26: Ep. 26 | Lessons from an Interim Engineering Manager with Indrajith Premanath

Erika (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommit podcast where we discuss our code commits, our personal commitments and some stuff in between. I’m your host this week, Erica. Join by.

Brittany Ellich (00:09) I’m Brittany Ellich.

Jonathan Tamsut (00:10) Hey, and I am Jon Tamsut.

Erika (00:13) We are a group of software engineers who initially met working on a team together at GitHub and found a common interest in learning and building cool things. We continue to meet to share our learning experiences and discuss our lives as developers. Whether you’re pushing code or taking on new challenges, we are happy you’re listening. This week, we are talking with Indrajith Premanath, an engineer at GitHub.

We work in the same organization and quickly realized that we were in the same position of not being interested in transitioning out of the technical contributor career path, but temporarily flexing into management as a result of circumstance. He has done a fantastic job juggling both responsibilities and we are excited to learn from his experience and approach. So welcome, Indrajith.

Indrajith Premanath (01:01) Hello, thank you for having me. My name is Indrajit Premanath. I’ve in GitHub for the past five years now, and I came through Microsoft, and I’ve been at Microsoft two years previously before that, and I’ve been in IC all my career until starting last January, where I was kind of being an interim manager for my team while my manager was on parental leave.

So that was the circumstance that led me to kind of be in that position for six months period, around five months, yeah, 20 weeks. And yeah, I think I’m excited to share about things I learned, things I could have done, should have done, and how it kind of changed my thought process and my career goals after going through that process.

Erika (01:50) Very cool. So you mentioned you took this on for six months. So can you kind of briefly describe the roles as an engineering manager as compared with your developer role? What were kind of the differences in your day to day?

Indrajith Premanath (02:06) Yeah, I think it was definitely a tough transition going from a IC to a engineering manager in the same team that you’ve been for the last five years, especially whenever I think as an IC, your intuitions or your gut reaction when you see a problem is to simply jump in and try to solve the problem and not necessarily think about how to prioritize this and how where does it

land with existing priorities. But as an engineering manager, I think the first task of me to suppress that feeling is that, I’m going to go and fix this. Instead, trying to see how I need to be triaging it and finding the right folks at the same time, finding the time to do the work. think that is the first part of transition that was hard for me is like, how do I stop writing code as much as I would like to?

⁓ and then I think then finally, I think also as an IC, it’s usually common to grab onto opportunities that come out as a problem. but now it is your job and responsibility to share that opportunity equally across your team and finding the right people. And also there’s no favorites to play. Everyone needs to get the right opportunity.

regardless of the outcomes are, because I think that is the most responsible part of an NGA manager is to find ways to improve as well as get the people the right opportunities to meet their own career goals. And ⁓ something to touch on, I think, at the end was how that career goals are met with those individuals when you have the conversations about promotions and reviews and that kind of

is the fulfillment part at the end.

Erika (03:52) It’s really interesting to hear you describe the first part of the mental model you have where you’re finding the time and making sure that you make sure the tasks are in the problem areas are clearly defined and dedicated and well assigned and it kind of reminds me of

the things that I’ve been hearing lately about the process of like using AI assistant coding where it’s like, how do you succeed with AI? It’s like you clearly define the tasks, you find the right, you know, context, you, um, you know, find the right agent to do it. And it’s like, Oh wait, that’s actually also very good for software engineering in general. So it’s kind of funny. It’s like same rules apply. Nothing really changes, but, um, yeah, as you mentioned.

when there’s an aspect of people and element of people, there’s also taking into consideration their goals and their mindset and how to communicate with them. And yeah, the person communication part of it is super important.

So curious, did you prepare at all for taking on these responsibilities and if so, how?

Indrajith Premanath (05:01) Yeah, think so. One of the interesting thing is my current manager has been my manager for the last seven years, so I’ve been with the manager for the seven years period and I have had shorter stints as an interim manager throughout that time when when they’re on an extended leave or a vacation for like two to three weeks period. So definitely I was a lot more exposed to this in a shorter period of time than taking on the responsibility.

