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Agreed with everything you said, and will add 2 major points: 1) God help you if you choose 80% coding and 20% management. Your team will be very unhappy. Mayb

Agreed with everything you said, and will add 2 major points: 1) God help you if you choose 80% coding and 20% management. Your team will be very unhappy. Maybe you'll take care of the HR/Admin work that noone else can, but their career growth will stagnate, and morale will be low. 2) If you do pick 80% management, and 20% engineering, understand that your growth as an engineer will completely plateau. Yes, you can still participate in design reviews, even weigh in on code reviews, and ship the occasional bug fix/perf improvement/nice-to-have feature or some operational tool that will save your team a bunch of time and make your oncall happy. But without hands on struggle with a new paradigm or scaling challenge, you won't grow. And given the choice between improving as a manager or improving as a hands on techie, you have to make the choice to work to improve as a manager, and start doing all the invisible things you never realized a manager does (least known and most annoying is managing UPwards) SOURCE: Just spent a year stepping into a vacant engineering manager role on my team, tried to do the 80-20, didn't love the management role, am back to a full time senior engineer, and am frustrated with my skills that appear to have atrophied.

cyrux004 8y ago
what kind of managing do you do ? I dont spend more than 1 hour a week with my manager, so I am not sure where your time goes ?
- lbotos 8y ago
  Current Manager. It's "Support Engineering" but currently: - Metrics for the business to understand what our pain points are - 1:1 Prep and post 1:1 vision planning ("Is everyone aligned?") - Performance review prep (time of year) - Chasing down other managers to try and get problems fixed that were surfaced in 1:1s - a "net" above the team, to filter out any business side bs that would go their way that would be a distraction. (The team has to trust that I have their best interest in mind. That's why a net, I let them know, and they can see) - Capacity Planning (Do we have enough people for the growth plan? Oh, did the growth plan get updated? Lemme take another look...) - Hiring - Reviewing Resumes - Are our policies up to date? - Process thinking (usually surfaced by pain points from 1:1s) It's a lot of meta thinking
- JimDabell 8y ago
  Off the top of my head, these are the kinds of things engineering managers often have to deal with: Hiring: - Writing job specs. - Dealing with recruiters - Reading CVs/résumés - Interviews - Onboarding - Outreach - Who do you need to hire next quarter to avoid capacity problems? People: - How do you level up your developers? What new responsibilities can you delegate to them so that they can grow without swamping them? Are you available enough to them so you can help them take these new tasks on? - Evaluating training courses / conferences etc. - Are there any personal or interpersonal problems that need sorting? - What can you do to help your team gel better and feel like they are part of a team? - Where are your team members' careers heading and how can you help them get there? - Your team has grown too large to manage effectively by yourself. How do you split things up? Process: - What is everybody working on? What will everybody work on next? - What are people blocked on? How do you unblock them? What is likely to block them next? - Can you do things in a better way? How? - You've got a lot of bugs in the backlog. Is there a root cause? Are there any patterns? - You aren't performing as well as you thought you were. Where is the time being spent? What's the cause? Are the estimates wrong or the performance? - Some people want to shift their hours or work remotely. Can you accommodate this? Do you have to adjust process and if so, how? Line management: - Approving invoices - Approving holidays - One on ones - Salary review - Getting people back to work after sickness / parental leave / sabbaticals - Disciplinaries / performance problems - Firing / redundancies - Exit interviews Planning: - How well is your team performing? How do you measure this and how do you improve? - Do you have enough capacity? - If not, which features do you bump? - Are there any bottlenecks in the pipeline? - What are you telling the shareholders you're delivering next quarter? Product: - Does marketing know what you are building next? What information do they need from you to sell it? - Do CS know how to support your customers with the new features? - Feedback from the rest of the business about the product and how the tech team works. - Are the specs precise, correct, complete, and achievable? - Features have been requested. Are they technically feasible? What's the general size of it and what quarter can we deliver it by? - A big customer has a major problem with your product. It's not your fault, but it has a disproportionate affect on the customer. How do you prioritise solving this problem? External: - A shareholder owns a business with a related product that they want integrated ASAP. How do you deal with that pressure without disrupting your plan? - One of your suppliers has a data breach that has leaked your data. How do you deal with that? Have you defined processes for reporting security issues? - A supplier is failing to perform adequately. Can it be fixed? How do you move away? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule? - A supplier has changed their pricing structure. Do you have to move? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule? - New legislation has been passed and you have to make changes to your product. What are the requirements? - A complaint has been made about the accessibility of your product. Does it have merit? What's the impact of fixing it, and how urgent is it? - A big prospective customer is on the verge of signing, but they must have one feature that you weren't planning on building until next year. How do you rearrange things to get the customer with minimum impact? - A service you use is changing their API. What's the risk of staying on the deprecated version until it can be planned in?
