I am currently in the process of applying for CEng accreditation, I've got 10 years of experience as a Senior Software Engineer, and having put together my application, worked with my mentor and following the UK Spec closely, I find myself in difficulty.
tl;dr, I think I've demonstrated technical leadership on my application, as does my mentor, but my PRA disagrees because I don't manage people or money; this feedback is contrary to the myth buster section about managing people and money being a requirement for ceng. Is anybody here willing to take a look at my application as a second opinion and suggest what they think is best to do next?
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This topic is important to me, and I have a serious question to ask here. While I don't wish to court controversy and this post is meant in good spirit, I am going to use a bit of humour/hyperbole in this post to illustrate my point and express my deep frustration with what the IET appears to claim, vs the reality of PRA assessments.
Background:
I refer to myth 6 and 7 on the registration help page
Myth 6 - You must line manage people to become IEng/CEng
You don’t have to be managing people, you could be demonstrating strong technical leadership or controlling other aspects of projects.
Myth 7 – You must manage a budget to become IEng/CEng
Managing a budget isn’t the only way of showing that you’ve had financial responsibilities. Experience with mergers and acquisitions, contracts, tenders, legacy and end of life parts replacement and experience from running your own business counts.
The gist of this I took to mean 'Technical Leadership' comes in many forms, and there are a lot of talented people out there that may not have the power to hire and fire people and receive notifications for how much the team spent on AWS this month, but they do other useful things like lead the design of technical software, imagine what new products would look like for users, innovate, provide guidance to their more junior colleagues, and be the go-to person when somebody has a problem because they're seen as an expert in their field, and the list goes on.
This is not to belittle the work of being a line-manager, but it seems to me that there are plenty more interesting examples of technical leadership. Contrary to the myth-buster section, when it comes down to it in practice, the IET seems to be obsessed with leadership in the strictest sense - i.e. "is there a line from 1 or more people on an organisational chart, and are you responsible for the cost associated with this?".
A 'Manager' in my company is somebody in charge of a team with the power to hire and fire. with this in mind, I am not a 'Manager', that is to say, that while I interview people of all technical abilities, and my manager asks me "should we hire them", ultimately it's my manager that actually signs the document. I have even been asked "how much should we pay them" in regards to interns, and when I saw the proposed amount was not in line with the London Living wage, I fed a better figure back. That figure is on the contract but I did not technically have the final say in the renumeration, but there's clearly leadership in spotting this, and successfully influencing those that do write the contracts to change the renumeration.
As another example, I have mentored multiple interns/graduate developers, and supervised them on their projects and been responsible for their project delivery, though again, while I have performed the responsibilities of a manager in relation to supervision, guidance, mentorship, career guidance, my job title is not 'Manager' and the organisational chart shows them reporting to somebody else, even if they never speak to this person more than once every month. This is just reflective of an HR department that wants to keep things simple and a flat organisation. Additionally we practice pair programming, and I frequently pair with junior developers almost every day to raise their technical abilities.
I've been on steering committees for code standards across the firm, I've been a 'patent lead' being one of the first to submit a patent in my practice area, and then assessing other people's patents and making go/no go decisions. Each decision is a commitment to invest £20,000 or so, or otherwise a statement that the invention is not worth patenting and that our competitors will see it that way too - but again these are joint decisions with 1 or 2 others; they have to be joint decisions because it would be irresponsible to put that kind of decision making into one person.
I've been the lead developer of a greenfield project where we were looking to hire a team after a 6 month initial development and design period. A lead developer is somebody who not only codes, but makes the technical decisions, who gets the right people in the room to reach a consensus, work with the business to understand the requirements, who draws, designs, and is technically competent that they can do some seriously heaving lifting in terms of large contributions to the product's codebase, either in terms of number of features implemented, or guiding others in implementation approach. But a Lead Developer is not a Manager. It is a role, my title is still 'Senior Software Engineer' not 'Engineering Manager', and I am taking on the functional role of 'Lead Developer'.
