Whitebox | Engineering Manager | Freiburg, Germany | Onsite or Remote | Full Time | EUR 80k p.a. | https://www.whitebox.eu/en/karriere/engineering-manager
Whitebox is one of the leading digital wealth managers in Germany. We are a fast-growing company at the forefront of revolutionizing the investment industry.
Our engineering managers' focus is on our people. We believe in discovering, establishing, and embodying strong principles. We have full faith and trust in our team members to decide and take action based on our principles.
Your main tools for this job are empathy and a desire to see people grow.
We need your help to challenge us, strengthen what works, change what doesn't, and make decisions light and enjoyable.
We are also looking for multiple Developer Roles. Find out more here:
Our senior engineers are experts in the field of software engineering. Through their experience they accumulated a wealth of knowledge. They are consistently able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to their team members and a wider audience inside our organization. They can provide guidance and show us a path of continuous growth.
But most importantly, our senior engineers understand that context matters most. It is about knowing the context under which ideas, paradigms, best practices, and solutions were discovered and created. It is about recognizing what our specific context requires. It is about taking deliberate decisions, well aware of the tradeoffs involved.
Our senior engineers understand that software engineering is about empowering people. So they set, manage, and guide expectations. They provide our team members in different roles and business functions with the power to gain new insights and quickly translate them to the next iteration of our services.
Whitebox is one of the leading digital wealth managers in Germany. We are a fast-growing company at the forefront of revolutionizing the investment industry.
Our engineering managers' focus is on our people. We believe in discovering, establishing, and embodying strong principles. We have full faith and trust in our team members to decide and take action based on our principles.
Your main tools for this job are empathy and a desire to see people grow.
We need your help to challenge us, strengthen what works, change what doesn't, and make decisions light and enjoyable.
We are also looking for multiple Developer Roles. Find out more here:
While there are some good observations in the article, and while I agree with the detrimental effects the observed behaviours have on the effectiveness of teams, I feel there is also a missed opportunity of understanding the manager's perspective.
If we start with the basic assumption that people will rarely try to do intentional harm, we can conclude that most harm is done unintentionally. So while the choice of the term "clueless" might apply, it also doesn't help with creating a path towards mutual understanding.
My current perspective on how we think and work is that we all have a mental model of how the world works. It is modified and reinforced by our actions and the effects we perceive. We will then try to apply our model to novel situations. I find the term "clueless" to not be accurate. It is more that people act mostly based on clues. But it might very well be that the mental model is inaccurate or even inadequate.
I don't think the simple quality "has been a developer" is a sufficient indicator to predict a manager's success. I find the trait "is flexible adjusting the mental model" might be more fitting, but also harder to discern from a CV. So my critique to the author would be in a similar class of error. Applying an inadequate mental model to solve the problem.
I believe we could all benefit from more goodwill and empathy towards our team members (and I am including the manager in the team, as well as the whole organization). Asking "what is our mental model and where does it break down?" has been tremendously helpful for me in the past.
Our engineering managers' focus is on our people. We believe in discovering, establishing, and embodying strong principles. We have full faith and trust in our team members to decide and take action based on our principles.
Your main tools for this job are empathy and a desire to see people grow.
We need your help to challenge us, strengthen what works, change what doesn't, and make decisions light and enjoyable.
We are also looking for multiple Developer Roles. Find out more here:
https://www.whitebox.eu/karriere#tab2
Whitebox | Backend Engineer | Freiburg, Germany | Onsite or Remote | Full Time | EUR 75k p.a. | https://www.whitebox.eu/en/karriere/backend-engineer
Whitebox | Senior Frontend Engineer | Freiburg, Germany | Onsite or Remote | Full Time | EUR 75k p.a. | https://www.whitebox.eu/en/karriere/backend-engineer
Our senior engineers are experts in the field of software engineering. Through their experience they accumulated a wealth of knowledge. They are consistently able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to their team members and a wider audience inside our organization. They can provide guidance and show us a path of continuous growth.
But most importantly, our senior engineers understand that context matters most. It is about knowing the context under which ideas, paradigms, best practices, and solutions were discovered and created. It is about recognizing what our specific context requires. It is about taking deliberate decisions, well aware of the tradeoffs involved.
Our senior engineers understand that software engineering is about empowering people. So they set, manage, and guide expectations. They provide our team members in different roles and business functions with the power to gain new insights and quickly translate them to the next iteration of our services.