- barrkel 8y ago
  A good manager will give you the idea they aren't doing much, paradoxically.
  - rok3 8y ago
    This. A good manager filters out most of the outside noise and problems so the team can focus on the task at hand.
- rbetts 8y ago
  I'm an engineering manager. It is Friday. I have 10 scheduled events on my calendar today: 1 phone call with a candidate that accepted an offer 3 scrum team demo sessions 3 standups 1 standing meeting for escalated support case review 2 1:1 meetings In addition, I will spend a chunk of time reading and sorting resumes, preparing a presentation I'm delivering next week, following up on a few blocking issues that came up last night/this morning, and reviewing the progress of software upgrade that's on-going.
ymlaree 8y ago
I was on the same boat, went back to senior dev but found myself missing the leadership side of the job (improve engineering process, cross team architecture etc) so I'm moving to principal SWE which seems to be the sweet spot in my current company.
hoorayimhelping 8y ago
>(least known and most annoying is managing UPwards) Boy if that ain't the most true statement about moving from engineering into management, I don't know what is. I was so exceptionally bad and unprepared for this when I tried my hand at management.
- colordrops 8y ago
  I will have to second this. I've taken on the role of engineering manager this year and found managing upwards by far the most difficult aspect of the job, and not something I expected at all.
- hazz99 8y ago
  What does it mean to manage upwards?
  - mooreds 8y ago
    Keeping an eye on the bigger picture at your company. Knowing what the current initiatives are. Knowing and working towards what will make your boss a hero. Empathizing with other parts of the organization and understanding where your team fits in.
    - internet555 8y ago
      “Make your boss a hero” is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say. At my first job out of university, my manager told me my job was to make him look good. I instantly wrote him off as a moron. We worked for a publicly traded company. Nobody cares about how you look or your little empire. This isn’t your money. You are hired to manage it for the shareholders, not to look cool or be a little rentseeker
      - sowbug 8y ago
        Sounds like the expression rubs you the wrong way. How about this instead: a manager is a representative of a team, and vice-versa. Not every senior leader in a company has time to get to know and evaluate every individual member of every team; instead, they evaluate a manager as a proxy for the whole team. You, as a team member, will be evaluated through your manager. It's up to you whether that evaluation is positive. "Make your boss a hero" isn't a very endearing way to phrase it, but it's a concise way to say that in a traditional corporate hierarchy, your fate is aligned with your boss's fate.
greglindahl 8y ago
The amount of time management takes depends on the size of your team. I've done 80% engineering and 20% management with small teams for more than a decade of my career. It's not for everyone, certainly.
- pm90 8y ago
  I hate to say it but "it depends". In a smaller company where teams are more cohesive and you have pretty clear objectives, management can be easy. But in larger corps, management becomes this big firestorm of meetings where if you as a manager don't represent your team well enough they will be starved off resources, projects and perhaps more importantly, recognition. Team members will see this and jump ship quickly enough. This is perhaps the biggest reason I personally prefer smaller companies. Its statistically more likely to have a more effective manager, because a manager doesn't have to be a superstar to get their teams what they need.
analog31 8y ago
I tried to do the same thing too. Here's what I learned. The people who are "managers" are also splitting their time. They only need to spend maybe 20% of their time in actual supervisory work. The rest of their time is spent on tasks that are delegated to them by their higher-ups. These tasks are largely forms of information processing: Gathering, analyzing, and communicating. Excel and PowerPoint. But they are typically one-time tasks that are not worth automating. I was happy with the 20% supervision, no problem. But the 80% information processing tasks just weren't interesting to me. When they finally posted an opening for my old job, I went to the boss and asked: "What do you want me to be, a mediocre manager or a great engineer?" Oddly enough, moving me back to engineering resulted in a second promotion on top of the first. Meanwhile, I did enjoy receiving a fair amount of management training and insider understanding about how the business works.
- deanCommie 8y ago
  That's exactly what happened to me. I thought I would love management. I love mentoring, developing people, prioritizing tasks for the team, balancing delivery and long term growth. But those "information processing" tasks you mentioned are the ones that nobody who's not a manager knows about and i HATED them.

