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Don't become an engineering manager

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Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#121

Post by coredev_ »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #91

Unpopular opinion: either you manage people or you manage work/processes, you shouldn't do both. if you're an engineering manager, either you manage your people and let them be engineers, or you don't manage any people and you focus on engineering solutions and managing the solutions themselves.

Why unpopular? Sounds about right to me.

I understand that some people take the manager path for the title/pay and never understands that the role is about handle people - not the tech. But they will not be very appreciated or it's a very small shop.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#122

Post by pflenker »

I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.

Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable.

A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now.

I don’t mind - it’s exciting! But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#123

Post by stronglikedan »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #113

In addition, I think the roles of manager and engineer will blend and management layers will flatten - companies are mostly looking for managers who code some of the time. It helps them run lean and avoid layers of management which slow down execution. As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we’ll be demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and that means they’ll need to be doing more tha…

> that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading

That never lasts. No one can do do both and do them effectively.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#124

Post by softwaredoug »

Manager or not I think the real risk is overly adapting your skills to one company. Managers becoming experts at one companies politics and cannot instead of general organizational dynamics. The devs who seem to only get by in this one team / codebase, and neglect general skills, looming down on outside info as buzzwords.

It seems smart at the time, and makes you more effective in the near term. But it might cause many of your skills to lose portability.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#125

Post by etothet »

If you are reading this and you are thinking you want to become an engineering manager, I urge you to think long term what you want that to look like. I've seen too often that developers who want to become managers because they think it's the next inventible step aren't prepared for the people management and HR part of that role.

And, as you move up to Director and beyond, those higher often have much less to do with actual engineering than tasks that sort of surround the world of engineering - lots of organizing information and attending meetings.

I've seen too many developers who though they wanted to manage become victim to the Peter Principle [1].

There is nothing wrong with staying a developer, even if you're not "moving up" to some idealized title. If you like the work and you can tolerate the place you work, you're probably ahead of most people in our field.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#126

Post by gdubs »

halper wrote: post #4

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…

There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think, with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch the equity package any further.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#127

Post by jf22 »

coredev_ wrote: post #117
jf22 wrote: post #71

I'm a former EM who would never go back in an AI age. EMs deal with friction and from my experience more output is more friction. You have org leaders and businessy people putting their foot on the gas because AI is so productive and then programmers shipping 2-3x more code. These two forces collide and you're stuck dealing with the friction so 10x the amount of initiatives you did before. The friction is like sandpa…

As an EM I don't get this. You are the sole responsible for quality. You are the sole responsible for what tools use. AI is voluntary to use. If AI produces code that no one knows and is hard to maintain, don't use AI in that way. If you can't make that decision, are you really the EM?

I don't understand he comment.

AI produces code that people can understand and is easy to maintain if you ask it for that.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#128

Post by roncesvalles »

jimnotgym wrote: post #43

> It’s a bad time to move away from tech It continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory…

It's because the software EM function in tech companies doesn't have parallels to managers in other professions.

The technical decisions are made by the high-level SWEs. The product decision and customer-facing work is done by the PMs. The EM role only exists to hire, evaluate, promote, and fire SWEs. It's very light on the "engineering" and very heavy on the "manager". It's almost an HR-type role.

In my career, all my EMs who weren't recently internally promoted couldn't read the programming language that their team writes in. Some of them have good system design skills but they eventually atrophy from disuse. It's very much a role where you hang up the cleats.

The root cause is that other professions didn't bifurcate technical leadership and people management into separate streams. The partner lawyer or civil EM is the seniormost technical person on the team. Often the software EM is the least technical person on the team.

BTW there are countries (like China) that don't follow this model. Meaning, the only way to get promoted above a mid-level SWE is to become an EM. There is no parallel IC track, i.e. no "senior staff", "principal" or "distinguished" engineers. Just young ICs and older EMs.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#129

Post by cjblomqvist »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #113

In addition, I think the roles of manager and engineer will blend and management layers will flatten - companies are mostly looking for managers who code some of the time. It helps them run lean and avoid layers of management which slow down execution. As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we’ll be demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and that means they’ll need to be doing more tha…

Or, because coding is now not a bottleneck, it'll become increasingly important to ensure all your developers know what to do/achieve, and you'll need to put more effort into setting up structures, processes etc to do that. More collaboration (instead of lone wolf coder) may actually increase the need for good managers.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#130

Post by alephnerd »

GlibMonkeyDeath wrote: post #94
alephnerd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate the job mobility that is lost when you transition from being an individual contributor into someone on the management track. The reality is, there are very few EM and above jobs, and job security is tough - if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE, I'd fire the EM first because I can always find another replacement or split their responsibilities across multiple individual contribut…

I agree at the first-line manager level (which this article is about), it's tough to get hired from outside, so getting the same position somewhere else after a layoff will be a tough job search. My comment was more on the next levels - there seemed to be about as many high-level technical roles as managers (paid similarly) where I worked in biotech (that might be a different situation for software-only companies.) A…

> My comment was more on the next levels - there seemed to be about as many high-level technical roles as managers (paid similarly) where I worked in biotech (that might be a different situation for software-only companies.) And there were more Directors/VP's than Principals/Fellows for sure. So at some point the "ladder width" crosses over.

Yea. Biotech is different. The equivalent of a VP for a specific formulation at a Pfizer would be a Staff or Principal Product Manager at a Salesforce.

In software, Engineering Managers have increasingly become solely people+program managers with a bit of a technical component.

EMs aren't expected to own product - that's PMs. Additonally, EMs aren't expected to own architecture - that's Principal and Distinguished Engineers. All that leaves EMs is program management.

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