I work as a Software developer, but now I am moving to a manager role and I had the following exercise on a course I took to improve my management skills: To solve a code challenge from a manager perspective.
For this exercise, I worked with one developer that shared his screen and think aloud about the problem, the goal was to help him solving the code challenge using management skills to understand my thought process and how I put my ideas to support the team, this was a little tricky for me because I've been on a developer role for almost 10 years and the very first thing that I tried was to solve the code challenge as a developer.
So, after staying silent for a while, I tried the following:
- Ask the developer if an existing issue has been reported in JIRA
- If it was reported in JIRA, then we try to follow the steps to solve the challenge based on that. Otherwise, we would need to ask other team members to check if they have seen any similar issue.
- Since no team member on the company has seen a similar issue, then we create a JIRA ticket to track the issue and focus on the challenge description and try to solve it at a very high level like: "hey, I've seen something similar, maybe we can use the following algorithm and this library..."
- After that, we ask Google for some assistance and check if we get the right solution.
- Once the solution is implemented, we update ticket status with the required information and that's it.
Not sure if I missed something or if there are more things that I need to take in consideration to improve my management skills for this kind of cases. For instance, what should I do if we do not get an answer on Google/Stack Overflow/Quora or any other site (very unlikely, but just in case).
So, as a manager, what can I do to assist a developer with a coding problem?