And I think the key difference was those shorter period is more of like holding the fort. You ensure nothing goes necessarily bad. You know, this person is going to be back in two weeks. So I hold my breath for two weeks. Everything will be fine. Whereas when it becomes a six months period of STEM, is not necessary. They’re not coming to save you after two months. I call this the first two months as I hope I run into my manager at my Costco face.

because my manager lives like 15 minutes from where I live. So I’m like, every time I go to Costco, I’m like, hopefully I ran into Billy today and asked these problems and hopefully he would have an answer. And spoiler alert, I never ran into him. But I think that is the transition where maybe a month or two after you realize you are kind of on your own in that extent. There’s a support structure always in your organization, but

that one person who always comes to save you at the end is no longer going to be there and you have to do that work. So the preparation, think one of the things I did as a result is I spoke to lot of interim managers who had, was in a position who for a long period of time within our organization and outside to get an understanding of how to get kind of my footing and like what kind of conversations to be part of. And then also maybe not something I actively thought of as I see.

but having much more strong relationship with my product side of things to understand the priorities and what needs to be done. And it resulted in me having a weekly one-on-one with my product manager on understanding what needs to go on within the team so that I have the opportunities understood. also, and the thing that I’ve…

I’m kind of grateful for this opportunity to think more about long-term than the short-term. As a engineer, I’m like, I’m going to do this for two weeks. I know what I’m doing. Whereas now I have seven engineers who are looking for opportunities and work and I cannot just have two weeks plan. I need a longer plan in order to be able to give them the right opportunities. So I think initially having conversation with people who have previously gone through this and then kind of

It’s a self-realization too. like, okay, I’m in this for long term than just two weeks. So like, I need to kind of fold my sleeves and kind of get into this. And I would say I’m not, my organization is very open to me being failing and figuring things out than being, because the first part is like, I’m going to be like my manager. So I’m going to do everything like my manager.

then eventually you realize your manager has certain characteristics and traits that allow them to be the way they are and be successful. But that doesn’t necessarily apply to you even though you try to replicate that. So you find your ways to be successful in your own terms.

Brittany Ellich (08:12) That makes sense. makes sense. I’m curious what you learned overall from this experience. I mean, has this like changed your opinion on what you want to do if you want to be an individual contributor more than you did before or, you know, has this decided, I want to go into management or anything like that.

Indrajith Premanath (08:25) Mm.

Yeah, I tell this to people that I actually came out of this experience as a better IC than a manager that I would be. think personally, I realized I relied on my manager for everything that requires me to move forward in my career to an extent and also not necessarily knowing what to do next. Maybe you all can relate to this is also.

When I became a senior engineer, would say I was lost for like two years, especially because I consider upon the senior, the path is well paved. A lot of people have gone down that path and there’s just checkboxes that you find that you tick. And it is relatively known how to get your career growing from that point. But once you become senior, it becomes choose your own adventure kind of a thing.

In that state, I was still kind of relying on checkboxes to exist for me to kind of grow. That’s the last two years, but, and then the realization is now I need to find ways that I want to grow my career because no one is going to tell me what to do. And now one of the part of that growth comes from how much value you bring to the organization and how do you find the problems or the.

issues that you could solve to bring that values. And I noticed that I more, I was more exposed to those problems and issues as a manager than I was at an IC and which allowed me to understand the mediums that I could look at to find the problems and issues in order to solve problems. Because end of the day, bringing a cool technology into our infrastructure, our environment is not

the most valuable thing to do unless if it’s not gonna solve a particular problem. And for me, I was struggling to find the problems that needs to be solved. And usually my manager was my funnel to share the problems. And at that point, I’m doing what I’m told to do, then suggesting what needs to be done. So I think this experience gave me to find avenues to…

expose myself to find those problems, to find where in career that I want to grow into. So definitely I came off as a better IC. And then I think Erica touched on it as well, where with the whole democratization of AI, the last phase of our software development lifecycle, which is coding, has become not necessarily the most important thing to be done. It has become the last step now

an AI could somewhat do it to an extent. So the initial step of things is what became the most important thing. And now that becomes where your relationship with your product manager, your team, your leadership kind of sculpts that initial set of things. So I think that is another part where I am more exposed to the process and also the skillset required to build that first.

face of things to get to the final stage. So that’s why, selfishly, think I became a better IC than I am a manager. And to say it out loud, I am still continuing thinking about computing being an IC for foreseeable future until a different opportunity comes along.

