A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers • Hacker News Board

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#151

Post by amyjess » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #79

The day I decided to make it a goal to switch from developing software to management: I was sitting at my desk at 8:00 at night fixing some bug and I looked across the sea of gray half-height cubicles at a someone 30 years older than me doing the same thing with the exact same job title, probably not making much more than I. At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Seni…

I think it's a case of different people having different priorities.

For example, I have zero interest in career advancement. I just want to draw a paycheck so I don't end up homeless and so I can afford to buy the occasional cool gadget. It'd be nice if my work was interesting so I'm not completely bored while I'm working for my paycheck, but advancement is definitely at the bottom of my list of what to look for in a job.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#152

Post by phlakaton » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

alexandercrohde wrote: post #14

I cannot tell if blog post is this a theory or 15-page commercial for one man's opinions. The title claims it turns engineers into remarkable managers, yet provides no evidence. I see a lot of bold claims (e.g. "As with any new job, the most important task you should be doing at any given time will definitely be uncomfortable. It should be") but this piece lacks the reflection and perspective of a PG think-piece or a…

His point was: be aware that to be a good manager you need to be effective in all three directions. From my experience, engineers stepping into the manager's role will primarily want to make their team happy and productive. But if that becomes all they concern themselves with, they will tend to land their team in the soup! Call it what you will, I think steering managers away from this is sound advice.

Interestingly, in my office's parlance, "manage down" is "make the boss happy (by making the team do what the boss wants)"...

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#153

Post by jraedisch » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 6:54 PM UTC

chuckcode wrote: post #118

ryandrake wrote: post #79

The day I decided to make it a goal to switch from developing software to management: I was sitting at my desk at 8:00 at night fixing some bug and I looked across the sea of gray half-height cubicles at a someone 30 years older than me doing the same thing with the exact same job title, probably not making much more than I. At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Seni…

True in my experience that managing developers paid better and had other perks like more equity and some control over priorities and projects that was nice. Technical or pure software companies seem to do a better job of valuing engineering talent and how core they are to business but still not as good as they could. The two things I've seen over and over are: 1) Pure technical people are under appreciated and in gen…

Maybe developers valuate themselves too low more often than management, at least when it comes to negotiating salaries? In general they might think more in terms of what they need (or "should earn"), than what they could earn. That is kind of a mistake.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#154

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

dropit_sphere wrote: post #112

lgieron wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bigger problem is that most companies view "engineer" as "implementor of ideas that come from the business". Isn't that the inherent nature of a lot of the programming jobs, though? For example, I'm currently contracting at a e-commerce company. My day to day work is as you described - closing tickets that get assigned to me in the Sprint. I also suggest new tickets, but they're solely limited to technical issu…

I was thinking about the same sentence you highlighted, and I think you're right. The problem is that it's often bundled with a similar but patently false and demonic idea---that the business and technical sides can be siloed without ill effect. They can't. Someday someone will write a best-selling business book about how it's valuable for management to have technical expertise, and it'll have some catchy term like t…

Some of the better VC firms (eg. a16z, YCombinator) are already putting this in play with their investment decisions, but they would rather profit off it than write a best-selling book. There's a reason why the conventional wisdom in the Valley - at least among firms in the know - is that you need a technical founder who also thoroughly understands the business.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#155

Post by msravi » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

dwmtm wrote: post #137

msravi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An honest question: Does the highest paid engineer know that (s)he makes slightly more than you? If so, does (s)he know of it in an official capacity or has (s)he sort-of figured it out? Oftentimes, I've found that management operates from a position of informational advantage, while a person on a parallel technical track at the same level has access to a lot less information. Hence the question.

Is there any meaningful sense in which a tech-tracker has more official or unofficial access to information?

Sorry, it's late here and my brain is just unable to parse your sentence. Are you asking if it matters if the information is gained officially or unofficially?

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#156

Post by jazzyk » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #135

ryandrake wrote: post #79

The day I decided to make it a goal to switch from developing software to management: I was sitting at my desk at 8:00 at night fixing some bug and I looked across the sea of gray half-height cubicles at a someone 30 years older than me doing the same thing with the exact same job title, probably not making much more than I. At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Seni…

I've been places where I was there for the 8:00 PM bug (or later). At most of those places, my manager/supervisor was still there, too, trying to help us figure it out. If nothing else, they were there for encouragement and food runs. (If your engineers are working through dinner, feed them .) Doing management right doesn't mean that you no longer are there at 8 PM. It means that you're there at 8 PM more often than…

Doing management right means your team does not have to work until 8pm every day.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#157

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 7:04 PM UTC

s73v3r wrote: post #143

carc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I know senior engineers that chose the technical route rather than manager route, who make absolutely ridiculous amounts of money. Like close to 1,000,000/year including equity. I don't know any non VP level people making anywhere close to that. Obviously this is anecdotal though.

