oh no. you're responsible for a group of skilled and not so skilled engineers in a domain that you don't understand. all is not lost.
what is your only goal - to maximize your teams contribution to the goals of the company. full stop. its not to stack rank your employees unless it serves that greater goal.
but you don't understand the domain. oh no. all you can do is develop a human relationship with the team. listen to them. you can't judge the quality of their work, but they can.
don't ask them to rank each other (I've seen this), but just be attentive. after not to much time you can really start to understand how people are helping the effort, and how they are undermining it. in broad terms, without understanding the gory details.
this is the only thing that works. everything else is just obfuscation.
What's all this business about ranking that you're talking about? I didn't mention it. And asking engineers to rank each other? Seems you've picked some bad companies to work at.
You should consider working somewhere where management is deeply technical. At everywhere I've worked, the entire eng-management chain (up to CEO) fully understood the domain (as you put it), the state of the art, the key system architectures, and so on. The idea that an eng manager's role should be limited to "developing human relationships and being attentive", would simply not fly.
Eng managers need to be able to go into code, and they must be able to gauge the complexity of the work under them, or they'll be unable to spot the difference between someone aggressively chasing a nasty heisenbug for weeks, versus someone struggling for weeks to put together a basic block of working code.
what is your only goal - to maximize your teams contribution to the goals of the company. full stop. its not to stack rank your employees unless it serves that greater goal.
but you don't understand the domain. oh no. all you can do is develop a human relationship with the team. listen to them. you can't judge the quality of their work, but they can.
don't ask them to rank each other (I've seen this), but just be attentive. after not to much time you can really start to understand how people are helping the effort, and how they are undermining it. in broad terms, without understanding the gory details.
this is the only thing that works. everything else is just obfuscation.