On being an Engineering Manager
When I was doing management in software companies, I found  Management By Wandering Around (MBWA) [1] to be useful.<p>Being an unstructured activity (but still planned, in the sense that you knew that you were going to do it now and then during the day or week), you tended to get more out of it in terms of information about progress, status, issues, and being able to help team members, technically or otherwise.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Management_by_wandering_around" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Management_by_wandering_around</a><p>It was supposed to have originated, or at least been used early on, at Hewlett-Packard (and also earlier by Abraham Lincoln :) see [1]).<p>Although I worked for a while in a company that was a joint venture with HP, I did not learn about MBWA there, but later on, in another company where I was doing management. Read about it in a management book, thought it was a good idea, and tried it out; turned out that it was useful.