Brittany Ellich (11:44) Makes sense. Yeah. I’m a huge supporter of having a close relationship with your product manager. I feel like that just makes so many teams work better when engineers and PMs work closely. And for what it’s worth, I’m a huge shill too for charity majors. And she has a really great article about the pendulum between.

Indrajith Premanath (11:52) Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Brittany Ellich (12:02) ⁓

engineering and manager and she actually recommends you you do switch back and forth frequently and you become a better engineer and a better manager by doing so. So it sounds like you had a pretty similar experience there. So that’s cool. That’s cool to hear.

Indrajith Premanath (12:15) Yeah,

I might have a controversial thought where I think there should be a form of rotation program where people who are interested in being a manager should be given that opportunity. I think I was lucky enough to be in a circumstance that allowed me to be in that position for six months. this, even though I was responsible for six months, I still had no strings attached. I still had like after six months, if I made a mess, my managers probably come in.

clean it up, that allowed me to take more risks and take more steps that I probably wouldn’t have done. So I think allows me to kind of understand what this role actually entails. So I think with this asterisk of if interested, there should be a rotation program.

Erika (12:57) Are there any like skills or like aspects of yourself or your career that you think made you the candidate that was chosen for this or did you express interest explicitly?

Indrajith Premanath (13:09) I’ve been expressing interest explicitly that eventually in my career, I do want to go down the management track. And that is why when such opportunities come, I do express interest in taking those on. So yeah, I think that’s usually one of the things that resulted in this. And yeah.

Brittany Ellich (13:29) I’m curious too related to that. So you had mentioned that you were as the interim manager, you were responsible for finding those opportunities for people that you were working with. Has that changed the dynamic at all? And like the team that you’re working with now that you know, I mean, you had the experience to spend time with everybody on your team to figure out their career goals as well. Has that been useful to understand their career goals as an IC again on your team or has that, has that helped at all? Maybe that’s a.

Indrajith Premanath (13:36) Mm.

No, most definitely. think one of the things that I was previously doing as an IC is that whenever I see an exciting project, my first thought is, I should be on this. I think this is a great opportunity. I’m going to learn a lot of things. I’m going to add value. then if you have a good manager, it’s not always where you always, you are the only person who’s getting the opportunity.

The manager ensures that everyone gets equal opportunities. That’s how my manager asked me. And so that always comes with a disappointment that where, ⁓ I would love to work on this project, but obviously this is going to go to the other person because of XYZ reasons. And now I understand it better when a certain opportunity is given to another IC. It’s not necessarily a reflection of my ability or my competence on whether I could succeed doing it. It’s more of

Everyone needs that opportunity to provide value. And it allows me to support them a bit more. I’m supporting them to reach their career goals and they’re fulfilling their needs than just only thinking about myself. And that builds more trust within my team where when I’m jumping in to solve a particular problem in someone else’s project, it’s not a threat.

It’s more of like, let’s work on this together to solve this problem. So I think that switch kind of helps me build better relationship. And to be fair, I used to hold one-on-ones with everyone in my team as an entry manager on a weekly basis. And since now be becoming an IC, we still hold a monthly, at least one-on-one that relationship keep going so that the trust it builds. also as a person told me.

You’re always bad for your team. So that’s how I’m seeing this new role of myself as an ICS in this.

Erika (15:47) I don’t know about you, but I think for me, I realized like the mindset shift of caring about the project versus caring about my individual contributions to a project. And I never thought of myself as this kind of like selfish person, but I realized like,

as an IC, I care more about my pull requests than other people’s. And now I care about them all equally. Like if there’s a request review, you a review request, like that is as important to me as like getting my PR through because they’re all important for the sake of the project moving forward. And like, yeah, I completely shifted that, ⁓ like that prioritization of my mind when I’m like, no,

Indrajith Premanath (16:26) Mm-hmm.

Erika (16:30) It doesn’t actually matter as much like what I do. It matters that the project moves forward and like really focusing on the team and the project level.

Indrajith Premanath (16:39) Yeah. And I would say the most fulfilling moment of, I would say my career at this point is when a person got promoted in this review cycle in my team, when I worked with them in their promo packet, they were working with my manager all along, but I was fortunately at the point where my manager is not around for the, need to take that promo pack to the conversations. And then they actually got the promotion. It’s much more fulfilling than when I got promoted. I think that is where the transition happened is like.

It is not worth being selfish at this point and it’s you score as a team. think that’s what I learned.

