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That's fair but my perspective as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career. My people manager managers never had the

That's fair but my perspective as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career. My people manager managers never had the skills to provide me with any growth, the only reason I'm at where I am today is because I decided I wanted to level up and taught myself outside of work. It's my goal as a manager to be that manager that I never had and lead by example for my reports technically in addition to the expected soft skills of a traditional people manager.

blacktriangle 6y ago
The thing is that role model should not be your manager, it should be a senior developer. A good manager is not a role model to teach you, a good manager realizes the importance of lowly engineers having role models and creates a structured mentorship program to make sure that need is being met.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  I don't understand why managers cannot fulfill both roles though? The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it). Outside of the project management responsibilities, there is a lot of time doing nothing. If I wasn't coding, as a manager, 80% of the time I would sit around doing nothing. I strongly believe that managers should be able to fulfill both roles but maybe it's just because I've been burned by so many managers in the past.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I've been a manager for a while and at best I get 20% time to code. With 8+ reports the weeks tends to break down into: * 20% for 1-on-1s and dealing with management level issues people bring up. * 20% spent on hiring * 20% on various status meetings (team, cross-team, with my boss, etc.) * 20% spent on pro-actively finding or solving issues before the explode. This includes networking with my counterparts in the rest of the org so I get information and build political capital.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      20% on hiring with 8 reports?
      - pnut 6y ago
        Engineering manager's reports are team leads, so that's like 40-50 people probably. Plus any cross-discipline interviewing.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        Startup so quickly growing team and less recruiting support. Stabler team in a large org would have less hiring but more meetings.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    >The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it). Where do you work? Sign me up! I have hardly any time to code after weekly sprint-related ceremonies, 1:1's, cycle planning, and architecture and code reviews. The job of management, like the job of any developer, varies from company to company, and situation to situation. Thankfully, the people side of my job as a manager is easy right now, but only because the people I manage are reasonable people to work with, and well receptive to feedback. It was very difficult last year when I had to work through more delicate relationships between the employee and employer. As always, it comes down to people. It also sounds like the place you may be managing at may not be challenging enough for you. Perhaps it's time to make a change?
    - virtue3 6y ago
      Your job isn't to code anymore homie. It all becomes a bunch of soft targets as a manager and that's really hard. The one big success I had when I was a manager was getting our client teams to unify on the bugs they were having and to be much more cohesive. When I first got there the android and ios and web people never talked and refused to believe they had the same types of issues/bugs. LOL. I ultimately hated it because really... I don't want to yell at people for being late to standup, so went back to engineering.
  - dairem 6y ago
    I'm an engineering manager and find it hard to relate to this. With 1:1s, ops reviews, planning, retros, design reviews, support syncs, etc., I have ~6-10 hours of meetings per day - then for non-meeting work I'm writing roadmaps, interviewing, managing escalations, doing project management, status reports, etc. How do you have 80% of your time free as a manager after this? I think that makes sense to code if you have that time, but my experience is that having that much time available as a manager would be an outlier.
  - afarrell 6y ago
    Question for HN: If you were talking with someone at a conference and heard him say > The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it) What signals would you look for to tell the difference between these two possibilities? A. This person has so much tacit knowledge of good management that they don't realise how much skill they are applying day-to-day. B. This person has zero awareness of how their team is burning out underneath them.
    - bitL 6y ago
      Would you consider the possibility that you might have done it wrong all the time and all your previous managers taught you the wrong way?
    - theptip 6y ago
      A well formulated question! I’d ask a few questions about the bits of management that I think are hard. How do you get your team aligned on the company’s priorities as they shift? How do you foster growth? How do you assess who needs to be promoted/given a raise? How do you handle feedback for employees that aren’t doing well, or aren’t meeting your expectations (or even harder, employees who think they should be promoted but you think are just solid at their current level)? And the big/meta one - what do you think the job of a manager is? (Could just be a semantic disconnect on what the job entails).
