Ask HN: Developers who became engineering managers, how was the experience?

Do not underestimate the differences between being an effective individual contributor and an effective engineering manager.

A lot of the concepts a good manager is driven by are counter-intuitive. For example, technical "leadership" as a manager can be repellant, especially to the more senior of your team, and interpreted as evidence of lack of trust.

The political environment of the company will also dictate your success. Half your job is to be the team coach/servant. The other half is making sure the rest of the company understands that what your team is doing is high-value (and making sure that actually is true).

The OP asked "what skill-sets from earlier were important in the transition." Surprisingly little. One of the team's biggest jobs (which you should try to delegate, by the way), is breaking down a problem into smaller, doable chunks. You'll have done this on smaller scales as a coder, and finding reasonable separations of concern can make or break projects. At the same time, you shouldn't be doing all this work yourself. The more responsibility (not just tasks, but decision-making) you can delegate to your team, the more they will own their work and feel responsible for their own success.

These are very different jobs, but training and spending time in those roles can help you on both sides.

Another piece is being able to make decisions and stand by them. That doesn't mean never backing down, or always being right, but you'll often make quick decisions with less than ideal information and need to be comfortable with that. You'll be wrong a non-negligible portion of the time, so you'll need to own that, work to fix any issues, etc. and not take it too personally.

As a manager of other managers, I like to tell my team that you're in a good place when work can continue on without you; your job is to push things forward, drive process changes and improvements, message successes up and down, etc.

My experience: It's brutally hard and utterly unrewarding. A good manager is evaluated by the performance of their team and the happiness of their team, but most companies do not even collect metrics on team satisfaction other than the mostly discarded of "peer evaluations". This tends to create a toxic environment where abusive managers who exploit their employees rise to the top and equitable and compassionate managers are forced out or given no real opportunity.

I've also never been offered, and in fact have been refused, any engineering management training. I asked, and folks say it's "too expensive." They offer some books (the wrong ones, usually), but I think they (subconsciously or consciously, idk) recognize that performance of the team is a lot more important.

The final thing is even if you do it for awhile and start to get better at it (as has been the case for me), it begins to infect people's expectations of you in the technical world. Everyone assumes you'll start to do it. In some part because you train yourself to adopt a manager's attitude of calm and promote the idea that "yes, this is fixable we don't need to panic."

Once you do it, it will follow you around.