Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
charity.wtfI am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with demands for me to write PRDs and nag people who refuse to do work to do it, but without me actually having authority to make them.
I finally decided to just not sweat over it, do work that matches my pay in 2-3 days a week and spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills to whoever is willing to learn and has a good attitude about it. With focus on general skills that they can take to their next job rather than internal proprietary tech. I don't care that I am not getting paid extra for that, at least it feels good to be in office.
Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.
Another factor is that going to management to get more compensation is a given around many industries. You aren't going to get more where you are if you don't want to move into management, because you won't get more elsewhere either in the same state and they know that. They are not trying to pay you what will keep you happy, they are trying to pay you what will stop you taking your knowledge/experience elsewhere.
You just have to be aware of the market you are locking yourself into. I'm well aware I could be making more as a manager, or even if I let myself be called a “senior” which often overlaps in terms of having some responsibility for people/things in a manager-y way, but I pootle along as I am anyway because I know while I'm not exactly happy ATM I'd be less so the other way and I don't think that the extra compensation would balance that.
We may fall foul of AI in the not too distant future and end up stacking shelves for Tesco, but then again a lot of those management reports and decisions look rather automatable by the same LLMs too, if not more so…
For what is worth, I'm a fairly senior manager (a few hundred engineers) and I firmly believe and vocally point out the opposite. I'm sure the kind of self dealing you describe is not unheard of, but it's also pretty cynical to assume that as a default. If the culture in your work place has gone that far down the drain for real, maybe take some time to look for a new gig or reality check it with a manager you trust?
It's a vicious cycle. Someone needs to break the chain.
I've actually been in HR discussions telling people managers are overrated and we need to value ICs more. It's really difficult to explain to HR people that managing people isn't[1] a higher responsability job than being an expert at doing something...
[1] Of course, sometimes it is. It depends on the team size and seniority, but also depends on the expertise. I'm just saying that a manager does not have to always have a higher grade than a person on his team.
> and we need to value ICs more
Maybe start by getting rid of the silly term - "IC". What's the difference between a product, project, sales and a people manager? They all manage something.
It's people's egos and lust for power that makes this distinction.
I'm against euphemisms in general and don't think we should be changing this word either.
As I see it, an IC is anyone whose main contribution is through artifacts or other actions they perform directly, and a manager is someone whose main contribution is through coordinating the actions of others. As such, I'm absolutely ok with "project manager" and "product manager" even if people don't report to them directly.
If you have a better term, do go ahead and propose it, but let's not throw out this useful term just yet.
If we are merely IC's when it comes time to get paid, why aren't we all IC's when it comes to returning to office?
Again, the problem is the "merely". Sports stars are ICs and they're well paid.
I've only seen people get upset when others act like ICs on sports teams. "Ball hog" and the like. I don't think that's a example of one.
That's a misunderstanding of what IC means: "an employee responsible for performing specific tasks or functions within an organization without the authority to manage other employees". Keyword is authority, not leadership or teamplay.
Perhaps we need a better term, but the concept itself is fine.
The distinction is useful because people managers have some specific tasks related to HR processes. The fact that the distinction has an ego implication is the problem, not the distinction itself.
Be the change you want to see mate, don't wait for someone else to do it.
Could it be (get ready to crack some eggs as I am about to fry some conspiracy-bacon) an effort by HR/companies to promote sr engineers into managers to then give HR reasons to cull the herd if they need to?
If management didn't pay well, qualified people simply wouldn't do it or you'd be limited to people who felt emotionally compensated by getting more power over other people (which is already bad enough).
Some of us enjoy helping other people. First bit of advice I give to new or would-be managers is to learn indirect gratification. Most common failure mode for new engineering managers IMO is the struggle to feel productive given that impact is achieved chiefly indirectly.
A couple jobs ago, when I realized I was doing all of the non-trivial front-end work at about the workload of ~4 of the other engineers, I just went golfing half the time. That way I was getting paid the same but for half the time at work! And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.
> And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.
It's funny, I think I'd feel more dumb if the person beside me was crocheting half the time but still more productive than me!
One of the best parts of WFH is not having to do a bunch of performative theater.
Business likes predictability. The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. Hence, unless you are the owner/founder, your replaceability will be valued more than your performance.
> The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person.
And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too.
> Business likes predictability.
That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work. It's common in sports teams, e.g. where you sell your star player and buy 5 others hoping to get more value. At the end of the day you're lucky to even get the same value.
Counterexample: sports teams that improve when they replace their star player.
Football doesn't have great players in an absolute sense. For the last decade, the greatest player, depending on which tiresome fan you ask, had been either Ronaldo or Messi.
Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players.
My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.
> Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players.
Messi nor Ronaldo were the star player of these teams that you mention.
The fans at PSG booed Messi. Kylian Mbappe was the main star and maybe Neymar. Messi always wanted to stay at Barcelona but it didn't work out. He more played his part and wasn't trying to be the star.
Ronaldo was well past his peak even in his Juventus days. He definitely wouldn't be a star player in any top team. No, it's not the team's fault.
> My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.
I don't see this as a counter example. You assume there's some god neutrally working towards the greater good of the organization. Often there isn't. If the above, i.e. those paying the salaries like it - that's all that matters. It's a different problem if management gets their priorities, metrics or whatever wrong. This team lead is the way they are because of such incentives. They are rewarded for it.
Both Messi's and Ronaldo's last stints were underwhelming because they are well past their prime. They are in their late thirties, and they started their professional first team career at extremely young ages (15/16). It's a testament to modern medical science that they are still not retired. Most professional striker/midfield players either retire by 32/33 or drop deep, or go to US/Middle east for a good pay day that isn't very physically demanding. The other players who started playing along with them retired years ago or moved to less demanding leagues (Rooney, Fabregas, Van persie, Robben all retired years ago. Even iniesta who started years after these, is in Japan for the last few years). Ronaldo didn't help at all acting like a primadonna instead of showing age and leadership in his second stint at MU, but that is him.
Is it team tactics that had to shift or is it just that the team had to let go of good players to afford the salaries of Ronaldo or Messi?
>And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too.
When a customer presses a button to book a taxi ride, they don't care whether the underlying database query takes O(log N) or O(N^2). As long as the price is good and they get a response within 3-5 seconds, they're cool.
This works for the absolute majority of real-world projects. Technical excellence has very little impact on the revenue, compared to other factors (product/market fit), so people making business decisions don't care about it.
>That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work.
Business is always a gamble. You don't know how the market will take your product before you launch it. You don't know what the competitors will do, how the sentiment will change, let alone global events like the COVID money printing followed by an interest rate squeeze. It's like you are trying to navigate a ship in a storm, and the mechanic keeps telling you how he can shove coal 5x faster than others and hence needs to be paid more. Except, you never need it that fast, and need to have 2 onboard anyway, in case one gets sick.
> As long as the price is good and they get a response within 3-5 seconds, they're cool.
