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What you give up by moving into engineering management

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Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#81
post #19

The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind. You start using corporate jargon. You become more authoritarian. You embrace careerism (a term I invented to describe people who erroneously conflate rising in corporate rank with happiness). You quickly learn that no one understands anything about the people or the business--and that all decisions are made by gut, cherry picked data, and story-telling. Suddenly,…

> The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind. The biggest thing they give up is having to do leetcode interviews.

I came to appreciate leetcode as a job seeker. Still don't think it is a great signal for HMs, but for the candidate it is a lot stressful than whiteboard coding.

Most problems solutions are a variation of small set of algorithmic techniques and you learn fast to identify the gotchas in the usually terribly edited problem descriptions.

Once you incorporate practicing coding tests in your life routine, they become an enjoyable passtime and a good substitute for mindless scrolling.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#82
To be frank? long term employability and short term job security.

The lower levels of management are terrible because you don't actually manage much, and become just a glorified bellboy for upper management, passing messages back and forth.

At the same time, due to disuse, your technical skills atrophy. So, it soon becomes a race to climb the corporate ladder or die.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#83
post #34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your only job as a manager is to protect and develop the team under you. That sounds like the philosophy of a tumor. Clearly, a manager has to care about other things as well, such as - how can my team contribute to the business in the most valuable way?

A manager should have a view about the business, and they must work to give their team the evidence and method of thinking to grasp why that view is correct. Only then will the team properly focus on the goal and execute effectively. This is part of developing the team. "If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and e…

Wouldn't they then just leave to become sailers? I build account software. If I yearned for the tax laws, I'd stop being a programmer, and start being an accountant.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#84
If you draw a Venn Diagram, with one circle being technical skills and the other circle being leadership skills, the intersection is engineering management. Unfortunately this is not a natural combination for most people, and it’s why there are so many bad engineering managers out there.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#85
post #19

The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind. You start using corporate jargon. You become more authoritarian. You embrace careerism (a term I invented to describe people who erroneously conflate rising in corporate rank with happiness). You quickly learn that no one understands anything about the people or the business--and that all decisions are made by gut, cherry picked data, and story-telling. Suddenly,…

> The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind. The biggest thing they give up is having to do leetcode interviews.

Nah.. I've rejected roles right after getting a leetcode link. Called a recruiter one time while on the bus, just looking at the link. Told her not to bother. I didn't want to work with anyone who would send such a link.

The called me back and said sorry, and I interviewed with their dev manager.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#86
post #60

First level management is not a great place to be...these are the folks Zuck told to go back to IC or leave At the first level, you have zero actual power. All you are doing is conducting perfunctory 1:1s and signing time-off forms. But you also aren't an IC and slowly fall out of the dev mindset and your skills atrophy My boss has been a first level manager for years...if he's ever laid off he is in big trouble...he…

Fully agree. After getting to second and third level management at startups and larger companies, I chased the $$$ to a first-level management role at a FAANG. The pay was multiple of what I ever dreamed of making, but expectations were set making the assumption that I had literally nothing to offer other than to manage performance and to find ways to generate "org impact" by being on random committees. All of the other things I did, such as technical mentorship, helping my higher level ICs get greenfield projects off the ground (starting a new thing is a surprisingly uncommon activity at larger companies), etc. was not valued at all.

I eventually bailed out and am now getting paid 1/3 as much to deliver 10x the value to startup.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#87
post #30
post #19

The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind. You start using corporate jargon. You become more authoritarian. You embrace careerism (a term I invented to describe people who erroneously conflate rising in corporate rank with happiness). You quickly learn that no one understands anything about the people or the business--and that all decisions are made by gut, cherry picked data, and story-telling. Suddenly,…

> Your only job as a manager is to protect and develop the team under you. That sounds like the philosophy of a tumor. Clearly, a manager has to care about other things as well, such as - how can my team contribute to the business in the most valuable way?

I think the parent is suggesting that protecting and developing the team is the only important task for a manager that doesn't fail at being a decent human.

The frequent incompatibility between morality and business, even down to simply shipping a shitty product to release at all, right up to building products that are designed to force purchasers to buy a replacement, is a matter that leaders must weigh.

A similar issue also applies to the people they lead. The line of professional detachment, between being too friendly and too military, is very thin indeed.

Generally speaking, while I fully agree with the parent that protecting, developing and coaching team is of paramount importance, I would say that, at the very least, hiring is equally important.

Hire the right people and your job as a manager is the easiest thing in the world.

Of course, in order to be good at any of the above, you must have a solid understanding of the business. It isn't simply a matter of being the people's champion.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#88
post #19

The biggest thing most managers give up is their mind. You start using corporate jargon. You become more authoritarian. You embrace careerism (a term I invented to describe people who erroneously conflate rising in corporate rank with happiness). You quickly learn that no one understands anything about the people or the business--and that all decisions are made by gut, cherry picked data, and story-telling. Suddenly,…

As an IC, I’ve had about 8 managers in my day. Sadly, I failed to recognize and appreciate great managers due to my own lack of maturity at the time and not understanding the manager role. 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…

> 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.

