I’ve worked in different sized companies and worked with various types of software engineering leaders. In my experience there are three typical archetypes when it comes to engineering leadership. In this article I wanted to describe each of the different type of leader and the common traits they may hold.
Cultural leader
This type of engineering leader is less technical, but technical enough to be dangerous. They may not be writing any code, but from a high level they can understand the architecture of a platform and how it lines up with solving business issues.
You may find them focused more on the operations side of the organization with big picture thinking, setting culture and efficiency through processes.
They work well cross-functionally with different departments like the c-suite, product, design, QA, sysadmin, operations, etc.
Likely interfaces with business stakeholders and breaks down business goals to technical teams. While helping non-technical stakeholders see how technical solutions align with serving business goals.
Technical leader
As the name suggests, this type of engineering leader is more technical in nature. You can think of them more like a principal engineer that comes in to solve the hardest technical issues.
They aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeve and get into code.
Thinks big picture about the the architectural landscape.
Although they manage people, the way they manage is likely through active mentorship like pair programming or architectural review.
The way they likely got to their position was they were once a strong individual contributor and got promoted to a management role as a result.
In-between leader
This type of leader is what I call an in-between (if you have a better term for this type, let me know) leader. They are a combination of the cultural and technical leader.
I believe a lot of job postings are looking for this type of engineering leader. However, from my experience, this type of leader is the rarest to find that can do it well.
I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, however in order to support this type of leader, an organization needs to be set up so that this leader can operate in both modes.
Unfortunately most organizations are too small for this type of leader to operate well.
With each type of leader, the common factor is meeting with people. Which could mean a lot of meetings, or in other words, a lot of context switching. In addition because they manage people, there are administrative overhead that is needed to be done.
With engineering, it is a creative activity and so you need margin to dive into an issue and come up with a solution. After all, the job of an engineering leader is to provide lots of margin for their engineers and unblock them of any issues.
For this reason, it is likely this leader’s day is filled with meetings, which means you’d find them contributing technically after business hours.
Not one of these software engineering leadership archetypes are better than the other. The type of leadership that is needed is highly dependent on the needs of the organization or business that they belong to.
Ideally an organization will have leaders made up of a combination of the archetypes described above to balance each other out. All striving to work together to better serve their engineering organization and business.
If you’re a software engineering leader, which of the three archetypes – cultural, technical, in-between – best describes you?