And I know of plenty of people who play football who make several million dollars a year. The question is, how common is it? In both athletics and engineering, the answer is not all that common.

The difference in football is that if you miss the cutoff for several million dollars a year, you make bupkis. In engineering, if you miss the cutoff for $1M/year (which itself is the low-risk alternative to "make a billion or nothing"), you'll make about $250K/year. And if you miss that, you make $200K/year. And if you miss that, $150K/year.

Engineering - at least at this point in history - is remarkable among professions where the very top of the pay scale is "the richest man in the world", but there's a relatively smooth progression below that where even a 25th percentile engineer makes a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#158

Post by ianbicking » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #79

The day I decided to make it a goal to switch from developing software to management: I was sitting at my desk at 8:00 at night fixing some bug and I looked across the sea of gray half-height cubicles at a someone 30 years older than me doing the same thing with the exact same job title, probably not making much more than I. At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Seni…

> At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Senior Software Engineer". Fix that and you'll see more engineers stay put (where they're likely happier and more productive).

In many companies I see more undermanagement than overmanagement, so starving out the management track doesn't sound like a great strategy. And if a company is going to have better career development and advancement, it's managers who will make that happen. The pithy answer is "why don't you become a manager so you can fix that?" – and maybe you don't want to and that's fine, but you should hope that some other enlightened person chooses differently.

Re: advancement: to have greater impact than a Senior Software Engineer you need to do more than hack or stay late to fix bugs. What we define as "management" might not be the best way to do that, but it's got to be something. And at a certain point impact based on individual skill is hard to scale. I don't think we have a very good model for what it means to be more than that, so there's something precarious about the upper levels of the technical track. I recall seeing an article describing the developer equivalent of "The Wolf" (the character from Pulp Fiction), and have encountered people in that position; it's kind of like a wildcat manager role, diving in to fix problems that are typically both technical and organizational. There might be other models of what it means to go beyond Senior, but I think they aren't as well understood as they should be. And a lot of them will look somewhat like management because a large component is doing work that makes other people more productive.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#159

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #81

plinkplonk wrote: post #12

"Don’t manage only to advance your career. Many tech companies have parallel career paths to seniority for both technical and managerial high-performers." Is this really true? Many engineers do become managers only to advance their careers. The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level. Even when a rough parity exists on pa…

The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level. Very true. Engineering is the hard way up, because there's so much less of the title and grade and salary inflation on the management track. Take Google. If you're a manager and don't make Director in 5 years, you fucked something up. On the other hand, the Director-equivalent…

Pretty sure a lot of what you said about Google isn't true. I personally know at least one Principal Engineer who works on the Search team in Google NYC; it's possible he was promoted after you left, but even then, he would've been Senior Staff and highly regarded.

Also, upper management in Search is still on the engineering ladder. These are folks with 2000+ and 500+ folks reporting to them, one of whom reported directly to Larry when I left, with net worths probably in the hundreds of millions, and they've chosen to stay on the eng ladder.

I also know folks who were special hires (tech celebrities elsewhere in the industry, with independent press and a strong publication record) who were hired in as Senior SWE with a salary befitting their previous accomplishments.

Re: A Plan to Turn Engineers into Managers

#160

Post by eigenvector » Tue, Aug 04, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

ianbicking wrote: post #158

ryandrake wrote: post #79

The day I decided to make it a goal to switch from developing software to management: I was sitting at my desk at 8:00 at night fixing some bug and I looked across the sea of gray half-height cubicles at a someone 30 years older than me doing the same thing with the exact same job title, probably not making much more than I. At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Seni…

> At 95% of companies, there is zero career development and advancement once you become a "Senior Software Engineer". Fix that and you'll see more engineers stay put (where they're likely happier and more productive). In many companies I see more undermanagement than overmanagement, so starving out the management track doesn't sound like a great strategy. And if a company is going to have better career development an…

OP is not saying to starve out management. Providing a meaningful career track for experienced engineers as technical experts rather than managers does not require reducing the number of managers. It does, however, require accepting that there's such a thing as a non-management job that might actually pay more than one higher up the org chart.

Often, organizational and technical challenges are intertwined. We become susceptible to certain technical pitfalls because of the unique weaknesses of our organization and its technical leadership (or lack thereof). I concur that many senior engineer roles will look like management. One thing that distinguishes them is that the senior engineer is not involved in the minutiae of HR decisions that line managers make for their employees (salary & promotion, approving vacations, etc.) nor in the broader allocation of corporate resources that consumes so much manager time, but rather on high-level but still distinctly technical tasks.

In my industry (power engineering), it is very common to see giant engineering companies that have gutted the senior engineer role. They are made up of hordes of interns and junior engineers and lots of hotshot bosses and nothing in between. The quality of work they can produce suffers noticeably.