The case for becoming a manager
newsletter.thelongcommit.comIf you ignore the titles and just start taking care of things, a whole world opens up that is invisible to most.
Doing things even when you aren't sure if they are your responsibility is precisely what makes you a responsible person. Encouraging everyone around you to do trivial things like bringing the shopping cart back is actually a big deal. And the most effective way to do this is to just do it. Park as far as you possibly can from the store and walk that thing for a solid 3 minutes both ways. Find one with a really noisy wheel. Make a whole production out of it. Leading by example is unbelievably effective if you lean into it just a little bit.
But this could be anything. If you see a customer waiting on a response and you know exactly what they need to be told, go tell them. Don't make them wait until next Thursday when their CSR gets back from vacation. If you aren't sure about the email, draft it, send it to your boss/peer/etc. for review. About 50% of the time they'll say "yep looks good please send" the other half they'll just take care of it right then and CC you on it. Either way you come out looking good.
The "not my job" crowd is simply not thinking ahead at all. You don't get paid more money the microsecond you go above and beyond. It takes persistent investment in this bucket before someone with actual power decides to help you out. There's not a progress bar or quest log you can review. It just happens. One day you get a phone call and that's that. There's no lead up or anticipation most of the time. You just have to be good all the time and expect that you are being observed. That's the only thing I've found that works over strategic timescales.
I’m reminded of something passed around Google’s SRE org when I was there:
https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/no-hero...
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I think that there are circumstances where being the one to pick up the slack results in being taken advantaged of, whether intentional or unintentional on the part of the advantage taker.
In your CSR example, picking up the slack or helping out a couple times when you are equipped to do so is good, but if it turns into a longstanding pattern of hiding what might be an organizational problem (maybe that CSR is really assigned too many customers to keep up) or an individual problem, then this mode of working can do more harm than good in the long term.
>> "Encouraging everyone around you to do trivial things like bringing the shopping cart back is actually a big deal."
Got three shopping carts launched at me while doing this once by confused people who revealed how they behave toward people socially expected to endure abuse and low pay. The problem often goes deeper than responsibility.
I quite like this article (despite some signs of AI writing in it). It reflects my own experience of transitioning to management roles.
The first time I managed a team I designed a whole solution for the team to implement, and they were like "Are we just your typists?!! Why don't you let us do that?". They were right; I stepped back and shared goals and direction with them instead from that point. It's hard to step away from how you did things before and give trust to others to do a good job.
The other thing they highlighted also resonated - if you become a manager of people who were formally your team mates, it alters your relationships with them. I remember feeling quite depressed when people no longer joked around with me in the same way they used to, and I felt a bit isolated. Took me a while to understand the shift in dynamics and not take it personally.
Not usually one to complain about AI, but I felt that there was some superfluous content here - maybe the use of AI has made it longer but not stronger.
Yep, I stopped reading as soon as I saw the obvious AI language. It's a huge turnoff.
The part nobody mentions: you trade the dopamine of solving a hard problem yourself for the slower satisfaction of watching someone else solve it. Some people genuinely prefer the second kind. Most senior ICs who move to management miss the first kind within 6 months.
The best engineering managers I've worked with didn't "become" managers. They were already doing the work - unblocking people, aligning priorities, having hard conversations - and the title caught up.
> The best engineering managers I've worked with didn't "become" managers. They were already doing the work - unblocking people, aligning priorities, having hard conversations - and the title caught up.
I have only been working for around 6 years now and have had 4 managers so far. That said this is the opposite of my experience. You need training on actually having reports vs. just leading a team. My current manager does not care about my personal growth or career goals whatsoever and he’s a bad manager for it. But he is good at delivering projects.
> My current manager does not care about my personal growth or career goals whatsoever and he’s a bad manager for it. But he is good at delivering projects.
I've gone back and forth between Manager and IC. I'm the opposite: I don't care about delivering projects, but I do care about my team's personal growth and career goals.
It's a sweet role. You get 2x the pay, and the only thing you have to do is act like a decent human, and select your team with nm precision, and you can just coast along and collect the pay check.
The only problem is the manager level above you. If you're the guy who likes plain speaking and speaking the truth, being a manager is not for you. If you have sycophantic tendencies, you'll last a long time.
To be honest, in my decades working in this, I have never ever saw a Manager that was a good Developer. Maybe it is just my luck.
The best managers of my career have all been developers, and like myself enjoy going up and down the management chain based on the need of the org. My favourite, at age 61 joined a ~250 person company as CTO, but spent his initial, transitional period of 90 days, as a part developer, part meeting listener, quietly learning as one would expect, helping them scale to 800+ people.
