Is engineering management bullshit?

Coordination is necessary. Communication is valuable. Running a business is complex. Product managers do valuable work. Designers do valuable work. QA does valuable work. Leadership does valuable work. Engineers do valuable work.

The core of an EXTREME number of complaints about modern professional software development lies in the pervasiveness of Career Management; and EMs are an extremely attractive entrypoint for people into this kind of track, who have no experience in any of the IC-facing roles, yet now they're managing ICs.

Just go look at the vast majority of job postings for EMs. The requirements are extremely bare on actual, hard engineering experience; maybe you see the last requirement read something like "built an app in java or c++", and it never gets covered in the interviews.

You can't manage a role you haven't held, I will die on this hill. Senior leadership is fucking hard; that takes specialized skills, MBAs maybe, a little bit of crazy as well. EMs are not that, and anyone who tells you what EMs do is remotely as specialized as what the people higher up do is probably an EM. At their best, EMs should have an engineering background (or at least PM/PO; having worked with engineers as peers); they should know what it takes to build modern software systems from the inside; they should know how to mentor. At their worst, EMs who don't know any of this, but know management, spend their days as a Jira parrot and can make the lives of the people they manage miserable.

Its actually astounding to me that this is controversial, and that people don't recognize that the only reason companies change the requirements bar for EM positions is because, if they made the bar what I describe, that candidate would also make a great engineer; and companies are short engineers, not short "people who manage people". Its not out of some grand design that the best managers live on the management track. Many, many other specialized disciplines don't do what Big Tech does. The tracks for Engineers and Engineering Managers shouldn't be separate; they should be one track. But Big Tech companies don't want their engineers leaving the IC role, so they make do; and the irony of it all is all this does is lower the average quality of EMs in the org, which causes engineers to leave anyway; just to competitors.

That's why Engineering Management is bullshit. It doesn't have to be. Much of what that role does is necessary; its just overwhelmingly filled by the wrong people, who then morph the role into some bastardization of what it should be, get promoted, then write the job spec for their replacement.

[1] https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/engineering-manager-payment-...

[2] https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/77396557743170246-en...

[3] https://boards.greenhouse.io/cloudflare/jobs/3135805?gh_jid=...

Great EMs have that experience; and it makes their/your job way harder because now you understand, at a deep enough level, what the people you manage are going through. When product reqs come across the desk of an IC-turned-EM, they can feel that gut punch immediately: "fuck, this is going to be so hard, that system is so legacy, and Sarah is super overloaded right now because she's the only one with any experience on the message bus transformer converter ingester"

Management track EMs actually do have it easier, because they get to think in the discrete world of tickets and human resources.

At a high enough level in any company: senior leadership needs to think about the world as perfectly discrete like that, because there's so much other bullshit going on that worrying about the specifics of the message bus transformer converter ingester would drive them off a cliff. But EMs aren't that. But many, many EMs think like that, and a big part is the incentive structure of their career path; their boss thinks like that, and their boss's boss thinks like that, so if I want to have my boss's boss role one day I need to think like that.

The strawman side of what I'm arguing is: "Well, you're just describing a bad EM". But the whole point is that that's quickly becoming the average in the industry, and that average is starting to define the role. Career-track management who get promotions, then write the hiring reqs for their replacements, and every other EM below them, combined with a massive shortage of engineering talent meaning companies need to define a different bar for their EM hiring reqs anyway.

Business decisions are rarely black and white which is why if you can’t articulate why you should get resources, you won’t - someone who can articulate their value better will get resources. And if they can convince someone else their idea is best, now you’ve got two people advocating (i.e. politics).

The larger orgs get the more politics because there is simply to much going on for any one person to have all the information needed to make a decision - they can only rely on others to argue for their own priorities.