You're so amazing aren't you. You even know precisely what the customer wants. Are you saying that if I offered a service with a 2 second response they're not going to take it? Nah they only want 3-5 seconds!?
> Technical excellence has very little impact on the revenue, compared to other factors (product/market fit), so people making business decisions don't care about it.
If you don't care about it how do you know it doesn't impact? If you don't care you don't know the details. So problem is, maybe if you cared it'd make a difference?
Also what does this have to do with technical excellence or whatever you're referring to? The whole point was the 1 person that could do a job better than potentially 5. It is about delivering business value.
> Business is always a gamble.
And? It was the poster above that said business preferred predictability and I responded to that. You're now taking it out of context and trying to derive other meaning from it.
So is it predictability or a gamble?
> It's like you are trying to navigate a ship in a storm, and the mechanic keeps telling you how he can shove coal 5x faster than others and hence needs to be paid more. Except, you never need it that fast, and need to have 2 onboard anyway, in case one gets sick.
Again we're back to assumptions. How do you know this mechanic that shoves 5x faster will get sick? Maybe they never get sick? So it'll be better than hiring 2 that might get sick. Again, that was the original argument. If you change it - then whatever. You might as well say those 2 you have onboard ALWAYS get sick so I still prefer the 1 that can shove coal faster.
It would be true if leaving probability were uncorrelated but in reality they are correlated so it's not such a big improvement than people usually expect.
I grew up reading all kinds of articles and books about how engineering itself is a career track and I believed it. However, when I looked at the great engineers, it seems they eventually turned into executives. Jeff Dean, for instance, is one the greatest engineers. He has deep technical skills. He is versatile, as we can see that he made key contributions in storages, distributed systems, and machine learning. Yet his end game? SVP of Google. And how many people can really be Jeff Dean?
I suspect the reason for this is that even great engineers don't scale indefinitely: At some point, if you want to increase output, you have to delegate some part of your work. To increase output even further, you have to delegate even more. That also doesn't scale indefinitely, so you have to start delegating the delegating. And before you know it, you're an SVP and not really directly doing any technical work anymore.
In Amazon terms, great engineers “are right a lot”. That is key in SVP type roles. An SVP isn’t typically managing ICs, they have a very different role than the manager role described in Charity’s article.
LinkedIn says Jeff is currently Chief Scientist, an IC role. And Google famously added an extra rung to its IC ladder just to make room for him.
Jeff has reports that means he's a manager.
Whatever his title, he runs Google Brain.
Ultimately even Jeff Dean is not so great that 1000 Google engineers doing what he tells them to isn't even more impactful
Some say they work for money alone and measure it in bills paid, in which case they can promote to management position, because the only difference they see is salary.
> there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly.
You’ve now undoubtedly made your life and that of those around you worse basically on the basis that you need to be proven wrong about being a “5x engineer”.
Engineers hate the hand-wavey nature of labour markets almost as much as they hate any attempts to remotely objectively quantify their performance.
The everybody-compromises happy medium is defined career tracks with largely qualitative and certainly subjective measures of actual responsibility. Nowhere in that are you going to get the reassurance that you’re after: that you’re worth 5 other engineers, or whatever. That’s just not how things work, even in IC roles. The fact that you pose this as a means of measurement in my eyes speaks volumes as to where you’d land on this imagined scale.
Honestly 99% of professions out there wouldn’t get away with being as entitled as software engineers are. Which, yes, market forces and all that. But let’s not pretend that there are many if any unreasonable aspects of a typical dev job.
For me there was a fork in the round around age 30 when I was pushed to take on managerial tasks/roles. This was at a company in traditional industry with basically no technical ladder, developers were line-work and the only way to climb was management. I stuck through it as an IC and at 45 I’m still not in management. I enjoy being an IC and hope to be for another 20 or 25 years. My only fear is that I have grown stuck in the company because seeking a developer job at 45 or 50 is probably subject to ageism more than a program/product manager job would.
> met with demands for me to write PRDs
> spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills
Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :)
But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.
It doesn't look like a mismatch to me. Looks like L6+ engineering work.
I cannot believe I'm not the only one! Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...
You're far from the only!
I love programming and I'm more than happy to work with juniors and solve junior tasks. I feel like this industry puts so much pressure on people to be an engineer or an architect or something more than a person who writes a little script to fix something and moves on. Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
> Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
I feel this pressure a lot b/c of big-tech promo culture.
> Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
To have a rough idea on how to scale it, should it take off, is not a bad thing. To do all the work, before it actually takes off, is.
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.
It's an issue of incentives, and sadly my experience is it's often not the immediate management that's the problem, it's structural issues with the company that low-level managers have little if any say in.
Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn't put their money where their mouth is. Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored with a thank-you. Hell more than once I've been forced to spend an entire day in a conference room with all the other relevant devs to do a "Root Cause Analysis" of a given recent crisis, and we took it seriously each time and came up with genuine solutions. But said solutions required more hardware, more maintenance, more stuff that no one wanted to budget for.
You work in that environment long enough, you learn to clock in and clock out. If you allow yourself to give a shit you'll just be constantly tearing your hair out. Those of us with some objective sense of professionalism usually evolve into the functional elites you mention, but I completely understand those who go the other way.
Sociopaths, the clueless and losers. This great essay analyzing The Office argues that in a modern business context you're one of the three. [1]
Those "functional elites" you mentioned? Usually they're working 20-50% more for 0-25% percent more pay. They're called the clueless because they've been conned into working more for less, usually under some clever guise like company being family or company values or the promise of a promotion that's always a cycle or two away. The essay then goes on to argue that losers are really just the clueless once they "get it." Losers understand the treadmill and lean into the tedium always aiming to save their time by playing dumb as needed. Sociopaths break out of the cycle by operating only with concern for power and switching up how they talk to folks based on whether they're clueless, losers or fellow sociopaths.
Sociopaths speak in powertalk -- an exchange of information on clear terms. It's usually veiled because the clueless and losers listen in and it makes them feel uncomfortable. If it weren't veiled it would probably sound like lawyer-jargon with lots of plausible deniability, conditions, arguing and explicit shared definitions.
Losers and clueless speak in their own languages based on who they're talking with. It's basically just lots of trying to feel okay... except for when it comes to losers speaking with sociopaths. There the only communication is straight talk, which is basically just direct requests of a master-slave dynamic (i.e. "do this"). The essay is well worth the read!
1. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
Not every place in life is a place of struggle and fight. Some people actually enjoy their work. This just sounds like "class struggle" and "proletariat and bourgeoisie" under different names. Also thinking of your colleagues and people as "elites", "losers" and the "clueless" gives me some understanding to the state of mind of who writes this.
To keep it lighter, in the companies I've worked in the architypes of people were more like:
- The "anger problem that shouts every once in a while" guy
- The "chronic nervous person that is paralyzed by impostor syndrome"
- The "i find more problems than solutions" guy
- The "i'm here to socialize, make friends, maybe get married"
- The "i gave up 10 years ago and just want my paycheck"
- The "i'm a kid learning everything I can and am just excited to be here"
- The "i'm working on my true passion outside of work while hanging out here with you guys" etc etc
People have their own lives, not everything is just a power play of losers and elites.
