Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)

My observation has been that unless you are amazingly charismatic or a force of nature, as an engineering manager much of your value is in your ability to understand your specific companies unspoken intricacies such as:

* who the different personalities are within the specific organization in order to get things done and who's opinion you need to take into account and who you can safely ignore

* who you can escalate to in order to get more resources (perhaps get a email pushed up to the CEO if needed) and who to apologize to if things go bad

* when to let your team self-manage and when you're going to need to assert your opinion

These are all highly specific to an organization.

The two ways to achieve this are through being in the trenches and observing for many years or have the social skills to hack your way in.

As such I think the interview for an engineering manager would be less than straightforward than a standard fizz buzz test.

More importantly if you do somehow pass the gatekeepers to such a job, your ability to actually hack into the new organization in order to keep your job for more than a year becomes a challenge.

This is exactly why so many companies have staff+ levels in the first place. Managers are there to handle the people and politics which gives the ICs space to do the technical side of departmental leadership.

When adults can't be responsible for themselves they need to be managed.

When adults can be responsible they need more than one other adult to address issues and challenges with. To learn from and to teach to.

Management is a industrial and corporate construct. Its put in place to force labour intense industries to tell others what they need to do. Tell is often a monologue.

There is indeed need for adults to be around other adults with a sane understanding of responsibility. That's not management though.

Management is often a bleak blank cover to compensate for what I would call being professional.

Most often management does not work because the construct is that one (the manager) gets to rule more than the other, even though the manager might be completely wrong.

Some management must be in place otherwise things will stagnate.

Most management is a big fucking joke being mostly about looking good upwards. Politics.

More wine...

> 12) Joy is much harder to come by.

Joy is an internal energy, orthogonal to the (tangentially) flat Earth that sits external to us.

We might take pleasure or find satisfaction in our work, but joy is a mystical thing derived from one's faith.

Whether a manager or Individual Contributor, one's capacity to find joy in the most suck-tacular experiences is the key to the next iteration of One Little Victory => https://youtu.be/o_dzB1EX_2I

A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dealing with micromanaging the rest and trying to educate them.

I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.