Communications of the ACM

novation and idea. Mental power is our most precious resource.

Part of this is being able to leverage the power of abstraction—focusing on what is important and leaving out the unnecessary details. Sometimes details are important; other times they are not. We cannot talk about everything in absolute terms. Compared to assembly code, C is declarative. But compared to transistors and gates, assembly code is declarative. Developers need to recognize these levels of abstractions.

A good engineer knows how to handle leaky abstractions and can swiftly go up a level or dive deeper down when needed. But that same engineer also has to accept that you can never understand everything.

We need to be asking, “How can we design systems so that computers can handle more of the work for us?” For example, a lot of developers are still creating programs as text. A lot of the tools we use to manipulate programs are still too primitive because they treat code as sequences of bytes. We need to be much more mindful of how we can use computers to help do our jobs.

The whole point of “The Humble Programmer” is that your brainpower is your most limited resource, so using smart tools is a good thing. Good developers understand that they can’t do everything, and they know how to leverage tools as prosthetics for their brains.

Kate’s takeaway: You should read (or reread) “The Humble Programmer.” And always be on the lookout for ways to work smarter—better tools, intelligent systems, and enlisting help. Focus your mental energy on the task with the most dividends.

What qualities make someone into an
amazing engineering manager?

First, you must have deep technical knowledge. But it’s also important to have self-awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence. You have to be able to understand other people, and you have to be able to steer people and move people.

In management, there is a communication feedback loop. In one direction, a manager interacting with his or her reports requires emotional intelligence. He or she has to know what drives the other person to get optimal results. A great manager will help people do their best work.

The second part of the loop is the reports back to their manager, and the skill that matters here is empathy. You have to understand what they are trying to say despite the noisy channel between you and your reports.

Each direction of the loop introduces uncertainty. You might hear something, but that isn’t what was said, and vice versa. It is your job as the manager to make sure this communication is optimized. It is on you to make sure that the feedback loop is a virtuous cycle—the better you understand your reports, the more empathy and emotional intelligence you have in that relationship.

By taking a Bayesian approach, you can increase your empathy by performing error correction on what you hear and increase your emotional intelligence by inserting redundancy into your communication. One way you get that error correction and redundancy is through peer feedback and 360 reviews to train your neural net continuously.

In your mind you create a model of someone. When something happens, you hear something or observe something; then you are updating your prior assumptions. This is where you must watch your biases. In the beginning, you don’t know anything about someone, but the more interactions you have over time, the more the uncertainty in your model diminishes.

Kate’s takeaway: The feedback loop is an interesting way to think about your interactions and relationships. If you want another lens on a similar topic, Erik wrote a paper on “The Responsive Enterprise” that talks about these loops in an organizational context. 4

What book do you wish all software en-
gineers would read, and why?

How to Win Friends and Influence People. 1 That book gives you really complete ways of thinking about human relationships and how you interact with other people. It is written in a way that makes you consider the lessons by putting yourself in other people’s shoes. How do they think or feel in these situations? And what can you do differently?