I'll be honest, even if the world was exactly as you described, which it isn't, I'd choose to not see it that way so that my life wouldn't be such a bleak existance. Rather be a naive happy fool than enlightned and depressed.
The article uses struggly words like sociopaths and losers, but defines them very differently from common use, often the 'losers' have the most fulfilling and rounded lives, i.e. true winners
- The "chronic nervous person that is paralyzed by impostor syndrome" - clueless
- The "i find more problems than solutions" guy - clueless
- The "i'm here to socialize, make friends, maybe get married" - loser
- The "i gave up 10 years ago and just want my paycheck" - loser
- The "i'm working on my true passion outside of work while hanging out here with you guys" etc etc - loser
It's a rough model of org interactions with poorly named categories.
>The article uses struggly words like sociopaths and losers, but defines them very differently from common use, often the 'losers' have the most fulfilling and rounded lives, i.e. true winners
They're "losers" from the point of view of capitalism and corporate hierarchy. If you're not committing your life to ruthlessly climb the ladder to grasp at wealth and power by any means and you don't buy into the game or its rules, you're basically a defective cog, a useless part of the machine.
If you're unaware that success is a rigged lottery designed to find and promote sociopaths and actually believe that reward comes with hard work, determination and passion, you're clueless. A mark. A rube. If you're smart enough, with enough abuse you'll eventually wake up and become a loser.
> They're "losers" from the point of view of capitalism and corporate hierarchy. If you're not committing your life to ruthlessly climb the ladder to grasp at wealth and power by any means and you don't buy into the game or its rules, you're basically a defective cog, a useless part of the machine.
You have too narrow a definition of capitalism and of corporate hierarchy. What you describe is one outworking of them, but not the outworking.
It's BY FAR the most common outworking. Most people won't be lucky enough to find a job that doesn't work that way.
Can you cite where you know this from?
This is pervasive across US corporate culture and present in 4/4 different sectors I have been employed.
Based off your statement in another thread "I've never really been to the US, other than a couple of brief work trips" - I can understand your view, but it is indeed the most common paradigm. Will happily review your sources that refute my experience.
Personal experience and the experience of the developers that I've met.
yes.
> Sociopaths break out of the cycle by operating only with concern for power
There are other ways to break out of the cycle. Keep looking.
> There are other ways to break out of the cycle. Keep looking.
What are these ways (besides founding a startup or something similar)?
Working for oneself is how we're meant to work, not to be a cog in someone else's machine. It is sad that for the past ~100 years it has become the norm and we idolize entrepreneurs, as if they are mythical creatures.
Many people lack the business skills, resources, or temperament for starting their own business. So this is certainly an option but not a panacea.
Not every business has to become a billion dollar startup. A fishmonger is more of an entrepreneur than any FAANG employee.
I hard disagree here. That's what capitalism wants us to evolve into: individual enterprises. But no, there's nothing inherent in the universe or human nature that determines individualism as the true way of working.
You don't have to go far to see people contributing to bigger causes that are not owned by someone else. Open source is a great example of this.
The main reason people idolize entrepreneurs is because they symbolize capitalism's perfect individual. There's a reason society today wants everyone to be an "entrepreneur", but it's not some higher meaning. It's just capitalism.
> The main reason people idolize entrepreneurs is because they symbolize capitalism's perfect individual
That's some deep revisionism right there. Humans have worked for themselves, for no master, since before we became Homo Sapiens.
The big societal achievement of capitalism is killing any entrepreneurial spirit and telling you you need to go to a good school and then find a good employer that takes care of all of your needs.
> Humans have worked for themselves, for no master, since before we became Homo Sapiens.
Sure, humans worked for themselves, but that was not what ultimately got us here. Humans only survived and thrived by working together. Homo Sapiens won the evolution race because they managed to grow tribes more than others, not because of more individualism compared to other species.
I get that working alone is an absolute joy and for many tasks that's the most efficient way of doing something (I certainly prefer that for programming). But that's not true for every task or the way it was "meant" to be, like I refuted in the first place.
> The big societal achievement of capitalism is killing any entrepreneurial spirit and telling you you need to go to a good school and then find a good employer that takes care of all of your needs.
That's one aspect of it. But capitalism is inherently paradoxical and also would LOVE to not think of humans as... humans. If everyone was an enterprise they can profit a lot more. It's what we see today with the gig economy. A race to the bottom where everyone is their "own employer" with zero benefits, all the risks and easily replaceable. It's a wet dream for pretty much every capitalist. How many startups we have/had describing themselves as "Uber for X"?
Another aspect is that fostering entrepreneurial spirit is actually profitable. Whoever already has capital will pretty much always win, so if a naive person wants to bet all of their savings in a business that fails, that capital is transferred to the existing capitalists. It's a win for them. If they somehow succeed, the most likely outcome is that at some point this enterprise will be acquired by a larger company. It's a win/win for them.
IDK if we live in very different bubbles (it certainly seems like it) but I see an extreme amount of push from society towards entrepreneurship, not against it. It's simply a very good way to funnel money from the bottom to the top.
> It's an issue of incentives
Please do not just oversimplfy a challenging problem into just "incentives".
Some people lack resilience, and they will collapse under the pressures of professional and personal life. Some people lack ambition and drive, they don't want to exceed their level of productivity no matter what you do.
It's not just a matter of incentives. If you offer the right incentives and opportunites to the wrong people, you will not get results.
The right approach here is to avoid hiring these peoples (not a perfect science). In absence of that, provide feedback expetations to provide a resaonable opportuntiy to change their behavior, then move them to other projects or terminate them.
And there are organization where non of this is possible - like government and many corporate IT.
> Some people lack resilience, and they will collapse under the pressures of professional and personal life. Some people lack ambition and drive, they don't want to exceed their level of productivity no matter what you do.
Few people don't want to improve their productivity. Improving your productivity makes you more valuable. But plenty of people don't want to work harder. There is of course a difference!
I deal poorly with stress, and am thankful I have reached a point in my career where I can earn pretty good money in positions where I'm not pushing myself too hard.
I enjoy learning of course, and do want to get better. But that's in balance with the demands of family and the happiness and fulfillment I find in other pursuits.
I have been promoted reasonably quickly over the past 5 years without playing political games. My productivity has improved through experience, and it seems like that got recognised through promotion. But I guess it's possible I got lucky with managers making bad decisions in my favour.
I don't know if you'd want to hire me. I'm not sure I'd want to work for you. Do you find success with your approach compared to peers with a more empathetic approach to management?
>If you offer the right incentives and opportunites to the wrong people,
Then you didn't offer the right incentives and opportunities. GP simplified it correctly.
Most people aren't lazy or malicious in the face of good rewards, they just realize there's no point working 5x for 1.1x the income after putting in 3x the effort fighting for that 10% raise. If you can't filter them out through hiring practices or termination, you're doing something wrong or you're experiencing the downside of supply/demand.