Reach out and tell him that. I'm sure he'd appreciate it.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#89
post #20

I quit managing because I couldn't stomach the language managers are required to speak. The cliches, the obfuscation, the outright lying when relaying the c__p coming from above, the list goes on.

The best managers I've worked with don't do much of that stuff. They do use the cliches and obfuscation, but only upwards . They talk to the team in the team's language. As for the crap coming down from the leaders, if anything, the best quality in a manager is understanding what is crap and what's actually useful, and deflecting the crap stuff before it gets anywhere.

This is something I learned in management that I think also made me a better engineer. It's important to be able to code switch on the fly. Shift your whole persona to fit in with the group with which you're immediately dealing, and be able to translate things into their own language. Then go to the next group and immediately morph to fit their culture. Rinse & repeat.

Re: What you give up by moving into engineering management

#90
I'd argue that being accountable for technical decisions, and losing touch with the codebase and your own technical skills, is just plain dangerous.

All of the greatest managers that I've reported to were able to (1) call "bullshit" when work was subpar, and (2) drop in, right down to the codebase, when it was clear that something was at risk. This whole culture of "accepting that different people will do things in different ways, so you should let go of your will to stay close to the tech/PRs" just seems overly sensitive to the elephant in the room: manage your time better, so that you can stay technically relevant.

How are you supposed to be accountable for technical deliveries, if you've got no expertise in the field and the codebase? How can you break up your vision into a set of executable subtasks, if you have not the faintest idea where one subtask should start and the other should end? And therefore, how can you enable your team to deliver on your or the organisation's vision? How do you come up with even remotely plausible timelines? Of course you need the people-centric managerial skills too, else, nobody is going to be motivated to work under you and help you execute. But, the key is, the people under you need to respect your technical skills as well as your empathy and managerial skills.

I'm concerned that the perpetuation of this trope of "you're _encouraged_ to lose your technical acumen as an engineering manager, it's OK!" is going to result in MORE of a common failure I've observed: the non-technical pure manager. They were recognised for good people skills amidst a sea of purely introverted coders, and are now tasked with managing junior to mid-level developers. They jumped on it, because writing code was always something they struggled with, and management is "prestigious".

This is a recipe for disaster. Unrealistic promises made to stakeholders. Deadlines inevitably get pushed down to the developers. And of course, these managers will (a) NOT be capable of noticing broken windows in the codebase or delivery/CI processes, and (b) NOT be able to suggest pathways out of them. So guess what happens? Shortcuts are taken. The codebase suffers more. The shortcuts are then relied upon for critical functionality, and you can't unwind them easily. Oh joy.

So there's the "engineering manager", who maybe was good at coding at some point, but has since "needed" to lose their edge. Hopefully they have a good tech to delegate most of the major decisions to. There's the "IC", who is still busily coding...

...But there's a 3rd path here that's not often mentioned: the "scout/squad leader" team lead. It's a great blend of hands-on work, leadership and management. You're, at most, one level up from the actual developers. You're the person in the squad that runs first, not the Army General shouting orders over intercom.

You're management. You're also IC (for non-critical path items!). You'll use your experience to explore the terrain before your comrades. You'll know when you need to scaffold prototypes, and even suggest initial stubs and interfaces for your team to implement. You'll also know when this is in good hands, and can stand back. You'll be able to offer meaningful advice to unblock your team, beyond "just pair with Jill, she's done this before, I'll make sure she's free". The point is: you _can_ drop in when you need to, if "Jill" isn't free and is doing something super-important. You'll know exactly where the gaps in the team are, and therefore who to hire.

You've seen the pitfalls before. You've seen what a good engineering process looks like. You'll be able to come up with target state for technical problems, but (unlike your pure-IC friends), you'll have both the influence and the necessary skills to break that down into sub-tasks that can be _executed by a team_. You are where you are because you have (1) good technical skills, (2) good people and comms skills, and (3) at some point in your career, realised that your visions cannot be executed in a timely manner by a single individual.

Your time management needs to be bulletproof. If your schedule is fully booked with meetings, (i.e. you've got 7 hours of meetings booked in an 8 hour day), then that's on you. Personally, if I have more than a few hours of meetings booked a day, I am re-scheduling, rejecting, or suggesting alternate times. I owe it to the other members of that meeting to give it my 100%. Also, every time I make a commitment to either myself or someone else, I'm blocking out time in my diary to actually _make through on that commitment_ (whether its "Review John's latest PR" or "Pre-refine tickets for next sprint"). This (1) makes it look like my diary is fully booked (like a "good manager" is supposed to have), and (2) makes it clear if it's a realistic commitment (so I can manage expectations), and (3) makes it clear to me what will slip if I have to accept some "bullshit" meeting, so I can manage expectations accordingly.

All of this can be learnt, and it doesn't blunt your coding skills. I just don't buy this "Engineering Manager or IC - choose your adventure!" myth that our industry seems to perpetuate.

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