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      There’s also C. It’s just a small, experienced team, and doesn’t need much management to be successful in the first place.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - lazide 6y ago
      I don’t think I’ve seen it ACTUALLY be anything but B in the real world, but theoretically, to answer your question - 1) that’s interesting! What do you consider the hardest people management issue you’ve run across? 2) what is the people management problem you think most people overrate in difficulty? It usually will surface if they, for instance, consider people management easy because they have zero emotional affect and hence never bear any emotional load, or if they’ve been bless by ignorance and don’t see the work their peer and senior managers are doing to avoid them setting everything on fire, or never consider coaching or growth of someone to be a problem - because they never do it.
  - brandall10 6y ago
    I'm going to pile on here with the others. If you're legitimately a people manager (not a low grade 'team lead'), there is no way, no how, you could have 80% free time. I've been doing this for some 23 years and had a stint as a proper manager for a year, where I spent about 20% of my time coding, and I was more starved for time than just about any other phase in my career. I'm currently a principal eng/ arch at a mid-size medical device company, and my principal eng/people manager complement, perhaps one of the strongest devs I've ever encountered (close to a fabled 10x dev), barely has time to code at all. He's just slammed all day every day with general meetings, doing 1-on-1s, presentation prep, working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc, it just kills his day for anything more than tiny bits of coding here and there, and because he is such a great dev, he does provide meaningful contributions. I have worked at small startups where things are a bit better, but I can't recall ever seeing a case where a good manager has more than 1/3 of their time to code. 80% dead time would mean hardly managing at all.
    - username90 6y ago
      > general meetings, presentation prep, working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc You as a manager don't need to do all that. If you can't delegate most of that to reports then you have a problem.
      - lazide 6y ago
        In most companies, once you’ve built or found the people to delegate that too, and handed it off successfully - congrats, you’ve demonstrated you can handle the next level and you get the next round of challenges. If you’re sitting around with nothing to do, either you’re in a dead end, or no one actually trusts you with more once you’ve ‘succeeded’ because you’ve burned too many bridges or alienated key people - even if the org chart looks good. Of course if someone is finding themselves in that churn all day for any length of time, you are quite correct - they are busy not succeeding.
        6y ago
  - morganherlocker 6y ago
    As an EM, 20% of time spent on project management sounds about right. What you are overlooking is the time spent managing the people on a team. Hiring, recruiting, promotions, coordinating parental leave, working out visas with immigration attorneys, check ins, comp adjustments, etc all take immense time and energy to do properly. It’s a full time job and then some.
  - mlboss 6y ago
    There was a post on HN few months back where the author listed atleast 30 tasks that a manager should be doing. The list included planning, mentorship, motivating team, hiring, communicating to higher management etc. It was a long list. I don't thing any person doing those task can also be a competent programmer.
    - Schwolop 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358795 might well be what you're referring to. It was a great comment!
marcinzm 6y ago
A manager is only a role model if the promotion structure is Engineer->Manager. At most modern tech companies that is not the main promotion structure. It's Engineer->Senior Engineer->Staff Engineer->Etc. Engineering management is a different path you can choose just like you can become a product manager but it is not the expected path.
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  I can't say I've ever been in a company where the path wasn't either: Engineer -> Senior -> Principal -> Staff -> Distinguished OR Engineer -> Senior? -> Manager -> Senior Manager -> Director In both scenarios though, they've been a more senior engineer.
  - scruple 6y ago
    I've seen people go from Engineer to Manager, skipping over, for want of better phrasing, the senior engineering ranks. In both cases it went poorly and a founders child was involved, indirectly at first and then later directly.
    - angrais 6y ago
      What do you mean a founders child was involved? Was that the person who skipped the senior rank?