He's the example to me, of the career I'm intentionally pursuing. There's tremendous amounts to learn from, and contribute to, everywhere. Sometimes an organization and I best work together with me managing, other times with fingers on the keyboard. Sometimes, there are multiple jobs.
We could recognize that we're in a different era, or at least that's my bias. Roles are increasingly combinations of generalists, especially in the AI era.
My manager is a good developer. But he's also a terrible manager.
I have very much seen that too!
> I have never ever saw a Manager that was a good Developer.
What does that mean? And why should a Manager be a good Developer?
Is this still a debate? It all depends on personal goal/wishes and constraints from your working contrxt (e.g company size, country of residence).
Take France with medium to large size companies: ICs (whatever the seniority) are usually paid less and have a hard time evolving so they are naturally encouraged to take on management roles by their hierarchy. In some other contexts, ICs may have more leverage thus not wanting to go the management route and that’s okay.
Anyway, in the next 5 to 10 years this all might change for better or worse so…
I think this article does a great job at conveying the new skills you need from a work-completing perspective as a manager, but there's another aspect that is much more subtle and long-term: being a guide for other people's careers.
I've seen dozens of people start managing, stop managing, change roles (including myself), etc, and there are two extremes that stand out:
1. Management out of necessity. They became a manager because they wanted to solve a problem that is too big for them to solve alone, and no one else was willing to fund it. So they got headcount, hired a team, and set them to work on solving the hard problem. But the problem they're solving is the only focus. This manager tends to have an elite team of low-maintenance engineers who just get things done. They are very effective, but eventually when those reports start asking questions like, "how do I get promoted? What's the next step in my career?" their manager has to suddenly learn this new set of skills or risk losing their highest performers.
2. Management to be a mentor. They became a manager to help other people grow. Sure they are solving problems with the team, but this manager spends the time to help higher-maintenance engineers grow their own skills. This is time-consuming, this can be frustrating, progress is going to be slower, but eventually you can reach very high throughput, and also feel very accomplished knowing you helped someone else reach their potential. This, however, has to be balanced with not moving so slowly that you frustrate your top performers.
There's nothing wrong with either of these extremes so long as everyone in the manager-report relationship knows what to expect, and many managers will be between these two extremes.
The main tl;dr takeaway is: as a manager, you are not just responsible for people's tasks, you are responsible for their career. Managers need to take this seriously and address it head-on to build those skills before the first time a report asks, "so how do I get promoted?"
As another commenter mentioned, the first role is Vision + Leadership, and the second role is more like Support + Mentorship.
Personally I would love do the first, and the second one feels more like HR should do. Of course, HR doesn't have the specialization needed for that, but maybe they should expand into that? HRO - Human Resource Optimization.
Perhaps these two roles shouldn't be conflated into a single position?
it’s like the difference between management and leadership though the latter doesn’t come exclusively from the former
The only career goals I want my manager to be responsible for is to not be in my way. I tinkered with my PC since I was young without my manager. I decided to go to Computer Science without my manager. I got my degree without my manager. I got my first job without my manager. I practiced lifelong learning without my manager. I ran my own company without my manager. I handled clients without my manager. I managed to find mentors without my manager. Etc.
There might be some people that need a nanny. I am not one of those people. My manager should be a proper valve between me and whatever layer he manages for and should not play stupid games when it comes to my career. That's it. He's a colleague. Not a mentor. I'm perfectly capable of finding mentors for myself, and if it happens to be them, well, kudos to them.
> That's it. He's a colleague. Not a mentor
You're missing a very important aspect of how managers impact your career: Opportunities.
The manager's job is to find you impactful work that a) gets you promoted and b) challenges you in the ways you want or need to grow.
Am I missing this, or are you assuming that I am incapable of finding opportunities myself, within or without the organization that the manager is beholden to? I honestly can't understand this framing, of the manager's job as a sort of opportunity finder for those 'under' them, and somehow being more impactful at this than the individuals themselves.
I'll give you this, some people need to be managed and for some reason presented with opportunities by a 2nd party. But some people just don't, they need to be collaborated with.
> Am I missing this, or are you assuming that I am incapable of finding opportunities myself
Somewhat, yes. It has nothing to do with you. Some opportunities you can create yourself, go for it. Other opportunities only arise in the context of leadership meetings you are not a part of (by definition, if you're not the manager). Having a manager in those meeting push for your opportunities is priceless.
