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What is expected of a engineering manager?

blog.rlmflores.me

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Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#21

Post by volkk »

ethamontif wrote: post #15

`A good way to think about hiring and growing your team members is to think that they can replace you.` This is really wrong. Manager is a path, but an IC shouldn't need to become a manager to keep growing in their career.

> Manager is a path, but an IC shouldn't need to become a manager to keep growing in their career.

I 100% agree with this, but have never really REALISTICALLY seen any of this methodology in the companies that I've worked at. Here's what I usually see instead: if someone is a staff engineer, then they worked their ass off to get there and are generally really good coders, and have wrapped their heads around the business/domain really well.

The managers I've seen are generally skewed towards incompetence, which to me, shows that interviewing to become an EM is MUCH easier than it is to become a staff engineer, yet the pay is identical. So you mostly have staff/principal engs that are VERY smart, and more often than not, have EMs/directors who have stumbled their way upwards by being lucky.

The question is -- do you want to be a principal engineer when you're 45, know the business, the code, the domain inside out, be paid well, but STILL have to answer to directors/managers who are 15 years your prior, who are entirely incompetent and have essentially lucked/bullshitted their way into their roles, and deal with all of that crap on and endless basis or do you become that person and attempt to fix it from the top?

A different angle: most companies have no idea what a staff engineer is, and how to promote from within. However, I've seen midlevel engineers do some decent work, maybe complete a major project, and be promoted to EMs. What's the point of trying to become a staff engineer (assuming part of your goal is to grow your wealth) when you can just easily become an EM at most places and make the same exact amount of money, and just do what you love (i.e coding), on the side. Of course, to each their own and all of that. But at the end of the day, it is much much easier to go into management and incompetence your way around to the top where goals are nebulous and not super calculable compared to being senior IC.

I should finally note that I have had a couple of EMs that were really good. However, those are far and few between IMO.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#22

Post by cactus2093 »

ethamontif wrote: post #15

`A good way to think about hiring and growing your team members is to think that they can replace you.` This is really wrong. Manager is a path, but an IC shouldn't need to become a manager to keep growing in their career.

Depends on the organization, some places managers don't have any involvement in anything technical, but at a lot of places they do. Managers are often involved with architecture/design decisions, resolving internal disagreements about technical matters, improving dev processes, negotiating with PMs to translate product requirements into concrete engineering tasks, etc.

These are all things a senior IC should be doing as well, and as a manager these are the kinds of things you can and should start having your team replace you on if they're up for it.

And then of course, some of your ICs likely do want to transition to the manager path. So you can involve them in hiring conversations, phone screens, conversations about team mandate/goals, team structure and head count, etc.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#23

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

dbliss wrote: post #8
stuff4ben wrote: post #3

Article seems to omit one of the big issues I had with being an engineering manager and that was managing budgets (people/assets) and financial forecasts. I'll probably become a manager again, but I'm enjoying my break and doing "real work" again.

+1 - I had a discussion with one of my directs today as they were considering becoming an SDM. There are so many days as a manager where every moment of my time is filled with meetings and admin tasks and at the end of the day you feel like to accomplished nothing. Where as with coding you can feel like you built something and have something to show for your hours of time. I certainly miss being an IC, more and more…

You might individually feel like you've done nothing, but if tending to admin tasks enables your ICs to just focus on getting work done --without distraction-- you're actually a multiplying force within your organization.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#24

Post by triztian »

lacker wrote: post #13

Your company expects that you follow along the deliveries, setting quality standards, making sure the team has the support they need and upper management the feedback they need. This part seemed a little weakly worded to me. An engineering manager should make sure their team gets things done. It isn't enough to "follow along the deliveries". Sometimes that is things like setting standards and communicating. But it's…

I agree with your points.

I think it's the wording like you mention, in Lat-Am countries it is common to say "darle seguimiento a las entregas" or "rastrear entrega" as a way to signal that the person is responsible of making sure that things workout well including handling or helping out with any technical or communication roadblocks for the team.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#25

Post by throw1234651234 »

Dunno, but as a dev lead, onboarding new devs is huge - easing them into the project, make sure they get to do challenging work but aren't stressed too heavily or beyond their capacity, etc. Huge time commitment just to write clean, understandable stories for them to work while they are new.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#26

Post by drchopchop »

Timberwolf wrote: post #14

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against InfoSec teams stuck in the '80s so the CI/CD toolchain can deploy to production, negotiating freedom with a CTO who wants to specify everything to the level of individual data str…

Agreed. The end goal is usually to make developers as productive as possible, which means a) giving them large contiguous blocks of coding time, and b) removing roadblocks (i.e. crap)

The "crap" can be politics, legal, ancient IT practices, useless meetings, constant demands for status/updates, bickering around cost/budgets, hiring, buying time to fight tech debt, and a whole bunch of other things.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#27

Post by rhn_mk1 »

Timberwolf wrote: post #20
meagher wrote: post #2

One thing missing from my recent engineering managers is lack of relevant coding experience. You don't need to be an great engineer to be a good manager, but it definitely helps when your manager knows enough about the battles fought in the trenches and can offer actual feedback/support instead of nodding for 30m, then going to another 1:1.

Companies really struggle with this, and in both directions. Startups and scale-ups tend to overcompensate to the point management hires get interviewed as super-ICs, where they'll be expected to answer technical stages at (or even above) the company's top IC standard, but only get a couple of basic scenario questions about management that anybody could answer. Sometimes you get lucky and they're good at both, but it…

What's IC?

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#28

Post by Timberwolf »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #27
Timberwolf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies really struggle with this, and in both directions. Startups and scale-ups tend to overcompensate to the point management hires get interviewed as super-ICs, where they'll be expected to answer technical stages at (or even above) the company's top IC standard, but only get a couple of basic scenario questions about management that anybody could answer. Sometimes you get lucky and they're good at both, but it…

What's IC?

Sorry, jargon: Individual Contributor, meaning someone who works on things directly and doesn't do any management.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#29

Post by pkaye »

x87678r wrote: post #19
Timberwolf wrote: post #14

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against InfoSec teams stuck in the '80s so the CI/CD toolchain can deploy to production, negotiating freedom with a CTO who wants to specify everything to the level of individual data str…

I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

This is why I decided to stopped doing engineering manager roles. Working on the crap stuff all the times is no fun. And the longer you do it the more your technical skills fall behind. I'm fine with the technical roles along with mentoring the new engineers.

Re: What is expected of a engineering manager?

#30

Post by andi999 »

x87678r wrote: post #19
Timberwolf wrote: post #14

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against InfoSec teams stuck in the '80s so the CI/CD toolchain can deploy to production, negotiating freedom with a CTO who wants to specify everything to the level of individual data str…

I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

Maybe it is different in Software engineering than in Hardware, but if you have a team developing hardware and they encounter a problem they cannot solve they have to turn to their manager. So the manager also gets technical crap/difficulties to solve. The 5% he cannot solve goes one level higher, so basically the higher you get, the more distille/purerd crap you get.
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