Management feels low value sometimes - it's hard to quantify your contribution. At first, I felt a lot of imposture syndrome and wondered if management could be

Management feels low value sometimes - it's hard to quantify your contribution. At first, I felt a lot of imposture syndrome and wondered if management could be automated. Now I know soooo differently. Having worked as a manager for a year now, I can say: It's way busier than you know! There's a lot of work that happens behind the scenes to keep everything going. The better your manager is, the more invisible this work will seem to the team. I think this is sort of like asking: what does a coach even do in sportsball? They're not a player, why not just have the team do their own thing? It's a different layer of the system that requires a lot of systems thinking and people skills. Here is a list of how I spend my time: - Making sure the right people have the right opportunities to solve the right problems - Coaching individuals on my team on career development - Helping to define organizational topology/structure and interfaces between teams & roles - Manage expectations of those outside the dev team - Proposing & maintaining process documentation - Helping define organization culture & maintain it - Hiring & Interviewing - Architecture, tech debt, system vision, and helping the tech leads make the business case - Facilitating communication between teams & acting as a shield for my team, so that they can maintain focus And then there are things that aren't officially my responsibility, but I end up doing because I do what's needed: - Jump in to help facilitate the team through an incident - Act as scrum master / agile ceremony facilitator - Produce Roadmaps & help define work/user stories when there is no Project/Product Manager / Business Analyst available - Troubleshoot production issues And I know there is so much more. To be honest, I would NOT have enough time to do everything if I spent 80% of my time coding. I'm lucky to get 5-20% of my time coding in! I think the original poster should try Engineering Management for a while to see how busy they get with non-coding tasks. Competencies you require to be an Engineering Manager: - Agile/DevOps/DevSecOps/Continous Delivery/Modern Buzzwords - Systems thinking - Organizational Design - Process design, including things like Lean, Six Signma, Toyota, etc. - Business strategy - Recruiting - Mentoring - Coaching - Public Speaking - Written communication - Product Engineering - Infrastructure Engineering - Negotiation & facilitation of disputes - And the list goes on! A really good book I recommend to try to understand the systems thinking required for management is: An Elegant Puzzle Systems of Engineering Management By Will Larson