What you give up by moving into engineering management

One of the signs of a healthy culture is that people are not afraid to acknowledge knowledge gaps.

> You must be willing to say "I don't know" 10x more than as an IC

> All other approaches will lead to you failing to deliver results, failing to retain, and a drag on the org.

Your advice is contradictory on its face. How can you embrace "not knowing" and having a curious mind, while at the same time declaring that this set of operational activities are "the only way to do it"?

> You must believe deep down in your core that ordering a human being to do something is a sign you must introspect about your failure as a manager, and commit to fixing the problem.

This also just seems like new-age guilt injected into the work place. Don't be a micro manager always in people's faces for no reason but if you're telling yourself you're a failure because _as a manager_ you told someone to do something, I'm not sure how you last more than 2 days on the job.

Earlier in my career, I had a manager who I initially had pegged as disengaged - he wasn’t, he was just actually delegating and managing without getting bogged down in the IC work he entrusted to his reports. At the time I thought this was not helpful as he couldn’t help me much with my direct tasks, and I had been on the team well before he joined so he would ask more questions to be answered by me than I of him. Frequently in our 1:1s I would not even know what to talk about.

But looking back, I realized I was asking the wrong questions, and he the right ones. He carved out a lot of scope and big projects for me (and others) which greatly advanced my career. He was bullshit shielding and setting up new projects so well that I didn’t realize how good he was at that until he was gone. In his focus time he was prototyping useful but not-critical-path tooling to make us all more productive. I almost want to cry thinking about how critical of him I was (never shared, but sometimes reflected implicitly with how I phrased questions) at the time. Nobody is perfect and I think he did try to communicate, but very vaguely and circuitously in a way I didn’t understand, how he saw his role by telling me an analogy along the lines of him being more of a than a .

To add to your list, I’d say expect reports to not understand or appreciate what you are doing for them. Maybe it’d help to make it a bit apparent now and then in a way that doesn’t flex the inherent power balance - probably better to show some of the bullshit averted than “look at what I wrote to get you promoted”. Or maybe it’d be good to directly share something like your comment to say “Hey, I’m on your side, and please let me know if you need cover for some incoming BS or want to try something with more scope - I’ll try my best even if I don’t have all our code’s class hierarchies memorized.” Because immature reports like my former self may not realize that a good manager works by entrusting reports and delegating decisions (with some consensus building) if they haven’t encountered that yet.

I’m but a lowly leaf node in the corporate hierarchy ATM but I’m curious about the “do things because they can’t be bothered actually doing them” - isn’t delegation down the tree like the entire point of being a manager? If you could elaborate I’d be quite interested