Jonathan Tamsut (17:12) So, kind of stepping back, how did you get into the kind of software programming or how did you decide that that’s what you want to do with your crew?

Indrajith Premanath (17:19) Yeah, I did not grow up thinking I’m going to be software programmer. I grew up in Sri Lanka. So I was so we did not have a computer until I was like maybe 13 years old. And also the computers were expensive back there. I was so scared to turn them on because if they don’t turn on, I have broken it. So I’m going to be in trouble. So for the longest period of time, I didn’t necessarily was exposed to computers much.

And even when I did, it’s usually to play video games or like be on the internet, nothing much. But my reason for joining the computer science program and I did is mostly my brother was doing computer science and my bunch of my cousins were doing computer science. And I was like, okay, it seems like a family thing. Might as well do the computer science part. And my brother was going to the same college as I was in University of Minnesota.

So I’m like, I have someone to support me if I was struggling. So then that kind of made the choice easy for me to pick computer science. And then eventually I liked it and the career that it leads to seems very fulfilling. And so I just decided to take that on.

Jonathan Tamsut (18:29) Cool. And no, that’s awesome. has there been any, I guess from a technical perspective, is there anything you’ve learned along the way that you found really valuable, or do you have any particular technical interests that we’ve been talking a lot about, sort of the softer side of things?

Indrajith Premanath (18:46) The recent technical interest has been mostly about, I usually never thought about physical constraints of software development. It’s mostly been, I’m going to write this code and push it. If it’s any issues, infrastructure team needs to figure out how to scale or how to improve our efficiency and our performance. But with recent initiatives that I’ve been part of, that’s something new that I was exposed to that I’m being interested in.

It’s an ongoing conversation within my team to think about a physical constraint of your changes that you make, not just the code. So that’s something that I’ve been kind of getting myself exposed to and kind of getting more understanding. So if any reason interest is probably be not just writing code and like what are the consequences of my code in more in the physical constraint infrastructure terms.

Jonathan Tamsut (19:37) Yeah, that’s That’s super cool.

Erika (19:40) Last question for you. For anyone who does end up taking on management responsibilities, what advice would you give or if you end up doing this in the future when you end up becoming a manager, what advice would you give to ⁓ your future self or anyone else interested in taking this kind of role on?

Indrajith Premanath (20:01) I think the most important thing is transparency. One of the things that I realized as sooner than later is that I’m trying, I was trying as a function of protecting my team, I was trying to not expose them to anything that could potentially not result in good feelings in like to ensure that I kind of first get exposed and try to contain that.

then understand, then kind of filtering it through. Because I think when a decision is made about and comes down the track, you are exposed to it first. And if you are just going to communicate the decision to your team, not necessarily explaining why a certain decision is being made, that you not necessarily will build trust on that your decisions are coming off of valid reasonings.

And soon I realized being transparent about why I am making this choice or why is this decision being made and being transparent about the reasoning kind of helped my team to kind of rally with me than just also put friction back thinking, I don’t want to do this. But if I was able to explain the value and also the reasonings behind a specific decisions that kind of helps them support me as their manager.

So I think that is one thing that I would advise to be more transparent. I think everyone is definitely welcome more information to understand a specific decision. So I think transparency is definitely important. I think the relation, more than the technical sides of like prioritization, interesting projects, the relationship you build with the individuals within your team kind of helps you.

progress differently than just shipping things. I think end of the day, a well cohesive team that understands each other can produce more stronger and like consistent results than just having them work on things without such relationship. So I think definitely that one of the reasons why I’m continuing those one-on-ones with individuals is to build that relationships. So I think transparency,

⁓ Building those relationships is the most important part to be successful because something my manager tells me is once your intelligent network matters, the people around you tells you when you are screwing up or they tell you when you are doing something well that helps you align yourself in a better position than you kind of having that blind eye on, I’m doing things that make sense to me. I’m not going to hear about anything. Everyone should kind of

would understand doesn’t really work. think having those people trust and tell you, hey, your decision did not make sense, or can you tell me more about the decision leaving that safe space helps.

Erika (22:48) a great reminder and hopefully these conversations are helpful for anyone who doesn’t have that kind of community. Maybe is looking for first some voices to talk through with what they’re going through and yeah thank you so much for sharing about your experience and what you’ve learned. So

We’ve been talking about sort of career paths and career goals, and you mentioned that you did not want to be a software engineer when you were little because you barely had a computer. So our fun segment today is saying what we did want to be when we were younger. Indra, just do you want to start us off?

