3 ways Engineering Managers can navigate layoffs and recession
3 ways Engineering Managers can navigate layoffs and recession
Engineering managers are stuck between vague messaging from the leadership and pointed questions from their reports. Everyone wants to know what’s happening.
"Am I on the list?" the engineer asked.
"Which list?" the Engineering Manager replied
"You know, what everyone is talking about, there is a list of people who will be let go," the engineer said.
"I don't know anything about such a list," the Engineering Manager replied.
The engineer shook their head in disbelief. It was obvious they didn’t trust the manager.
Following up on my previous newsletter (A framework to navigate recession as a developer) engineering managers are stuck between vague messaging from the leadership and pointed questions from their reports. Everyone wants to know what’s happening.
1. Are there going to be layoffs in our company? If yes, how likely is it to impact our team?
2. Will there be more layoffs (if there have already been layoffs recently)?
In most organizations, engineering managers have little information. They are kept in the dark up until the day layoffs are announced. (You can read “How layoffs play out” for more details on the process)
Despite this reality, their reports expect EMs to have answers.
In this newsletter, I will talk about three aspects of being an engineering leader during times of recession:
Motivating your team during uncertainty
Maintaining team productivity in the case of layoffs
(Addressing a corollary topic in shipping great features and improving team efficiency during hiring freezes)
Taking precautionary action to prioritize your career growth
Motivating your team in times of uncertainty
There are many ways to motivate your team, but above all, you’ll need to maintain trust with your team.
As your team starts to ask questions, they expect answers despite your lack of visibility in leadership decisions.
If you’re starting from a position where your team lacks trust, it’s important that you begin building trust every day with transparency. This builds their confidence in the security of their job.
Here are a couple of approaches that can help improve your team’s trust in your leadership:
Acknowledge your team’s anxieties.
Explain the boundaries and realities of your knowledge.
Reassure your team of transparency for any news you find out.
Share your experience and stories from your network in navigating times of uncertainty.
Remind them of the continued rising demand in software development talent.
Speak to the product’s strength, roadmap, and alignment to company goals.
Empathize with their concerns by sharing your own uncertainties.
Once you’ve established trust with your team, you can then shift the conversation to further motivate your team by focusing on the areas you and your team can control.
The question that should help drive you and your team is:
How can we be more productive and efficient so that the value of the team is understood by management?
Some areas you can focus on include:
Proving your team product is mission critical
Focusing on delivering efficiently
Treating the time as a drill for current and future tight times
Setting your team up for success (In the case of layoffs)
Despite your best efforts to encourage your team, it’s also wise to plan ahead for the scenario where your company moves forward with layoffs.
With a more lean future team, it’s important that they’re set up for success to avoid digging themselves out of a giant hole. Furthermore, these actions will set your team up for success regardless of layoffs or not.
A couple areas of focus come to mind, as you set you team up for success post-layoffs.
Updating documentation
Reducing tribal knowledge
Removing redundancies
Updating onboarding
Updating documentation & Reducing tribal knowledge
These two topics come hand-in-hand as keeping documentation and knowledge bases updated prevents your team from losing tribal knowledge. Without updated documentation, remaining team members may face additional demotivation due to losing colleagues with knowledge they needed to be more productive in their work.
Keeping your documentation and knowledge base updated protects your team from further loss of productivity or lost time in understanding a legacy developer’s code.
Becoming diligent about documentation and reducing tribal knowledge can continue to be a healthy culture within your engineering team moving forward, despite the early stressors that influence such a shift.
Removing redundancies
Regardless of layoffs or not, removing redundancies will improve your team’s overall productivity and focus on bigger objectives.
It may also be a good time to take a step back and analyze your team’s current processes to find inefficient or archaic workflows or processes.
Are teammates working on the same project? Are there other areas of the product that require more focus? Are projects well-aligned with company objectives, or have they aged out?
As you remove redundancies you might also find gaps in your team’s processes that might help your team’s overall productivity. Either way, you’ll have a better understanding of key projects that require attention and deprioritize other projects with less headcount.
Updating onboarding
Alongside updating your documentation, organizing internal and external resources for new team members may set your team up for future success.
For example, perhaps layoffs may result in a reorganization, then you’ll need to quickly onboard new team members to your projects.
Or perhaps after layoffs, you realize your project still requires another developer to maintain or grow a critical part of your product.
Either way, updating your onboarding documentation will increase your new team member’s time-to-productivity and keep your team’s performance high.
Prioritizing your own career growth
While it’s important to improve your team’s morale and care for your team’s success, I also wanted to share the importance of protecting your own career.
Several years ago, during a similar time of broad layoffs, my friend (a developer working at a major tech company) was invited to a meeting with his skip manager. Given the circumstances, he braced himself for a conversation in getting laid off.
Yet to his surprise, the skip manager discussed his manager getting laid off and his promotion to fill his spot.
I wanted to share this story not to create fear in your position or distrust in your team but rather to point out that scenarios like the one I shared are not uncommon.
The reality is that there are much fewer engineering managers who are being hired because there are fewer circumstances in which an engineering manager position opens up.
For example, a manager has to either leave a team OR a team has to grow two to three times its original size to hire a new manager. In addition, developers internally may be some of the first candidates to grow into an open engineering manager role.
All to say, it’s more difficult for engineering managers to move or find new positions when they’re suddenly laid off.
Considering the factors above, engineering managers have to be more strategic in their approach. Here are some actionable tips I recommend engineering managers take to protect themselves.
Keep an eye out for companies actively hiring for an EM that aligns with your management philosophy.
Start reaching out to your network and catch up with colleagues. Most engineering leaders are hired through their network.
Prepare referrals and keep a list of referrals in case you’re suddenly let go.
Stay up-to-date with system design and system design interview questions.
Seeing past the fog of ambiguity
LinkedIn and the news is filled to the brim with postings about layoffs. Having gone through a recession in the past while on a visa, I empathize with the pressure and anxiety engineering leaders face these days.
In many ways, middle management is one of the toughest positions to be in during these times. From one end, you’re receiving little to no information (with reason), yet on the other hand, you’re managing a team of real people with life-altering concerns that expect answers.
Amidst the ambiguity, you’re still expected to drive results, manage performance, build trust, answer questions, think about your career, and the list goes on.
There’s only so much you can do, so it’s best to focus on what you can control at the moment to succeed past the waves of ambiguity.
I’ll end this newsletter with a famous story about the female swimmer Florence Chadwick:
In 1952, Florence attempted to swim the 26 miles between Catalina Island and the California coastline.
After about 15 hours, a thick fog set in. Florence began to doubt her ability, and she told her mother, who was in one of the boats, that she did not think she could make it. She swam for another hour before asking to be pulled out, unable to see the coastline due to the fog.
As she sat in the boat, she discovered she had stopped swimming just one mile from her destination.
Two months later, she tried again. The same thick fog set in, but she succeeded in reaching Catalina. She said that she kept a mental image of the shoreline in her mind while she swam.
The moral of the story:
By navigating this season with the mentality that today’s challenges will pass and a destination in our mind, we’ll see a stronger set of engineering leaders rise and ambitious goals realized.
If you’re looking for places to start with system design or engineering manager interview prep, you can start here: