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

thoughtspile.github.io

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

#171

Post by quickthrower2 »

thoughtspile wrote: post #63
quickthrower2 wrote: post #60

I have found EM positions (where you lead a team of 4-8 and your reports are ICs) to be way more stressful and don’t really pay much more. VPEngineering is where you get a meaningful pay increase. In addition you need to keep up with the tech as you need to evaluate the skill level of people in your team plus they turn to you for advice. And it is way more tiring. Keeping up with what many people are doing, at a tech…

But then again, c++ hft and payment processing aren't exactly low-stress jobs either

Yes indeed. My point was more that to make more money as a IC there are niches but there is no general track, but as a manager you stay at your crud webapp company and can manage more and more people.

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

#172

Post by golly_ned »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #121
marcinzm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix would disagree.

Netflix is indeed an outlier and has always paid higher than the rest of the market since it's such a shitty toxic place to work and in a terrible location to boot. Even they aren't hiring someone looking at L5 at one of the other big companies at 600k. They'll be much higher than the other companies though.

/All/ the current and former Netflix engineers I've talked to talked glowingly about working Netflix. I'm supposing there's a lot of self-selection. And they've recently started hiring remote.

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

#173

Post by tux2bsd »

askonomm wrote: post #4

And here I am, 12 years into my career as a software engineer, never, ever, wanting to be a manager. I just want to build things, I don't want to manage them. I see what it is like to be a manager as I work closely with them, and I just don't find it appealing at all. As a senior engineer, my words also often matter, but I don't have the huge amount of responsibility that comes with being a manager, which is nice. I…

[dead]

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

#174

Post by musicale »

> As an engineer, I hated bloody corporate BS: individual performance reviews,

Good to have someone acknowledge that individual performance reviews are ineffective nonsense. I have seen little evidence to contradict this in organizations that I am familiar with.

The result seems to be that promotion is largely based on seniority, personal influence, random chance, or changing jobs.

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

#175

Post by r0s »

mattlondon wrote: post #14

The biggest pain is the people. You'd be surprised how childish grown ups can be. FFS just be adults and get along. 80% of my stress as a manager is basically solving playground squabbles between people old enough and experienced enough to know better. 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 m…

As a team lead and manager, I've had SWE friends mention that management shouldn't even exist. Petty arguments, performance issues, termination, even sexual harassment reporting are things I've had to personally deal with.

Well that shouldn't be an issue in a professional workplace and functioning team, is the rationalization. I couldn't agree more! Yet, there's a huge gap between what should and does happen when a bunch of humans (sadly, mostly men) work together.

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

#176

Post by karaterobot »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #6
askonomm wrote: post #4

And here I am, 12 years into my career as a software engineer, never, ever, wanting to be a manager. I just want to build things, I don't want to manage them. I see what it is like to be a manager as I work closely with them, and I just don't find it appealing at all. As a senior engineer, my words also often matter, but I don't have the huge amount of responsibility that comes with being a manager, which is nice. I…

Senior engineer is fairly low. At some point you may get tired of stagnating salary and being told what to do all the time. They are higher technical positions that have no or very little management responsibilities (up to senior principal engineer, architect, etc). It depends also on the company and how much they value you. Best I have seen is engineer with PhD and decades of experience be the research/architecture…

> At some point you may get tired of stagnating salary and being told what to do all the time

Managers don't get told what to do all the time? Since when? Managers just get it from both sides. If you don't know about all the stuff your manager is dealing with from people above them, or from other managers in the organization: good! That means they're doing their job shielding you from that. The manager is telling their reports what to do—okay, I guess so, sometimes. But just as often they're adapting their plans to what their teams tell them can or should or has been done. And they're also being told what to do by people to whom they are direct reports. People who are, in my experience, much more demanding and much less collaborative than most managers themselves are with their teams.

I've been a manager, and I stopped all that because it felt like I had more bosses and less agency than when I was an IC.

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

#177

Post by aquickbrownfox »

fabianholzer wrote: post #153
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME in ~20 years I’ve never been on a team where there wasn’t someone underperforming (I acknowledge sometimes it was me!). So while I agree it’s stupid to force a curve, it also doesn’t seem realistic when every manager claims their entire team is great.

Your personal experience notwithstanding, I don't think that it can be generalized that there is always an under-performer on every team. If I may offer my anecdata, I've seen several teams that could be characterized by stability and depth of expertise in their respective areas. You could say they always performed on a very high level, but never over-perform, because the high level is what is expected. Stack ranking…

It depends how big a “team” you consider. At the 5-10 level maybe not. At the 30-50 level most likely yes. At the 100+ level there are certainly a few.

In the well run orgs at Amazon the bell curve is applied at the larger scales where it makes sense.

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

#178

Post by esafak »

timr wrote: post #169
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think digging into the roots of SWE's not being respected is worth discussing. Are doctors, lawyers, or surgeons viewed the same way? I don't know those industries well enough to say. Some domains of software are very, very deep and require many years of study and practice. It feels like the root of SWEs not being fully respected simply comes back to the fact that they aren't considered as part of the org as much a…

> I think digging into the roots of SWE's not being respected is worth discussing. Are doctors, lawyers, or surgeons viewed the same way? Those are three very different things with different growth paths. But as someone who went from engineer to entrepreneur and is now on the product side, I can say that software people, almost as a rule, focus on stuff that doesn't matter for promotion. It's really frustrating somet…

Do you really respect doctors for growing their business? I would look down at a doctor whose mind is on money. When I really need a doctor, I sure do look for the best, not the one with the most patients.

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

#179

Post by pbae »

sorokod wrote: post #132
deutschepost wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also there is a comment by Major Winters that this is a stupid rule, because Lipton is one of the best and most respected platoon leads in the company.

True, Winters indeed said that but the interesting question is why would the Army have such a policy in the first place (I assume that here as in other things BoB sticks to the realities of the time).

The new LT would have to continue to interact with SNCOs in the battalion who had outranked him, which might cause friction.

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

#180

Post by mytailorisrich »

askonomm wrote: post #159
elevatedastalt wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's nice to be "Senior engineer" when you are 28. Not when you are 38 and being lorded over and over-ridden by "Staff Engineers" with half your experience.

Not everybody wants to get promoted to their level of incompetence. Some of us want to stay at a level that we are good at, and not endlessly climb a ladder.

Nothing of the sort has been written or suggested in this discussion. This is bizarre.
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