Having had many managers who don't do this for me and a few that do, definitely want the second kind.
This is a pretty odd take, from my perspective.
If one of my direct reports came to me and said they were interested in working on, say... AI observability (replace with whatever interests you), and that was something I had any influence over (even if only indirectly), I'd be finding whatever way I could to connect my report with that kind of work.
It's all well and good to say that you're in control of your own career advancement, but that's not in conflict with working with your manager on supporting your career development. Even if they don't have anything to teach you, they will necessarily have some influence of your scope/area of work, so it only makes sense to work them on aligning your work with your interests.
I believe everything you wrote about here is actually cooperation between two people, and to the point of what I said, you not actively getting in the way of your direct report's career progression.
> The manager's job is to find you impactful work that a) gets you promoted and b) challenges you in the ways you want or need to grow.
To me, the comment I responded to reads like a manager actively involved in the promotion of a direct report, and in finding a scope of work that the report might find challenging so that they grow. Your comment reads like a colleague helping out another colleague to the best of their ability. Which is exactly what I expect from a manager.
> You're missing a very important aspect of how managers impact your career: Opportunities.
Indeed! In basketball terms, a manager should be the MVP in Assists. They don't score directly but they set up plays for you so you can succeed. It's then up to the employee to act on it and score.
The best managers I've had are of this type.
Titles are such gross oversimplifications, I wonder if "manager" even holds much meaning anymore?
If you look at the IC track of the engineering ladder at a big tech company, the "Distinguished/Principal Engineer" is technically an IC role, but they have so much organization leadership responsibility that it feels wrong to say they aren't doing high level "management" as part of their role.
I have trouble wrapping my head around the exact distinction of manager vs IC the higher up the engineering ladder you go.
I imagine as a Principal Engineer you are essentially directing other tech leaders, even though you don't directly perform performance reviews on them? (that's for the SVP Eng?)
This is where I separate "manager" from "leader". As a principal level IC, I'm part of "engineering leadership" along with the senior managers, but not a manager.
The work isn't that different to management, sure, but it is different. You're not doing performance reviews... but if someone is over performing you can help get them promoted and if you think someone is doing really badly you can help get them fired.
Makes sense. You're managing lots of things (architecture, processes, etc), but you're just not directly managing people.
I can fire you. You can’t fire me. That’s the difference
My motivation was quite different, and i'd like to encourage more people to consider the same.
Often times narcissistic power grabbing (often technically incompetent) engineers become managers, like it was the case a previous team I've worked at and it was quite penalizing to the whole team.
I've realized that either i can be the one managing and try to do good, or be at the mercy of another manager; chose the first.
This is what taught me to sublimate my own ego. Overcoming the wickedness of others with patient, meditative calm can be an incredible experience. It just takes longer than a business day to play out. You've gotta think across much grander time scales. 3 steps ahead, at minimum, at all times. Burn these people out of your team. Take charge and stay focused on the customer. It often takes non technical people a little bit longer to lock onto complex problems and downstream consequences. It's taken me nearly 2 years to deal with one bad hire. All I can fantasize about is being in a position to never hire that kind of person again. The destruction some people can cause in a business is unthinkable to those who haven't seen it yet. I didn't believe these people existed until it was way too late.
I still prefer to solve technology problems, but I see a bigger and more important mission out there. Keeping the team happy and aligned on the customer is much more rewarding overall. I'd rather 5% dev time in paradise than 95% dev time in hell.
> The most valuable thing management has taught me is how to communicate with precision when someone else’s work depends on it.
Ignoring the AI tells throughout the article for the moment, but I'm very surprised that someone who is a staff, staff+ level IC hasn't has to build this exact skill.
> When you’re an IC, unclear communication slows you down. When you’re a manager, unclear communication breaks your team. That difference in consequences makes you learn faster than you would any other way.
This is nonsense: unclear communication from me to my team absolutely breaks the team, despite being a staff+ and not an EM. Distinction without a difference.
There won't be many managers for long. And definitely not the ones that don't know proper engineering. Teams are already shrinking, managers will be the first casualty.
The reason I had for being a manager was to be able to get the work done without the idiocy I'd had to deal with earlier in my career.
Up to a point this worked, but when I didn't program I started to become part of the problem and when I did, I didn't have time for the management.
The politics are horrendous and just to survive you try to bend just enough with the prevailing wind not to get into trouble but then you find you're becoming "the man" to your team. If you're too nice they start thinking "what does he even do?" - well all the boring stuff that lets them off the hook so they can focus.
