From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate

Then of course the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision making processes, going behind your back and contradicting previous agreements, trying to short-circuit or subvert agreed processes etc etc for above childish reasons.

Turns out that a lot of "professionals" are not professional at all and are actually pretty petty, spiteful, grudge-holding argumentative children who go into a strop (or as the article puts it "go lay on the grass thinking about their project") for a day or 5 if they don't get their way.

The rest of being a manager is a breeze though! 10/10 would buy again etc :)

- The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was lucky to be in a growth area.)

- The skills feel transferrable, but every pure EM I know who got laid off is still looking for work and ready to give up. Meanwhile, those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work. Corporate management cultures are actually incredibly variable across companies and not directly transferable. The single most transferable skill I know in this industry is Linux internals.

- The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better.

IMO the best thing about being a manager is that you get to spend a lot of your time thinking about the future, and you are more likely to be “in the room where it happens,” talking to and hearing from C-levels. It’s also the worst thing, because you see how the sausage gets made.

I do agree with the things the author dislikes, but they get better. As a new manager, the author possibly hasn’t yet run into the thing you come to hate the most: senior management in many companies is basically a high school clique. Behavioral problems that would get normal people fired are sometimes tolerated in VP, C-levels, even directors sometimes, and working in such environments is trying.

In practise now I find that I am a Team Lead and yet I have far less ability to influence things than I thought. There are a host of people including my boss who want to run everything and expect me to be a rubber stamp.

In fact I get into shit more because I have to speak up for people in the team who are (unfortunately) rightly afraid to. Like "for a story to be ready we need the API defined" - how can QA work in parallel on automated tests when they don't know what to test? Scrum masters, POs, my manager, architects......they just talk whichever shit suits them today as if it was all self evident truth and tomorrow they're moaning about why the tests are late.

Basically you get into the politics of who is to blame for the state of affairs and the people who chose those directions and strategies are well connected and good at shifting blame.

But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.