      - scruple 6y ago
        One of the founders children was hired on to a low ranking managers team as an entry level Software Engineer. They were hired specifically by the low ranking manager and without the typical interview process. That low ranking manager, inside of a calendar year, became the director of an entirely new division in the engineering org. That division eventually went defunct, having never shipped a single product to production or having accomplished anything else of note. The other was a founders child being promoted from SE I or SE II into a middle management role. That also did not end well.
ska 6y ago
> ... as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career. There is no reason this has to be your manager. Your managers job was to understand that this was something you needed, and find a way to try and provide it for you; it's unfortunate that didn't happen for you. > It's my goal as a manager to be that manager Can I make a suggestion? As a manager it's important that you respond to what your team actually needs, rather than your perception of what you would have needed in their place. There are a number of ways to do this well, and a much larger number of ways to mess it up.
ska 6y ago
> I wanted a role model to learn from Another general comment on this theme. In my experience people making the engineer to manager transition typically need a mentor and guidance in management even more than they ever needed a technical mentor.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kvutza 6y ago
I guess you talk about group leaders, not project managers. Group leaders are from developers, with added responsibilities (and that means with added work).

blacktriangle 6y ago

The thing is that role model should not be your manager, it should be a senior developer. A good manager is not a role model to teach you, a good manager realizes the importance of lowly engineers having role models and creates a structured mentorship program to make sure that need is being met.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
I don't understand why managers cannot fulfill both roles though? The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it). Outside of the project management responsibilities, there is a lot of time doing nothing. If I wasn't coding, as a manager, 80% of the time I would sit around doing nothing. I strongly believe that managers should be able to fulfill both roles but maybe it's just because I've been burned by so many managers in the past.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I've been a manager for a while and at best I get 20% time to code. With 8+ reports the weeks tends to break down into: * 20% for 1-on-1s and dealing with management level issues people bring up. * 20% spent on hiring * 20% on various status meetings (team, cross-team, with my boss, etc.) * 20% spent on pro-actively finding or solving issues before the explode. This includes networking with my counterparts in the rest of the org so I get information and build political capital.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    20% on hiring with 8 reports?
    - pnut 6y ago
      Engineering manager's reports are team leads, so that's like 40-50 people probably. Plus any cross-discipline interviewing.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      Startup so quickly growing team and less recruiting support. Stabler team in a large org would have less hiring but more meetings.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  >The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it). Where do you work? Sign me up! I have hardly any time to code after weekly sprint-related ceremonies, 1:1's, cycle planning, and architecture and code reviews. The job of management, like the job of any developer, varies from company to company, and situation to situation. Thankfully, the people side of my job as a manager is easy right now, but only because the people I manage are reasonable people to work with, and well receptive to feedback. It was very difficult last year when I had to work through more delicate relationships between the employee and employer. As always, it comes down to people. It also sounds like the place you may be managing at may not be challenging enough for you. Perhaps it's time to make a change?
  - virtue3 6y ago
    Your job isn't to code anymore homie. It all becomes a bunch of soft targets as a manager and that's really hard. The one big success I had when I was a manager was getting our client teams to unify on the bugs they were having and to be much more cohesive. When I first got there the android and ios and web people never talked and refused to believe they had the same types of issues/bugs. LOL. I ultimately hated it because really... I don't want to yell at people for being late to standup, so went back to engineering.
- dairem 6y ago
  I'm an engineering manager and find it hard to relate to this. With 1:1s, ops reviews, planning, retros, design reviews, support syncs, etc., I have ~6-10 hours of meetings per day - then for non-meeting work I'm writing roadmaps, interviewing, managing escalations, doing project management, status reports, etc. How do you have 80% of your time free as a manager after this? I think that makes sense to code if you have that time, but my experience is that having that much time available as a manager would be an outlier.
- afarrell 6y ago
  Question for HN: If you were talking with someone at a conference and heard him say > The job of management isn't hard (I'm doing it) What signals would you look for to tell the difference between these two possibilities? A. This person has so much tacit knowledge of good management that they don't realise how much skill they are applying day-to-day. B. This person has zero awareness of how their team is burning out underneath them.