The only non-trivial thing here is the owners pushing the downside of that market back onto the managers to magically solve, because we all know saying "that's not possible" is going to make you the target of 'disciplinary actions' instead. Welcome to the catch-22 that is management, enjoy your stay.
>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's due to completely backwards incentives. Most people don't give a fuck because they aren't rewarded properly. If I do an excellent job and complete whatever task I'm given well ahead of schedule the only reward I get is more work. Even if I sandbag a bit and do an excellent job and complete on time, often the reward for being "better" is more responsibility or more difficult tasks (without compensation). Some folks want that, many do not. Dollars to doughnuts if your team members know that quality work on schedule will be actually rewarded then you'll find more of those members capable of producing that quality of work.
Honestly, this sounds to me a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want people to care about things, you have to listen to what they care about... I can influence some of what people care about as a manager, but it's long-term steering a spaceship a few degrees at a time.
I think too many people see managing a team as "managing the people to do good work." When, in fact, managing is much more about managing the right projects/opportunities into your team's scope. I very rarely tell people what to do, because ultimately, I don't have any power to change what they do. And they'll respect me, and the project, more if they think they're making the decision instead of me.
> If you want people to care about things, you have to listen to what they care about
Ultimately we are all paid to solve the problems the business needs solved, even if the solution is boring and not 'exciting' or 'cutting edge' tech (which is often). The best people finds excitement and challenge in almost any work and are self-motivated. Sure, as a manager you should try your very best to shield the team from crap work and have a healthy balance, understand their interests and find opportunities that match (even outside your team), but ultimately also work is work and is not always, or even often, possible to have super exciting bleeding edge work that fits everyone's interests. Even harder when people have a very narrow set of interests or they don't even know, they're picky, etc.
> I very rarely tell people what to do, because ultimately, I don't have any power to change what they do.
Are you a manager? you very much should be able to change what they do if you are. If project x comes along with twice the value of the current project someone is working on, you very much should be able to preempt what someone is working on. It's not ideal and we all try to avoid project churn, but it happens and needs to be handled effectively by the manager.
> And they'll respect me, and the project, more if they think they're making the decision instead of me.
I mean, delegation and ownership are fine as a mechanism to boost engagement and career growth, but you can't delegate everything (otherwise what are you doing again?). Also, what's up with the "if they think" wording here. Are they making the decision or not, are you tricking them into thinking they're making the decision?
> Ultimately we are all paid to solve the problems the business needs solved, even if the solution is boring and not 'exciting' or 'cutting edge' tech (which is often). The best people finds excitement and challenge in almost any work and are self-motivated.
I think the best managers are able to find relevant challenges/projects for their reports interests. Everything you're saying says to me, that you depend on in "good employees" is broadly something I see as being an option in "all employees". And I see it as a failing of me, as a manager, if I can't bridge that gap for all of my reports.
> Are you a manager? you very much should be able to change what they do if you are. If project x comes along with twice the value of the current project someone is working on, you very much should be able to preempt what someone is working on.
Yes, I am a manager. I can absolutely try and sell people on a new project. I can't make them work on it. When I was an IC, I ultimately worked on what I thought was most important, and would slowly move to projects that people asked me to work on, (but I didn't want to work on). I was an effective IC, so people couldn't complain. Don't see any reason that wouldn't hold true for the ICs that I work with, now that I'm a manager.
> I mean, delegation and ownership are fine as a mechanism to boost engagement and career growth, but you can't delegate everything (otherwise what are you doing again?). Also, what's up with the "if they think" wording here. Are they making the decision or not, are you tricking them into thinking they're making the decision?
Did you read the article? At least in engineering, if you think you're going to make the decisions just because "you're the manager", then I think you're managing backwards. If I need to make a decision, I'm in charge of convincing people it's the right decision. But I also have to listen to those people when they tell me their concerns, and change course if their concerns are reasonable.
It sounds to me, if you're a manager, that you're only an effective manager for people who are already succesful. I think the thing that makes someone a good manager, is that they can make anyone effective. Everyone can grow and flourish under you.
> if you think you're going to make the decisions just because "you're the manager", then I think you're managing backwards.
You're making it sound black and white when is not. You do make some decisions. Judgement is required around what decisions can be made by you (+ provide reasoning) and which ones require building consensus or just be delegated.
> I think the thing that makes someone a good manager, is that they can make anyone effective. Everyone can grow and flourish under you.
If that were true good managers never would PIP or let go anyone, and that's just not true. The opposite is true. If you think everyone can flourish and never let go poor performers you're the one doing a disservice to your team.
> Ultimately we are all paid to solve the problems the business needs solved, even if the solution is boring and not 'exciting' or 'cutting edge' tech (which is often).
Sadly, we're not. And that's the gist of the problem.
We're paid to do whoever's in power wants us to do and it might not solve any business need. Often some manager or otherwise decides to implement something that might not even be what customers want. It's not about the challenge or anything like that. A lot of people are frustrated at implementing things that make no sense.
> If project x comes along with twice the value of the current project someone is working on, you very much should be able to preempt what someone is working on
Only if think you control your destiny. Your manager above may have their own direction or ideals.
> Ultimately we are all paid to solve the problems the business needs solved
There's usually leeway in this: the business has many needs and they get prioritized depending mostly on perception (project impact projections are usually fuzzy with no concrete evidence to back them up)
A manager can be good at pitching interesting/rewarding problems to solve, and get the higher ups' buyin to prioritize them over more boring asinine work.
I've found that culture is king in terms of governing what's shipped. From day 1 new hires are looking at what their peers are doing, and more importantly what's being tolerated by the manager and the rest of the team.
As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly. I point out opportunities for improvement, and more importantly I call out excellent solutions. The excellence can be in the form of elegance or just hard graft finding a bug. It's a small action that's additive and doesn't interrupt work. But it does wonders at setting the tone.
One thing I've found very hard indeed is if the team you manage is surrounded by peers that "don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality". However, if you reinforce your culture of excellence it becomes resilient to it ... and then the tricky thing becomes avoiding arrogance within the team.
>As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly.
If you did this in an environment with undercapacity, with the exception of being a very well respected or lead dev, I'd eventually call you out for being a snake trying to set the tone of development with nothing better to do. I had a colleague do this and its obnoxious. Especially because
>reinforce your culture of excellence
is almost entirely subjective.
I can see how that'd be weird for everyone to do it (unless they're themselves reviewing the PR). But in this context I am the engineering manager so it's my job to have oversight - so maybe that helps in my team?
One other bit that's probably worth mentioning is that I'm quick to point out when I've learnt something new from the PR in question. I guess I bundle that with "call out excellent solutions" - but it's a slightly different thing.
> is almost entirely subjective.
Of course. But even the regular discussion of what amounts to excellence helps move teams in that direction. What we're trying to get away from is "don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality" which exists in bucket-loads in giant corporations and I want my teams to have no part of it.
> 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.
