Ask HN: Engineering managers; what are the problems you face?

I don't completely disagree, but to take the other side:

When you're being hired both you and the company are taking a bet. The company is betting that you're worth $x+$y/year, where $x is the salary and $y is bit extra to accommodate the risk that you aren't, you're betting that it's worth working for the company for $x-$z/year, where $x is the salary and $z is a bit extra to accommodate the risk that you aren't. I.e. both sides price in risk.

After a year or two, the risk on both sides has largely evaporated. The company now knows that you are (or aren't) worth $x+$y, and you know that it actually is (or isn't) worth working for the company at $x-$z.

There's now a delta between $y and $-z (assuming the initial estimates were accurate) where it "makes sense" for you to stay, the company could pay you more, but why would they? If it wasn't for the fact that shrinking salaries is a negative experience for the employee (more negative than the dollar difference) they could also pay you less. Splitting the difference by not changing the salary at all seems fair, and nicely lines up with the agreement you already have in place.

> 4. Having used Jira and Azure DevOps, scheduling tools still don’t seem great. The PM I work with prepares a schedule in excel with me every quarter and we revisit it every few weeks. People look at that like 5x as much as they look at our planning tool and it takes like 1/10th the time to edit or less.

I've a suspicion that in an ideal world, reporting/planning tools for management and day-to-day task tracking for teams would never touch in any kind of automated way. I think the desire for an automated chain all the way from ICs up to reports to higher management makes those tools suck both as reporting/planning tools and as tools for coordinating the actual work. I also think it'd be damn hard to sell that vision to management ("you want to make it harder for us to see exactly what everyone's doing at any time, and introduce a step designed for someone to fudge numbers or lie to us?" 1) Yes, and 2) They're already fudging numbers and lying, you've just pushed that step all the way to the bottom of the stack, at a cost to actual productivity and team-level transparency.)

I am relatively new to the workforce, but I am struck by the amount of time spent reporting estimate, redoing estimates, and planning work.

(I'm a Director-level with 30 reports in my organization, with a few managers as direct reports. These thoughts below reflect my current problems as well as problems I had when I was "just" an engineering manager. Note that the problems don't go away, just increase in scale...)

Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates. Someone else mentioned turnover, but I have never (so far in 6 years) had anyone quit while working under me, so turnover for me has been really low.

Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes.

For the third question, I talk to my old bosses and coworkers the most. I have a fantastic relationship with my last two bosses. Nowadays we're peers (same title, different companies) and we compare notes and mentor each other. If you don't have someone like this already, I suggest going to meetups (post-COVID) and meet other engineering managers. A shortcut to this is to find a new job, and then your old job colleagues can be your external mentors ;) That said, there's nothing wrong with having mentors within your company. Just be up-front with them about what you're looking for, especially if they're upper management.

For the fourth question, I've never really found that tools have an impact in either direction. I've yet to find a tool outside of Excel/Google Sheets and email that is indispensable.

> Surely you're a lot more valuable to a company with two years' of experience in a codebase vs. a new company with no experience.

You're not paid your value, you're paid the least amount a corporation can get away with paying you - which is a very different number. (Not that I resent it, it's part of doing business)