Wednesday
Room 2
10:20 - 11:20
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Becoming an Engineering Manager Without Losing Your Technical Soul
It is common to hear programmers say "I don't want to become a team leader or manager because I want to stay technical." I have news for you - you can be both.
As an Engineering Manager, how deep should your understanding of the systems that your team members are building go? How should you balance system architecture and design, code review, debugging, project management, mentorship and caring for your people?
And the perennial question - how much code should you be writing?
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but what I can bring are personal reflections from 20 years of managing high-performing software engineering teams alongside my 45 years of coding.
Paul Williams
Paul co-founded the London Engineering Department at Bloomberg, and is part of the leadership team that has seen the local engineering group grow to over 1600 developers over the last 25 years. He, his team, and peers designed and built core components of the Bloomberg Professional Service, aka the Bloomberg Terminal, including Launchpad, the multi-screen real-time financial data display, and Instant Bloomberg ("IB"), the finance industry's ubiquitous secure instant messaging system. His focus continues to be near-real-time display and data-processing systems, involving development and deep analysis of C++ frameworks and interactions with managed JavaScript environments.