# Marc-Aurèle Brothier's Manager Readme

**Senior Engineering Manager / Cloud at Pix4D**

# Hello I'm Marc-Aurèle

I'm excited to have you here and appreciate you taking the time to learn more about my leadership style, expectations, and how I work. While this document aims to provide an overview, please keep in mind that I may miss or overlook some of my peculiarities. I'm always open to reviewing my behavior or this document to ensure that we can work effectively together.

I consider this document a living document, meaning it will evolve as I reflect on myself, my behavior, and my expectations. I hope that it will serve as a useful resource for you to understand my approach and enable us to work together effectively.

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or feedback.

_**Newest version of the document is now hosted at [https://github.com/marcaurele/...](https://github.com/marcaurele/marcaurele/blob/main/MANAGER.md) .**_

# Motivation for this document

My README page is intended to help others understand what it might to work with me, especially for people who haven't worked with me before. It's also a well-intention-ed effort at building some trust by being intentionally vulnerable, and to share my ideas of a good working relationship, to reduce the anxiety of people who may be on my team(s), now or in the future, at any level.

I hope to provide a genuine report on how I work, reducing bias/assumption and enabling people to work with me and others based on a common framework.

We’ll spend our 1:1s to get to know each other better, of course.

# About me

- I’m passionate about Computer Sciences and IT in general and spend a lot of time reading and doing.
- The domains I like are: security (hacking, social engineering, blue team, red team), systems/Linux, networking, resiliency, distributed systems, operations, automation, development, UX, developer experience.
- I have a home lab with a HashiCorp stack (Nomad + Consul with ACLs, I skipped Vault for now) to deploy many self-hosted services, to play with and to keep learning.
- I’m a console/CLI/🐧 person, I will automate as much as possible to not use a 🐁
- I’ve been twice around the world, taking 2 different years off to travel and disconnect completely from work and standard life.
  - [https://shakeyourlife.brothier.org](https://shakeyourlife.brothier.org) - 1st year off, photos are missing
  - [https://come-away-with-me.racobro.ch](https://come-away-with-me.racobro.ch) - 2nd year off.

- I’m a mountain-bike coach and train kids in my local cycling club.

# How you can help me

- Let me know when you’re blocked, need assistance, without waiting long. A simple 5 minutes discussions could unlock you. Do not underestimate the gain, neither see it as a weakness.
- Learn and remember from our discussions, so that we do not need to go over and over the same things often. As engineers we need to connect more and more dots of our systems to understand the whole better.
- Not forgetting your administrative duties, and staying on top of them (vacations, flex hours, sickness and their reports, OOO in your calendar, GitHub status…). 

# My working style

- I communicate by email and chat messages, I expect you read your emails at least once a day.
- I want to get things done, pushing to get it done to the last item. I will say no when there are too many projects in parallel and will incentivize my teams to focus on one thing at a time.
- If I say I will take care of something, you can trust me I will deliver / update you with it.
- By default I will trust you, so if I do not hear anything from yo, I consider that you are not block and will deliver what's requested. 

# What I expect

- I expect during a technical discussion that our common final goal is to seek solutions for a long term vision that will facilitate understanding of any developer, be as easy as possible to maintain, and to solve the initial goal of course.
- I believe in collaboration and dislike silos as we are all on the same company boat at the end of the day. I expect that people are going beyond their ego to improve the company and its people in general.
- Learn from our discussions, so that a topic is discussed a few times.
- Capability to divide a project in small incremental deliveries in order to see results and to feel the progression. We should aim for a MVP and work incrementally to improve the solution.

# What I want to earn

- Your trust and respect for the work I put in to remove blockers, simplify your environment so you feel at ease and can focus on what is important to you.
- Honesty in our mutual discussion, so that any topic can be discussed. I see my role as helping you to think through, challenge your point of view, to help you take better decisions.

# Communicating with me

- I start my morning by clearing my inbox, following the [Inbox 0 approach](https://klinger.io/posts/how-to-use-gmail-more-efficiently) and[OHIO](https://www.howtogeek.com/411312/forget-inbox-zero-use-ohio-to-triage-your-emails-instead/) one as it’s never truly empty.
- I will be direct in my message, do not expect “How are you?”. I’m going to the point. I could even miss the “Hi/Hello” in my chat message, do not take it badly.
- Be clear and avoid assumptions. State, as I will do, if the request is urgent.
- I will usually take 1 working day max to reply to any message (except when I'm catching up after being off).

# 1-1 with me

- You have a Note file attached to the calendar invite. Add the next meeting date if it’s not already there and add, whenever you need, bullet points on topic you want to discuss with me. Prefix them with your initial so say it’s coming from you. I’ll do the same.  
- I do not use the 1-1 for project updates, but rather for personal updates, mentoring, design thinking, to help you grow as an engineer. I will also use that time to give you a more long term view on what we are doing. 
- If you are my direct report or I’m there more to mentor you, I’ll expect that you are the one filling most of the bullet.
- If we are colleagues, it should be a ratio equivalent to how much work is going in each direction. It would be mostly about interactions between our teams on projects.
- I try as much as possible to not skip a 1-1 and will simply shorten the meeting if we do not have much to speak about. Sometimes it's the unplanned discussions that are the most interesting.

# Strengths/Weaknesses

- I’m too optimistic and always want to do an extra effort to get things done in a nicer way, for better long term, or to help.
- I can understand a very broad stack of technical domains in Computer Sciences.
- I always consider the point of view of a customer, a consumer of an API, a colleague using my code, to challenge how I would like to view/use the work I’m / the team is delivering.
- I do not like poor quality, but want to commit to improvements iteratively.