Well they are paid for the hours required. That's the problem (as some commenters have already mentioned).
It's not just the pay. It is often unfair. It might not be you but I've seen plenty of managers reward those that do a lot less compared to others. When people start to experience these things, how. do you expect them to care?
Making software is a bit special in that you can't really make use of people like that. In e.g. a supermarket you can.
That is exactly the problem. Business assumes highly technical people are fungible. They are not. There are very few highly competent people on the market. Not enough to cover realistic requirements for business. So they hire anyone who makes duck noises assuming they are ducks.
> So they hire anyone who makes duck noises assuming they are ducks.
Isn't it more accurate to say they hire anybody making duck noises assuming they are wolves? Technical interviews in no way identify the skills developers are going to use in their daily work.
Finding technically competent people is easy. Finding people who continue to give a fuck the moment their trial period is over is difficult.
> Finding technically competent people is easy.
This is not what I've been told by many, many hiring managers over the past few years.
> Finding people who continue to give a fuck the moment their trial period is over is difficult.
Well... yeah? I've been saying for years now that if passion is a hard requirement to getting a job, then you're begging your applicants to lie to you.
> Well... yeah? I've been saying for years now that if passion is a hard requirement to getting a job, then you're begging your applicants to lie to you.
Caring about the work is not passion. Most of the time work involves politics, paperwork and dealing with all sorts of things that people don't like. I doubt anyone is passionate about this type of thing.
It's really easy. The problem they have is finding technically competent people in the desired budget.
Disagree. Openly offer a million dollars a year and the extra competent people you get will be buried under a neigh uncountable number of additional pretenders. So no matter what you pay it's never easy.
AND then the HR sociopaths filter out anyone not neurotypical who wouldn't have any issues doing the job, but is otherwise weird.
The fact that they accept most of the pretenders because they do a better job of acting normal is the worst part, because there are many more. dropping half the qualified isn't many people, letting half the pretenders through is a large number.
It's demotivating when you know you're doing 80% of the work, but getting paid the same as the other 5 people on the team. When a company finds a great dev, they seldom have the sense to pay that person enough to make them feel motivated to outperform their colleagues.
Used to be "You can pay people to show up but you can't pay people to care" now it's more "You can pay people... they might show up"
Of course you can. Managing people mean having to deal with people of various skill levels and with different things motivating them. You have to find way to make it work and that means finding way to get something out of people who are not intrinsically motivated. No one said it was easy.
Eh, can, sure. Should, meh.
That's kind of why I want to be a manager. As a developer I'm tired of having to work with code written from people who don't give a fuck.
At least as a manager, it wouldn't be my direct problem. If the developers want to crunch to fix last minute issues because they didn't do it right the first time then that's their decision; but I don't want to be part of it anymore.
15) Meetings.
I look at my director and senior directors schedule in Outlook. It is 6 to 10 hours of meetings per day. They often start at 6am and might go until midnight because the company is worldwide. Meetings with people in India, China, Singapore, Israel, Europe, east and west coast US.
I get annoyed if I have more than 2 hours of a meetings a day. I get really annoyed when they interfere with my personal life outside of normal work hours.
I may be working from home at 6am or 11pm mostly to monitor jobs and check results. But I don't want to have a meeting at those times.
Unless I am paid by the hour, there's nothing making me do more than 8 hours per day.
Even if I am paid hourly (I am) ... it's rare.
I am not sure what kind of people do that, but if it's managers, then EM/Lead is as far down that path I want to go.
While I think people who organize these meetings might have a benefit of being able to keep track of everyone, I'm usually surprised how much dead time there is when people discuss what they're working on and there are only 2 or 3 people who are involved in the discussion while 20 or so other people are on the clock doing nothing. The manager might reply that everyone should know and care about everything happening but this is never the case.
Companies will say look at all the money we're saving by by hiring people in India/China/whereever meanwhile the managers are stuck taking calls at all hours of the day. The saving are really enabled by the manager working these extra hours to support international teams.
Those managers sound like pushovers.
The managers are the ones scheduling the meetings.
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...
This comment reads like something #6 from the OP would say.
I think it's actually agreeing with a lot of points from #11 and #16. Obviously this is an article about why you shouldn't be a manager, so it doesn't have any reasons why you should be a manager or why management is important. They alude to the fact that someone has to do performance reviews, fire people, and resolve conflicts.
The less edgy and more academic version of this is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y.
The managers I've most worked with are mostly concerned with what will be built (and that is discussed with other managers as well as other stakeholders external to the team), and don't care that much about internal team dynamics. They trust the team to have enough professionalism between its members to do the work as needed, self-organise etc.
I'm an experienced engineer that's been a manager for three years. I'm now returning to an engineering role.
Having been a manager and having learned what it means to scale your ability to have impact and to land impact purely through leveraging others, I feel far more equipped to be the kind of engineer that I would like to manage.
More than that, one of the best experiences I've had as a manager is to be able to dissuade myself of many of the misconceptions and stereotypes that are rife in this thread.
I'd strongly advise non-managers in the thread to read Charity's other blog posts such as the Engineer/Manager Pendulum too.
I made the move to full-time management after about 16 years as a hands-on Engineer & tech lead. As a high-level Engineer, I was very much into mentorship, influence, architecture, and process, so it felt natural to go into management. After a few years, I moved back to being an IC because it was very hard to not "control my own destiny" through hands-on contributions.
As it turns out, going back to being hands-on made me realize that I'd kinda been-there, done that in terms of the things I wanted to get done myself. I really missed a) playing an integral role in the career growth of others and b) the strategic level thinking of being an upper-level manager, so I went back to full-time management. There are times where I still think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but then I have those moments where someone on my team or in my org will thank me for supporting them or how that X that I've done has reduced the hassle of their day.
Being a manager happens organically to some of us because the challenge of getting a system of people to work is an organic next step from getting a system of circuits to work. People create such interesting, unique, and unpredictable problems compared to systems that have become quite predictable after a number of years of experience. Really nailing a people problem gives me that same high a successful compile used to.
(Context: Northern Europe)
Switching jobs is quite hard as an (engineering) manager, at least if you're a bit introverted like me. Often you depend on the number of people who trust you from their experience working with you that have switched companies and have come into a trusted position there.
My career:
ages 20-30: Individual contributor.
ages 30-45: (Engineering) manager, running product development teams of varying sizes (up to about 50 people), being all over the architecture/system design. Not really coding in a focused way.
ages 45-now: Individual contributor, coding most of the time.
I was really concerned I wouldn't be able to keep the interest in actual coding all day long when I went back to that, but lo and behold, I'm actually finding it more fun and rewarding than the management roles. Stress is down too.
You too can recover from being a manager :).
thinking about making a move towards management, for a similar reason: I really enjoy programming, but after slinging code for 8 hours at work, I can't justify working on my hobby projects when I come home anymore...
hoping that by using more of my "soft skills" and thinking about architecture at work, I'll be able to come home and work something like a solitaire solver without feeling like it's "non-productive"
I think over the years it's healthy to switch back and forth between management and IC, and sometimes inbetween as a tech-lead manager.