On top of this I've put together specifications for work we needed carrying out, looked at the viability and costs of hiring externally, internal secondments, interns, outsourced contracting in cheaper regions etc... Again the 'we' here is myself as the lead, my manager, a business representative such is the nature of project teams at inception - they're small and lean. This project was undertaken with me in a secondment position, I was approached by my manager one day and the discussion went something like "hey, there's mutterings about building a thing that solves problem x, we need somebody to lead the development and take technical charge, not just building it, it's a good opportunity for you to build a team around you". Unfortunately my project was put on hold due to a combination of covid, a cyber attack, and a significant loss of technical staff in the team I originally came from - when my manager asked if I could help, I volunteered to go back and support my original team, so the project was on hold and I never got round to actually hiring these people, but I still went through the preparation to do so. I produced contracts for tenure, looked at the cost-effectiveness of hiring in different locations, engaged 3rd parties with formal specifications for the product they would be contracted to deliver, I submitted a patent, worked with 3rd party lawyers and other external parties.
The reality of budgetary reviews is that sometimes you review the budget and the outcome is "no, let's not do it", or "it's not worth it", that's why it's a budgetary assessment! Like a maths exam where the working is more important than the final answer, surely the process of performing this review is more important than the outcome for CEng application purposes. Sometimes great projects come to a halt because there's suddenly no more money due to external factors, and the focus (especially in a pandemic) turns to ensuring people can keep their jobs - hiring freezes, spending freezes, budget reviews etc.
These are a few examples, not to toot my own trumpet, but this and more is covered in my application in a much more formal way, my mentor has stated that I have "sufficient evidence for a CEng application" and so the focus has turned to my verbal presentation.
The problem:
Contrary to my mentor's advice, my PRA has reviewed my application and returned with "Talk about planning and responsibility for management of people and money. I do not see these responsibilities." even though talk of evaluating costs for hiring are on my application explicitly. They have promised to provide more detail, but the remark is sufficient to know this isn't going to be a simple case of rephrasing things.
Perhaps they're mistaken, but I trust the PRA to be right, I'm assuming they know their stuff, and that their advice is correct and representative of what the IET assessors will say, and if they're looking for 'people and budget' then they can't possibly think i've demonstrated technical leadership anywhere else.
I realise this is hyperbole, but in my mind based on the above feedback, to get CEng it would be far easier for a low level manager who happens to work in an IT organisation and enjoys coding in the evenings on personal projects, to gain CEng accreditation than it is for an actual engineer with a genuine passion for software craftsmanship who can demonstrate technical leadership who just happens to not be strictly in charge of the team and budget on an organisational chart. Clearly this is not desirable and shouldn't be the case in practice, but the obsession with management of people and budget does make one wonder.
To this end, it would be good if somebody could clarify officially.
- Do you need to be a manager or not?
- Do you need to manage a budget or not?
- Did I demonstrate sufficient technical leadership in my application or not (one would of course have to see my application to do this, which I am happy to send across)
It seems to me that technical leadership comes in many forms, and while the IET may have a myth buster page, this really is not translating into reality, and even if my PRAs is mistaken about this (which seems unlikely as I assume they are an expert in these matters), my concern is I'm going to stand in front of a panel of interviewers who are going to draw the same conclusion with the same preconceptions of what technical leadership actually is.
A significant chunk of my application has been dedicated to trying to demonstrate the leadership (C) competencies in the absence of being a 'boss', and much of it could probably have been cut if I just got a job where I manage technical people and money - and this seems rather unfair.
If anybody would like to see my application for better context to offer their opinion, I would be most grateful, as after 10 years of collecting evidence, to be told 'you don't manage people and a budget' has left me very disappointed. It is a fact that not everyone can be 'the boss', and this is extremely true in Software Engineering teams where structures are flat with large manager ratios 1:15 being considered normal, because companies want products developed rather than layers of management. If the IET don't understand this fact then I am reconsidering if the IET as a multi-disciplined engineering institution is appropriate for a software engineering CEng application.
It is after all Chartered Engineer, not Chartered People Manager, Chartered Accountant, or Chartered Chief Technology Officer.
Kind regards
Dan B
