Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't become an engineering manager

newsletter.manager.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 281 posts

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#81

Post by bigwheels »

halper wrote: post #4

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…

It's an artifact of humans being obsessed with hierarchy and pecking order.

Overall rather petty and boring.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#82

Post by solatic »

jimnotgym wrote: post #43

> It’s a bad time to move away from tech It continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory…

> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession

I don't think that you can take somebody with a finance background, take them straight out of their MBA, and drop them in an EM position. That's a bad fit. Good EMs need to come from software engineering backgrounds, mostly for the reasons you cite.

But management truly is a different profession with a different set of skills and a different set of challenges.

Even on the IC track, there's languages and frameworks that I touched early in my career (e.g. Java/Spring) and haven't touched in, I don't know, a decade, and I have not been keeping up with whatever is most recent best practice there. If I were to go into an IC role for one of those frameworks, I might as well be going into an IC role for a language I haven't learned before, ever. I expect someone who has been working with that language on a daily basis to really, really know it - having the standard library practically memorized, knowing common pitfalls, doing a lot of stuff from muscle memory, someone who you give them a PR that "looks OK" and they start reading and immediately can say "well that's just not even remotely idiomatic".

EMs are almost guaranteed to lose that touch because their day job is talking to people, not writing code. That's not to say that they couldn't go back to the IC track and start to sharpen those skills again, but EMs with FOMO who try to stay in the code are spending that time not talking to people. The lack of focus makes them bad EMs.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#83

Post by ahtihn »

alephnerd wrote: post #53
GlibMonkeyDeath wrote: post #49

The arguments: * It's a bad time to move away from tech As a manager your role isn't to be the "best technical person" anyway. You still need to understand fast-changing capabilities of course. But you are managing people now, and the required skills are different. See below. * The ladder is very competitive It's always competitive, and in my experience it was the exact opposite - there were far fewer VP-level techni…

I think you underestimate the job mobility that is lost when you transition from being an individual contributor into someone on the management track. The reality is, there are very few EM and above jobs, and job security is tough - if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE, I'd fire the EM first because I can always find another replacement or split their responsibilities across multiple individual contribut…

> if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE

When does this choice ever come up?

My experience is that most engineers are seen as interchangeable while most EMs aren't.

Only time I've seen EMs fired for economic reasons is when a larger amount of engineers were also laid off.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#85

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #60
jghn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They matter within a company for the reasons you cite. They mostly don't matter between companies however.

Why do you think that? Senior, staff, principle levels are pretty standard across the industry, even if some companies call them different things

This is definitely not true. It’s all dependent on the company size.

I work in cloud consulting (specialize in app dev).

I worked at AWS ProServe (full blue badge RSU earning employee) before working for a much smaller company. I’ve seen the leveling guidelines for both.

An L5 (mid level) at AWS had to be a subject matter expert in at least one area (development, DevOps, security, etc) and be able to lead a “workstream” of a larger project including dealing with a customer or a smaller project by themselves. That maps to a “Senior Architect” at my current company.

A senior (L6) at AWS should be able to handle larger projects with multiple workstreams and deal with more ambiguity. That maps to a staff at my current company (current position)

An L7 is usually over a practice and/or handling multiple large implementations and more involved with strategy. Imagine someone (who hypothetically - they don’t need outside consultants) was working with Netflix.

That maps to a “Senior Staff” at our company.

You might ask what about lower levels in consulting? I never work with them. The bilingual cloud architects/senior cloud architects work with them. We don’t hire anything lower than that in the US.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#86

Post by convolvatron »

Balgair wrote: post #62
halper wrote: post #4

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…

Rant: I was a systems engineer for a while there. But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades. But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess. But then trying to fi…

this is not at all restricted to your case. try 'distributed system engineer' or even 'software engineer'. for the latter, one is an engineer of software, and the other is one that engineers with software. both perfectly valid jobs. it doesn't help that the interviews for the latter adopt the questions and expectations of the former, even though they are different jobs.

its entirely possible to go through the software engineer hiring pipeline, and end up in a situation where the organization and the new employee have a fundamental disagreement about the slate of work.

somehow in the giant waterfall of money, our ability to even talk meaningfully about our work to each other got lost

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#87

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #28
halper wrote: post #4

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…

Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one. If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper tit…

Titles mean even less across organizations. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to hire you and level you based on how they ascertain the level of scope , impact and dealing with ambiguity you dealt with.

You can be a “CTO” of your little 5 person company - you might be leveled as an mid level software engineer at BigTech

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#88

Post by phendrenad2 »

People should know that you can't "just" turn down a promotion. You might be leaving management in a tough position where they were hoping to rely on you to fill a gap, and by turning it down, you're making it hard for them to be objective. They might default to seeing you as unreliable, and cut off future advancement opportunities (the ones you actually want). It's not fair, but that's how people think. This isn't a big problem when the money is free and everyone is trying to poach employees. You can just jump ship. But in this hellish economy, everyone is stuck. So take that damn promotion.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#89

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

zkmon wrote: post #19

Not quite. In most companies managers are seen as 'inner circle' people while technologists are just workers. Managers get exposed to a lot more comms, giving more visibility and get ability to act like a smart person purely because they have more emails and get into more calls than the others. They not only get more power, but also get more info.

Line level managers are the most easily replaceable and in my experience powerless people in an organization. When I was being hired as an IC in product companies before to lead major initiatives. One of my requirements was to report to either the director or CTO (startup). Even after the startup grew and they hired a EM, the CTO carved out a position for me so I wouldn’t report to an EM.

Re: Don't become an engineering manager

#90

Post by palata »

pkaler wrote: post #61
halper wrote: post #4

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…

As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to: - L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff - L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally…

> Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that.

But the big difference, I believe, is that being at the top of a ladder in one company may be completely different from being at the top in another one.

It's easy to be the CTO of a company of 2, much harder for BigTech. Even if the company of 2 has the same levels.

I have met people being very very proud of their title of CTO, and when I asked, their company had a handful of developers.

Post reply on HN