Indrajith Premanath (23:26) Yeah, sure. So growing up, I was a theater kid. So I was participating in lot of plays. was directing a lot of plays. So growing up, I wanted to get into movie industry, specifically the Indian movie industry. That’s one of the reasons why I also ended up doing a bachelor’s degree is because I was a specific movie director who I wanted to work under, had a requirement.

that anyone who wants to join him as an assistant or associate director needs to have a bachelor’s degree. So I was like, okay, I’ll do this bachelor’s degree and then probably go back home and then eventually to India to like join the movie industry, not in a specific role, but eventually if you find my way there. But my interest was to be in theater arts. And that’s the first thing I told my college advisor.

like, I’m doing computer science, but I would love to also major in theater. And they were, apparently I was the first person to have that combination in that group. So that was my career aspiration growing up.

Erika (24:26) Do you do any theater for fun now?

Indrajith Premanath (24:29) Unfortunately not, but I do go see a lot of plays and musicals. I’m exposed to musicals now, which was not a thing back in Sri Lanka. I’m definitely, to be honest, I do look for opportunities. And my, one of the, my idea is to potentially join an improv group to see how bad that takes. So we’ll see.

Erika (24:47) also a music major in college so we could team up and do a software development themed performing arts.

Indrajith Premanath (24:52) Yeah.

Deal.

Jonathan Tamsut (24:55) I’ve

heard Erica sing and she’s pretty good actually.

Erika (25:00) Thanks, Jon. Yeah, on the street, right? That was the offsite.

Jonathan Tamsut (25:06) You busted it out, no vocal warmups. was impressive.

Erika (25:10) Yeah, yeah. Well, cool. Yeah, funnily enough, I did not actually want to be a good actor when I was little, even though that was basically all I ever did was like run around singing and dancing and doing dress up. But I wanted to be either a florist or a dolphin trainer. Those are my my two aspirations.

Indrajith Premanath (25:30) Mmm.

Erika (25:32) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (25:33) That’s cool. I feel like marine biology is a phase that a lot of kids go through very interested in working with the whales. I really wanted to be a veterinarian and I am not that now, but that’s okay.

Jonathan Tamsut (25:45) Yeah, and I wanted to be like an inventor or a scientist. I liked Legos and wanted to build stuff.

Erika (25:53) Did you ever have like prototypes or like invention ideas?

Jonathan Tamsut (25:57) as a kid, I mean, I built stuff with Legos and I would like, yeah, I don’t remember any specific like invention ideas that were novel, but I’ve always, I remember being little and always thinking about teleportation because I live in, I grew up in LA and traffic was terrible and I was like, someone needs to know this.

Indrajith Premanath (26:15) You

Brittany Ellich (26:16) I was, I went through an inventor phase and the one invention I can remember that I worked on was I wanted to build a hoverboard and I was like, I just, I’ll just take like the workings of a hot air balloon and put it on a skateboard. And I know I was like, this is genius. Why has nobody done this yet? Like it’s gotta be so easy. And that’s also, I think how I approach software building as well. Why don’t we just take this piece that’s completely unrelated and put it on this thing. It’ll work. It’ll be great.

Erika (26:32) you

you

Indrajith Premanath (26:43) Yeah.

Erika (26:43) What could go wrong? I think you probably know a little bit more about software than kids’ science brains. sometimes it does feel that way. Awesome. Well, a huge thank you to everyone and especially to Interdict for joining us. If people want to find you, where should they go? YouTube, Blue Sky, website.

Brittany Ellich (26:51) Valid. A little more than physics, for sure.

Indrajith Premanath (27:08) I think the best way would be LinkedIn. I think that’s the best way to find me.

Erika (27:12) Cool, we’ll include that in the show notes. And thank you listeners for tuning in. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe or do whatever it is you’d like to do on the podcast app of your choice.

Check us out on Blue Sky and share with your friends. As a reminder, we are still now solidly in the middle phase of our Looks Good to Me book club, which means that there is still plenty of time to get involved. You can start in the middle. You can start at the beginning, whatever you want to do. So check out the show notes for more info on that. And until next week, goodbye.