cyrux004 8y ago

what kind of managing do you do ? I dont spend more than 1 hour a week with my manager, so I am not sure where your time goes ?

lbotos 8y ago
Current Manager. It's "Support Engineering" but currently: - Metrics for the business to understand what our pain points are - 1:1 Prep and post 1:1 vision planning ("Is everyone aligned?") - Performance review prep (time of year) - Chasing down other managers to try and get problems fixed that were surfaced in 1:1s - a "net" above the team, to filter out any business side bs that would go their way that would be a distraction. (The team has to trust that I have their best interest in mind. That's why a net, I let them know, and they can see) - Capacity Planning (Do we have enough people for the growth plan? Oh, did the growth plan get updated? Lemme take another look...) - Hiring - Reviewing Resumes - Are our policies up to date? - Process thinking (usually surfaced by pain points from 1:1s) It's a lot of meta thinking
JimDabell 8y ago
Off the top of my head, these are the kinds of things engineering managers often have to deal with: Hiring: - Writing job specs. - Dealing with recruiters - Reading CVs/résumés - Interviews - Onboarding - Outreach - Who do you need to hire next quarter to avoid capacity problems? People: - How do you level up your developers? What new responsibilities can you delegate to them so that they can grow without swamping them? Are you available enough to them so you can help them take these new tasks on? - Evaluating training courses / conferences etc. - Are there any personal or interpersonal problems that need sorting? - What can you do to help your team gel better and feel like they are part of a team? - Where are your team members' careers heading and how can you help them get there? - Your team has grown too large to manage effectively by yourself. How do you split things up? Process: - What is everybody working on? What will everybody work on next? - What are people blocked on? How do you unblock them? What is likely to block them next? - Can you do things in a better way? How? - You've got a lot of bugs in the backlog. Is there a root cause? Are there any patterns? - You aren't performing as well as you thought you were. Where is the time being spent? What's the cause? Are the estimates wrong or the performance? - Some people want to shift their hours or work remotely. Can you accommodate this? Do you have to adjust process and if so, how? Line management: - Approving invoices - Approving holidays - One on ones - Salary review - Getting people back to work after sickness / parental leave / sabbaticals - Disciplinaries / performance problems - Firing / redundancies - Exit interviews Planning: - How well is your team performing? How do you measure this and how do you improve? - Do you have enough capacity? - If not, which features do you bump? - Are there any bottlenecks in the pipeline? - What are you telling the shareholders you're delivering next quarter? Product: - Does marketing know what you are building next? What information do they need from you to sell it? - Do CS know how to support your customers with the new features? - Feedback from the rest of the business about the product and how the tech team works. - Are the specs precise, correct, complete, and achievable? - Features have been requested. Are they technically feasible? What's the general size of it and what quarter can we deliver it by? - A big customer has a major problem with your product. It's not your fault, but it has a disproportionate affect on the customer. How do you prioritise solving this problem? External: - A shareholder owns a business with a related product that they want integrated ASAP. How do you deal with that pressure without disrupting your plan? - One of your suppliers has a data breach that has leaked your data. How do you deal with that? Have you defined processes for reporting security issues? - A supplier is failing to perform adequately. Can it be fixed? How do you move away? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule? - A supplier has changed their pricing structure. Do you have to move? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule? - New legislation has been passed and you have to make changes to your product. What are the requirements? - A complaint has been made about the accessibility of your product. Does it have merit? What's the impact of fixing it, and how urgent is it? - A big prospective customer is on the verge of signing, but they must have one feature that you weren't planning on building until next year. How do you rearrange things to get the customer with minimum impact? - A service you use is changing their API. What's the risk of staying on the deprecated version until it can be planned in?
barrkel 8y ago
A good manager will give you the idea they aren't doing much, paradoxically.
- rok3 8y ago
  This. A good manager filters out most of the outside noise and problems so the team can focus on the task at hand.
rbetts 8y ago
I'm an engineering manager. It is Friday. I have 10 scheduled events on my calendar today: 1 phone call with a candidate that accepted an offer 3 scrum team demo sessions 3 standups 1 standing meeting for escalated support case review 2 1:1 meetings In addition, I will spend a chunk of time reading and sorting resumes, preparing a presentation I'm delivering next week, following up on a few blocking issues that came up last night/this morning, and reviewing the progress of software upgrade that's on-going.