Then you realise that problems with arseholes that used to come from above and from the side can now come from below as well and, unless you're in some capitalist fantasyland, there are only slow painful and expensive solutions which damage you.
You also get to see that you're not allowed to do the things that would let your team achieve goals but you are definitely going to be blamed for all the ridiculous ideas your superiors try to force on you when they finally escape through promotion and you're left trying to explain why X and Y were done.
So in general I feel burned out about people after my experience. I completed projects on time in the face of lots of problems which I managed to navigate around effectively but the experience was horrible because people are often horrible and horribleness wasn't some thing you could admire - like "oh they're tough but effective." It was more like stupidity all the way through but made up for by arse kissing.
In every place there's stupidity all over the place. At one place people know all about how to use source control as if that was too unimportant to mention but have no testing system for all their macro-services so everything's always breaking .... but of course we can't delay those new features just because of the latest incident can we? At another I'm getting lectured on how to do everything by the git expert of 3 months while I convert their incredible SCCS system. At another, man,we have 100 commandline arguments and our customers just better learn them all to get an optimal result.
All of them screw up agile and bitch about why it isn't doing what they thought it would.
The new thing is checking up on your AI usage to make sure you're using it enough. Lets not fix our development and testing process ... no ... lets hope AI will magic our quality problems away!
Being a manager doesn't really let you fix this stuff.
Firstly you have to be able to articulate why things are going wrong and that's bloody hard. Then you hit the problem that if you have amazing insight that lets you see what to do, nobody else at that company has it and they're all off following their own ideas no matter how little they might have worked in the past.
Whatever is wrong is that way because the sort of social situation that came into existence formed it that way. You're not battling a lack of insight but something else - perhaps a set of incentives. Whatever it is, it's like trying to stop a hurricane by holding up your hands.
If you're too low the higher management force you to be sht and if you're higher I imagine that the pressures of the business force you down the road of being sht anyhow.
Accountants want software to depreciate - so it has to be "finished." So they hate you going back to fix things that are supposed to be "finished" and want you to work on new things.
..........ok, end of stream of consciousness. :-) I just feel a bit battered by it at the moment. Nothing in life is easy.
I hate the term "individual contributor" how else does anyone contribute but individually
A lot of professions have terms of art that can be interpreted incorrectly or be viewed as odd by laymen. "Individual contributor" is no different.
Maybe it sounds weird to you, but it's a well-understood term in the management profession.
it's a bullshit term because a managers contributions are also individual and the kind of contributions (implied to come from non-individual contributors) also come from individual contributors
ICs are given tasks for one person. Managers are given tasks to distribute to entire teams. By definition managers do not contribute individually because their output (from an org chart perspective) includes the output of everyone reporting to them.
see how the language lead directly to you considering all contributions to belong to the manager? yea newspeak is bad for the brain!
Your manager is on the hook for things you do. I can’t explain it more plainly
I avoided having minions for my entire 30 year IT career. Fuck if I'm going to let someone else's mistakes reflect negatively on me.
May you be released from thinking that your mistakes reflect poorly on anyone, including yourself. Being bad is a necessary part of becoming good
When did I say any of that? wtf are you talking about? I clearly said OTHER PEOPLE's mistakes, not my own. But thanks for playing.
edit: In fact, that is exactly my point. I DO take responsibility for my own mistakes, I just don't want to be held responsible for OTHER PEOPLE's mistakes.
> I DO take responsibility for my own mistakes, I just don't want to be held responsible for OTHER PEOPLE's mistakes.
That's a sensible position. But if you want to lead a team then you must be responsible for any failures in the team as a whole.
It's not easy. I've had very low performing employees in my team but I'm still responsible for the productivity of the team. My management isn't cutting me any slack just because I have a low performer in the team. If the employee is not doing the work then I must find a way to fill in the gaps until I can replace them. Usually that means I get to do all their work and all my work until a replacement is hired.
As above, so below.
If you think that your reports mistakes would reflect poorly on you, then surely you also think that your mistakes reflect poorly on your manager. Which is just not the case, unless there is something bigger happening.
That's an entirely valid point of view, and one plenty of people share. Being accountable for other people's mistakes sucks.
The only issue with it is that you can only get positive side for work you do directly, which limits the scale of what you're seen to be capable of doing. I lead a team of about 50 (7 directly, plus their teams), so I get to lead on quite big projects that I'd only work on smaller parts of I wasn't a manager. I enjoy that aspect of my role. But yeah, taking the blame when someone screw up isn't fun.