Being recently hands on with the technology helps coach and assess reports and means you know the real situation of the software.
Being a manager, if you carve out enough space, lets you make a highly productive, happy, successful team, and sometimes you might be the best person to do that.
I think I'd find only doing one forever more a bit tiring!
Super funny, I went through the same swing.
I was able to eventually cool off on technical burn out as a manager and went back to working on some personal projects. Eventually though, sitting in meetings all day for 12+ months had the same mental effect and I lost motivation and burn out increased. I'm back as an IC now and balancing my time better.
I think the better solution may be to find a way to pace yourself at work so you aren't slinging code for 8 hours. It's unlikely many of your coworkers are doing the same. I think it's important to find a sustainable pace at work and to just say no to the rest. Hopefully your company supports that.
It will depend lots on the product/project. In my case the product we built went gangbusters for a decade. I ended up abusing/building Lego kits as form of mindless therapeutics while watching very-easy-to-digest sitcoms to wind down. I have quite the collection now.
Most products/projects aren't like that that though - but perhaps the pressure is still there?
Funny, I thought the same before switching to a product role. Reality is, it's a lot more demanding than my previous engineering role and I do a lot less private coding than before.
I don’t know about the part where Charity mentions it’s really really easy to get an Eng job than a manager one. As someone who got laid off recently, it sure as heck doesn’t feel that way.
And the skills not being transferrable? How is being good in a particular field of tech _more_ transferable than management skills, which is arguably needed everywhere be it tech or not.
Finally the credit/blame - managers and people above them get paid much more than a lowly engineer. Sometimes you get blamed and then paid handsomely, lol.
The hard conversations and emotional drain is true though. But generally, if you love writing code and interfacing with people equally, it’s hard not to be drawn to the appeal of the management position.
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.
I hate this comment because it describes my workplace to a T. It's scary how accurate it is.
So many fragile egos in high authority positions who can't admit they made a terrible decision 3 years ago and are still in denial and doubling down on it.
shudders
very accurate. I would humbly add:
* handling the sheer amount of times that somebody says something is going to happen and then the complete opposite happens, because they lied/they didn't have information/they were projecting their desire/they are out of touch with reality
I hate this because it’s true and i have seen this multiple times.
>How is being good in a particular field of tech _more_ transferable than management skills, which is arguably needed everywhere be it tech or not.
Managers are viewed the same way engineers are when it comes to skill transfer, in that their "expertise" is limited to the field. Which is why it's rare to find managers who made leaps that way across fields, as they always get overlooked in favor of someone who's either already in the field or is ok with switching from a technical role into a managerial one.
I did not know that, but should have expected it.
>As someone who got laid off recently, it sure as heck doesn’t feel that way.
Managers are not having any easier of a time finding jobs right now.
Anecdata, but I've found it much easier to replace managers compared with engineers.
Measured qualitatively in terms of 6 months performance
The single fastest hire my department did recently was for an EM position. Took something like under two weeks from opening the position to signed offer. No one had ever seen anything like it before.
I have found that hiring engineers often is done with strict objective criteria: do they know the language and tools well and can demonstrate that live in front of a bunch of peers. Also they are measured on subjective "does everyone on the team like then enough to go out for a beer with them?" I've seen Sr. engineer positions stay open for years with 50+ candidates interviewed.
Hiring managers tends to be done with subjective criteria like "did the CTO get a good vibe from them in a 15min call?" I've seen engineering managers hired by just being the first friendly person through the door.
That said, I've met so many former engineering managers who just can't find work and now haven't written code in years. There's a lot of competition for a few jobs, and no real way to distinguish yourself. They are a very sad lot, and the biggest reason I left the management track to become an IC again. After talking with the 30th sad former manager who can't write an if statement I saw the writing on the wall and got back into engineering.
Are they any good? Perhaps they knew somebody in the company already, which made it easier to get them into the role.
It also might be an easier time to hire right now.
> he mentions
Charity is not a man!
My apologies, an implicit bias is showing. Updated!
To me there are 2 main reasons:
1) ownership - the manager does not really own the way the team works, in most cases it's just applying processes defined somewhere else (career progression, expectations, OKRs, sdlc, internal processes and the way the team works)
2) the eternal doubt - managing teams and people is not a science (that's why there are thousands of books claiming they have found the formula) and people are always different (different motivators, interests, personalities), and usually managers don't get proper training, and if they do it's more about facilitating discussions and giving feedback than anything else. This creates a lot of uncertainty over the actions that a manager take as the results, often, arrive later in time than, let's say, building a feature.
And the reality is that it's a complete different job than being an IC and most people don't realize this until they are deep into it.
ps to people talking about meetings, the reality is that this depends a lot on company culture and organization...in general the more the meetings the worse the culture (because it means that there aren't really good processes to share status updates and people don't take advantage of async communication as much as they should, but still want to be on top of everything so there isn't really much delegation and trust).
> Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird.
Software is a new industry, we're only just starting to get it right, and put behind us a litany of failed projects and methodologies. Every decision in a software company has a technical aspect. I personally am absolutely over non-technical managers and the aberrant strategies and directions they set out on. In my jaundiced view, any software company not led by developers is just waiting to be blown out of the water.
But don't let that detract from an intelligent, heart-felt and thought-provoking article :-)
> > Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird.
I don't see the problem here either. Sounds like somebody overheard that comment and had no real answer hence "they're a shitbird".
I want to take instruction from managers who have literally done the thing they're asking for.
There is a reason vast majority of football coaches/managers are former players I don't see why that should be different from software -- even those managers who didn't play professional football often have a pro background in another team sport.
> There is a reason vast majority of football coaches/managers are former players
The reason there is nepotism. It’s insanely difficult for anyone without preexisting connections to get any sort of coaching opportunity. I definitely think ex players make worse coaches, generally speaking. They just have an almost insurmountable leg up.
I do think eng managers should be technical, though. Not because I think you need to have done a job to manage it, but because they are frequently asked to make what amount to being technical decisions.
The thing that makes best managers IMO is the lack of ambition to be leaders. They understand their role as helping engineers do their job and grow and do that well. Whether you need technical expertise for that is an open question. In my career I've seen bad managers both with and without technical background, while good managers all had some experience as engineers - but my sample size is quite small.
Personally, I don't so much want to be a manager as I want to get away from the BS of being an individual contributor.
I'm tired of having my warnings about things like tech debt and code quality ignored; only to be expected to fix everything and maintain deadlines when everything falls apart.
I'm tired of being compared to engineers who get things done quicker because they cut corners and build up tech debt.
I'm tired of caring about my craft when managers just want people who churn out slop.
The fact that management doesn't directly do the work is definitely a problem. They're ultimately recycling other people's opinions to evaluate performance, perpetually out of the loop, yet they still have to be the bad guy if a project is behind schedule or there are performance problems. They are also in trouble when it comes to actually helping people finish problems: aside from buying licenses or equipment, all they can do is say, "go ask this person".