ymlaree 8y ago

I was on the same boat, went back to senior dev but found myself missing the leadership side of the job (improve engineering process, cross team architecture etc) so I'm moving to principal SWE which seems to be the sweet spot in my current company.

hoorayimhelping 8y ago

>(least known and most annoying is managing UPwards) Boy if that ain't the most true statement about moving from engineering into management, I don't know what is. I was so exceptionally bad and unprepared for this when I tried my hand at management.

colordrops 8y ago
I will have to second this. I've taken on the role of engineering manager this year and found managing upwards by far the most difficult aspect of the job, and not something I expected at all.
hazz99 8y ago
What does it mean to manage upwards?
- mooreds 8y ago
  Keeping an eye on the bigger picture at your company. Knowing what the current initiatives are. Knowing and working towards what will make your boss a hero. Empathizing with other parts of the organization and understanding where your team fits in.
  - internet555 8y ago
    “Make your boss a hero” is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say. At my first job out of university, my manager told me my job was to make him look good. I instantly wrote him off as a moron. We worked for a publicly traded company. Nobody cares about how you look or your little empire. This isn’t your money. You are hired to manage it for the shareholders, not to look cool or be a little rentseeker
    - sowbug 8y ago
      Sounds like the expression rubs you the wrong way. How about this instead: a manager is a representative of a team, and vice-versa. Not every senior leader in a company has time to get to know and evaluate every individual member of every team; instead, they evaluate a manager as a proxy for the whole team. You, as a team member, will be evaluated through your manager. It's up to you whether that evaluation is positive. "Make your boss a hero" isn't a very endearing way to phrase it, but it's a concise way to say that in a traditional corporate hierarchy, your fate is aligned with your boss's fate.

greglindahl 8y ago

The amount of time management takes depends on the size of your team. I've done 80% engineering and 20% management with small teams for more than a decade of my career. It's not for everyone, certainly.

pm90 8y ago
I hate to say it but "it depends". In a smaller company where teams are more cohesive and you have pretty clear objectives, management can be easy. But in larger corps, management becomes this big firestorm of meetings where if you as a manager don't represent your team well enough they will be starved off resources, projects and perhaps more importantly, recognition. Team members will see this and jump ship quickly enough. This is perhaps the biggest reason I personally prefer smaller companies. Its statistically more likely to have a more effective manager, because a manager doesn't have to be a superstar to get their teams what they need.

analog31 8y ago

I tried to do the same thing too. Here's what I learned. The people who are "managers" are also splitting their time. They only need to spend maybe 20% of their time in actual supervisory work. The rest of their time is spent on tasks that are delegated to them by their higher-ups. These tasks are largely forms of information processing: Gathering, analyzing, and communicating. Excel and PowerPoint. But they are typically one-time tasks that are not worth automating. I was happy with the 20% supervision, no problem. But the 80% information processing tasks just weren't interesting to me. When they finally posted an opening for my old job, I went to the boss and asked: "What do you want me to be, a mediocre manager or a great engineer?" Oddly enough, moving me back to engineering resulted in a second promotion on top of the first. Meanwhile, I did enjoy receiving a fair amount of management training and insider understanding about how the business works.

deanCommie 8y ago
That's exactly what happened to me. I thought I would love management. I love mentoring, developing people, prioritizing tasks for the team, balancing delivery and long term growth. But those "information processing" tasks you mentioned are the ones that nobody who's not a manager knows about and i HATED them.