped up. 1:1s are the default place that I will review these with the idea of improving things moving forward. I oppose public shaming. I expect that you respect those that come before you on the team. Even when things look in disarray, your default vantage point should be that there were good reasons for the decisions that were made. Assume everyone is great at their job and trying their best at all times. When you are unable to do so about an individual, we need to have a discussion about it in a 1:1. # 1:1s I have 1:1s weekly with all of my direct reports and monthly with all of my skip levels. The focus of these conversations is not project updates, but the reality is that there will be times that projects come up. I consider this to be your meeting, so we will prioritize the topics you want to speak about. What we discuss is confidential unless I explicitly state otherwise. Typically, I will ask if you are ok with me taking the info you provide into a more public forum. # Personality quirks I am skeptical about people who lack humility. My worry is that they will not be open to learning because they over-estimate the level of their current understanding. I am a quiet speaker. Do not hesitate to ask if you did not hear something I said. I studied journalism and have done some freelance writing in the past. People using words incorrectly -- especially fancy ones -- triggers me. # Where to focus on your first 90 days? **For managers:** - 30 days: Identify the one area that the team needs to focus on to improve its performance - 60 days: Determine plan for incorporating those into the product roadmap - 90 days: Incorporate at least one of the changes you've made and report back on resulting data **For developers:** **Week 1:** - You will complete the onboarding process and, update it where outdated, enhance where it is inadequate. - You will make your first code commit(s). - You will participate in your first code review. - You will deploy to production. **Week 5:** - You will have committed to each of the codebases owned by the team. - You will join production support as a shadow: - You will be point person for production support during the day. - You will monitor our key performance metrics and update the team at standup on their status each morning. - You will review all paging events that take place off-hours with the on-call engineer. - You will have deployed all the systems to production that the team owns. **Week 9:** - You will join the production support rotation as a full member.