This view takes for granted the effort required to figure out who should do what and when.
Some more:
* The politics and alliance building required to get anything done is both absurd and exhausting.
* You get it from both sides: leadership is pissed off because of X, individual contributors are pissed off because of Y. In both cases they are pissed off at you, or at least pissed off at something and using you as a pin cushion.
* You have to pretend to care about things. A good individual contributor can get away with an attitude of "I'll work on whatever you want me to work on, but this is just a job to me", whereas a manager is expected to be a loyal and excited booster of whatever stupid shit the company is up to.
* Generally I worked harder as a manager than as an IC, and the work was more stressful. The pay bump was not as significant as the stress bump. I've also worked at places (like my current job) where ICs make more than PMs. I am an IC here, and have no idea why anyone would ever take a PM job here. Sure enough, we can't keep them around.
* Do you like to consider all options and really think through a decision before you make it? Well, get used to being asked for definitive, snap judgments all day, every day.
Reason number 1: I don't want to manage stuff. It's not my forte. I want your hardest problems and devise technical solutions for it. I want to write code.
I don't to manage a bunch of developers. Or stakeholders, annoying everybody every day for an update.
Manager: more stress, and roughly the same pay.
I just did the move back from management to ic and boy does that resonate with me.
I agree with every single reason.
There are some that might push you to be an manager though, and I've had some fun time with that in the past. The two main ones to me are
1. The technical side of managing, things like how do you organize work for the best, process, etc.
2. Helping people grow - which you can have as an IC but is your main goal as manager. That system of taking a step back when someone asks a question, and figure if it's a problem of skill or clarity.
Both of these cannot be done when most of your energy is sunk into useless bureaucracy, as is often the case in large companies.
Management is about having authority. That is, you're a vector: you must defend the company's values (which you may disagree with) in front of your team (which may disagree with them too).
So you'd better be very aligned on those values to be happy in the job.
(for example, when I was a manager, my manager's goal was to "show the rest of the company we can make websites much faster", which meant putting pressure on everyone. I disagreed with that, making things faster just to "show it can be done" at a very high human price, didn't look like a good idea. So I suffered.)
Defending the company's goals is not necessarily an adversarial thing. Many teams have a very local observable area, and giving them context for the company's decisions and facilitating their alignment to these decisions, if well done, is enough. Not every company has a sketchy business model or anti-social ethics (hello Google), so in many companies, alignment issues are not quintessential, and solving them can be done pacifically.
In other words, sure, management is about authority, but there are many things from which authority can be derived: the authority of a respected teacher is very different from the authority of a coercitive cop.
Also, from a sociologic perspective, values are an outcome. If someone has to defend "the company's values", that means they are wishes, not values.
That sounds like a terrible attitude. Management is about providing value to the company, and usually the best way to do that is by shielding your team from the worst of what's coming down by being an advocate for your team and what they do, and communicating the real situation as well as possible. You work with adults, if they know what they are doing and why they will prioritize well
I think I was overwhelmed with pressure. Actually, the team was also overwhelmed (a few people went away).
In the beginning of the project, I tried reorganize things, etc. And it went well for a month then pressure from the customer mounted again. And although I explained that things would be more expensive than planned, nobody wanted to listen. And ultimately, nobody stepped up to say "it won't work as expected", all the eyeballs were looking at me to say it. Which was difficult for me.
I should have realized that my boss was wrong and that I had to reach for help to someone else. I think I was too inexperienced to understand that soon enough.
I work in a small company, but I've found that when I'm uncomfortable supporting one of the companies values to my direct reports that is powerful fuel to push the c-suite to change things. Of course, it took a lot of building trust to get there, and it is important to have some core of truly shared values, but I've found that work has payed off.
Good management goes both ways: you need to defend your team, convince the higher-ups of its worth and ultimately help define those values.
Of course, it's always possible to end up with a boss who refuses to listen or just doesn't understand, and then you're in trouble.
I was with a boss who refused to listen, that's for sure. Not the whole company, just him. This ended in me burned out and him gotten fired (I think I have been the one too many).
Retrspectively, the guy created the conditions of a failing project and I was too unexperimented/weak to say "no" (it's pretty hard to say "we can't do it" when everythign around you ask for "we can do it"). Big lesson learned: have the courage to say no.
Fortunately, the company noticed and dropped in some additional management and the projcet went on. But it was too late for my health :-(
So, yeah, you can say it's nothing to do with company's core values but nevertheless, I got that feeling. And eventhough I may not be a great PM, I trust my feelings pretty much.
It’s possible that I’m misreading sarcasm or something.
But point 6, “engineers can be little shits”, about how asking if the person in charge of you understands the work going on is mildly offensive for the obvious reasons, and extremely offensive for how fucking stupid it is.
Knowing how to do something is not an absurd ask of being responsible for that thing being done.
I only ever got up to 3 dozen-ish reports as an EM, but to the extent I ever lapsed in being able to read a diff, that was me just failing.
EMs should know a lot about engineering. That’s what “Engineering” and “Manager” mean. Like, in the dictionary.
That's just not reality. Many EMs are not necessarily proficient or even knowledgeable in the stack. It depends on the company.
EM doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. Last week I applied to an EM role that was 100% people management where my tech experience did not matter much. I also applied to one that was still a majority technical/architecture design, that some would consider a 'tech lead' or something like that.
Being offended by it is kind of funny. You'll probably have a boss like that eventually.
I’ve known lots of people who aren’t technical to the level of an engineer but still crazy smart and high-value in teams. They’re usually called project managers.
Calling them engineering managers and acting like it’s good to have EMs who can’t code is an anti-pattern. Just call them PMs and let them do all the high value stuff they do.
Lots of good points in the article. I would add the language that managers are required to speak is mind-numbing. It is Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" come to life.
> And also, the people who excel at all those management tasks, the ICs who would actually make great managers but don't want to do it? They make the best ICs. Literally a dream. They make my job so much easier in so many ways. Wouldn't trade them.
Ah the cliche Steve Jobs quote. Any driven person who wants to make change at an organization knows that they have to become a manager to scale. These are all day-to-day reasons that distract from why people get into the role in the first place.
At the current FAANG I work for, managers are so consumed by organizational overhead that there’s plenty of room for IC (ie staff engineer) to influence direction.
Not sure if this applies at the VP level.
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.
Anecdotally I haven't observed managers having more difficulties job hopping than engineers. In fact managers are often the first to jump the ship in stormy weather.
And once they reach the director/vp/c levels it’s even easier to do so, independent on their achievements. They always throw the classic ‘grew the team from x to y people, and from i teams to k teams’ and get an offer.
Why would it be easier? The higher up you go, the less positions are available, and the competition for them is stronger.
There are fewer positions, but as usual people who already reached the required level have a hard priority. So it's only harder if the total number of management positions is shrinking faster than total number of engineering positions (which might we'll be the case now though).
As I see there is an advantage for managers in terms of rising up the corporate ranks. Management titles form a strict hierarchy. So if your company grow from 10 engineer to 100 engineers then someone needs to be a Director because you "can't" have EMs report to other EMs. You can, however, have a Senior Engineer be a tech lead or help provide broader architectural plans.
Holy smokes this was a timely post... I am strongly considering moving into a team lead role with the idea that I might move into engineering management afterwards.
What's the trend w.r.t mgmt in healthy companies? I have seen the atherosclerosis-like effect of many many fiefdoms at the current "${JOB}" and the crushing burden of too many middle managers. Will the successful companies of the future (today?) have fewer managers and many more engineers?
Anecdotally I am seeing many more managers being laid off on my personal LinkedIn timeline than ICs...
One reason I'd like to get into leadership/mgmt is to have a greater say in team culture, tech choices, what gets done and what gets sidelined, etc. I feel currently very little power. Sure I could become a staff level or higher engineer and have some pull but it'll only be something that: "gets taken into advisement" rather than some edict given/decided by a manager or managers.
Is my thinking completely wrong?
well, i think i did my 2 years term (eh) trying to be CTO/head-of-eng in not-that-organised setup.. and heh, was never given the manager powers/tools. But got things like deciding over my head and workarounding me.
before i started, i read the Managers Path of Camille Fournier... REALLY good book - and the only thing that did not match with me was "you cannot be friends with them (below) anymore". Which, sadly, is mostly true. But i did not expect the other parts. Politics that is not called politics.
So, yeah, looking for Mentoring/ Principal/ Staff/ Whatever-you-call-that - in my 35years making software i have-been even life coach (of few chosens) but seems not a Manager (of whoever run-of-the-mill is there)
ah. have fun.
www.svilendobrev.com
edit: and the lesson is: you can only be a proper manager if you have proper "manager" above..
One of my reasons: as an engineer you maintain much stronger "makes things done" skills, and have much better opportunity to build side business with high pay reward: it could be android/macos/windows app/saas you sell, or mvp which will attract investments.
I used to think that it's much harder to find a manager job than a dev job. Eventually I learned that this is not the case - quite the opposite. There is obviously lack of good managers. After reading "Peoplewhare" I understood why. There are two main manager objectives: 1) Advance the project 2) Advance the people. I can't even imagine how one finds a symbiosis between people's ambitions and project needs. Someone has to get hurt.
I was a technical IC for the majority of my career and apart from leading small teams technically, didn't do much management.
However, i picked it up when i started my own company and it has considerably changed my pov. Hard conversations, managing time, developing people, building the organisation, delivering value to clients and a ton of other things which i couldn't dream of doing as an IC have been possible and extremely rewarding.
I think the article makes a few good points but on the overall, I feel that an younger, immature and less clued in me would resonate with it more than me now.
Your experience is very, very different than what the article was about. Starting your own company means you have ownership and pride of everything going on in the business. That motivation and entrepreneurial spirit will obviously paint everything in pink, at least for a while.
Imagine having those responsibities, but nearly no decision-making power. All those messy human behaviors are now coming at you from above and below.
What's tough is that to do management well, you need a level of freedom like what you experience as a founder. However, most managers with their own bosses will never get that level of freedom and have to somewhat conform to existing culture/process.
Thanks. That's a useful perspective.
I read it as a general screed on managers in general. Not on improperly structured environments that don't enable managers to do good work which I understand is what you read from the article.
Unfortunately you did not understand what I read from the article. Thanks for the attempt though. Maybe "an younger, immature and less clued in me would resonate with it more than me now" :eyeroll:
All good.
Also see this comment of mine to get the full picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697404#36700085
Was nearly fired once for telling the truth. Made me realize I'm not sociopathic enough to laud power over people nor do I kiss enough ass to be coddled by higher ups. I'm quite happy with my IC/senior role.
I am running into the situation where pay bands are tied into titles. Once you reach the upper end of your pay band you have to gain a new title. So you'll be pushed into management track or pushed out the company. I'm pretty sure I'm headed for the latter.
> I'm pretty sure I'm headed for the latter.
and what is your playbook for this given job market is not good.
Work on my MVP and travel to extend burn rate. My employer will be myself.
Another reason I don’t want to be in management. Email and Slack ruin your life.
Only 2019 reasons? Surely there are more
Being a manager often involves additional time commitments, including meetings, administrative tasks, and mentoring employees. Some people may prefer to prioritize their personal time or work on other projects without managerial responsibilities.
Not everyone aspires to climb the corporate ladder or take on higher management roles. Some individuals may be content and fulfilled by pursuing specialized expertise or contributing in other ways.
What can I as a little shits engineer, do to encourage and motivate managers?
As a manager we like people who actually build a house out of something other than shit and straw as we have to present that to people who don't like us and we just want a peaceful life too.
So keep it simple, quality and don't get distracted by shiny things.
Wow, my experience could not be any different. In my experience, the business side of the house is the primary driver of adopting "shiny things", by a long shot. Engineers plead for empirically-supported, simple, robust, high-quality implementations. But they're overridden by the impulse to add complex whiz-bang buzzwords. It makes a great pitch - long term viability be damned.
I'm not blaming "managers" here. This applies to anyone who sticks their nose into an engineering process without the merit or to do so.
I’ve had the opposite situation. I’m a PE that works with a director. Problem is he’s been a lot more keen on the “shiny” than I am. After more than 25 yrs being an IC I’m definitely over the shiny. I can smell shiny tech debt miles away. Problem is trying to get the managers out of the technical path.
Sometimes I need the distraction and want to try out the shiny things.
I really should find a new job because my manager has your attitude and it drives me crazy. I'm at a big corp and I can't stand the "just deal with it, there's processes and they suck but it's for the best" attitude that everyone has. I keep having the delusion that this year will be different because there has been small improvements.. but ffs. We run a Java stack and VisualVM is something I should be able to download without all the hoops. Nobody wants to help you jump through the hoops either, they just tell you to do it, and expect you to succeed.
I think you misjudge the situation. And I'm not that manager. If there's an enabler I'll help you get it out and keep the politics away from you. That's my job.
But most stuff out there isn't moonshot project work. It's boring ass maintenance and minor function changes. What I don't want is when someone is asked to change a web form to find a whole fucking ReactJS stack pulled in because someone is bored or it looks good on their résumé. This does happen.
Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I have no interest turning a Java GUI that's been working for 20 years into a React app.
I probably have to admit I have a manager who doesn't really align with my needs. He's great at the business side but terrible at the technology side. That's why I'm still around, because he does back me up, but he won't get into battles about downloading VisualVM. We have jdk8 installed and it's in there, just use that! Why do you need the latest version? It's frustrating, but I do like my manager and my team, they just have the ability to roll over and follow the damn rules sooner than I prefer.
> 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
That is an amazing comment, but this is a much better upload: https://youtu.be/rMYDuPWHFAo
(2019)
Wow, I sure hope no one who manages anyone agrees with this person.
Why, specifically?