  - bitL 6y ago
    Would you consider the possibility that you might have done it wrong all the time and all your previous managers taught you the wrong way?
  - theptip 6y ago
    A well formulated question! I’d ask a few questions about the bits of management that I think are hard. How do you get your team aligned on the company’s priorities as they shift? How do you foster growth? How do you assess who needs to be promoted/given a raise? How do you handle feedback for employees that aren’t doing well, or aren’t meeting your expectations (or even harder, employees who think they should be promoted but you think are just solid at their current level)? And the big/meta one - what do you think the job of a manager is? (Could just be a semantic disconnect on what the job entails).
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    There’s also C. It’s just a small, experienced team, and doesn’t need much management to be successful in the first place.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lazide 6y ago
    I don’t think I’ve seen it ACTUALLY be anything but B in the real world, but theoretically, to answer your question - 1) that’s interesting! What do you consider the hardest people management issue you’ve run across? 2) what is the people management problem you think most people overrate in difficulty? It usually will surface if they, for instance, consider people management easy because they have zero emotional affect and hence never bear any emotional load, or if they’ve been bless by ignorance and don’t see the work their peer and senior managers are doing to avoid them setting everything on fire, or never consider coaching or growth of someone to be a problem - because they never do it.
- brandall10 6y ago
  I'm going to pile on here with the others. If you're legitimately a people manager (not a low grade 'team lead'), there is no way, no how, you could have 80% free time. I've been doing this for some 23 years and had a stint as a proper manager for a year, where I spent about 20% of my time coding, and I was more starved for time than just about any other phase in my career. I'm currently a principal eng/ arch at a mid-size medical device company, and my principal eng/people manager complement, perhaps one of the strongest devs I've ever encountered (close to a fabled 10x dev), barely has time to code at all. He's just slammed all day every day with general meetings, doing 1-on-1s, presentation prep, working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc, it just kills his day for anything more than tiny bits of coding here and there, and because he is such a great dev, he does provide meaningful contributions. I have worked at small startups where things are a bit better, but I can't recall ever seeing a case where a good manager has more than 1/3 of their time to code. 80% dead time would mean hardly managing at all.
  - username90 6y ago
    > general meetings, presentation prep, working on process improvements, Scrum/product owners for backlog grooming, interfacing with other managers, etc You as a manager don't need to do all that. If you can't delegate most of that to reports then you have a problem.
    - lazide 6y ago
      In most companies, once you’ve built or found the people to delegate that too, and handed it off successfully - congrats, you’ve demonstrated you can handle the next level and you get the next round of challenges. If you’re sitting around with nothing to do, either you’re in a dead end, or no one actually trusts you with more once you’ve ‘succeeded’ because you’ve burned too many bridges or alienated key people - even if the org chart looks good. Of course if someone is finding themselves in that churn all day for any length of time, you are quite correct - they are busy not succeeding.
      - 6y ago
- morganherlocker 6y ago
  As an EM, 20% of time spent on project management sounds about right. What you are overlooking is the time spent managing the people on a team. Hiring, recruiting, promotions, coordinating parental leave, working out visas with immigration attorneys, check ins, comp adjustments, etc all take immense time and energy to do properly. It’s a full time job and then some.
- mlboss 6y ago
  There was a post on HN few months back where the author listed atleast 30 tasks that a manager should be doing. The list included planning, mentorship, motivating team, hiring, communicating to higher management etc. It was a long list. I don't thing any person doing those task can also be a competent programmer.
  - Schwolop 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358795 might well be what you're referring to. It was a great comment!

marcinzm 6y ago

A manager is only a role model if the promotion structure is Engineer->Manager. At most modern tech companies that is not the main promotion structure. It's Engineer->Senior Engineer->Staff Engineer->Etc. Engineering management is a different path you can choose just like you can become a product manager but it is not the expected path.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
I can't say I've ever been in a company where the path wasn't either: Engineer -> Senior -> Principal -> Staff -> Distinguished OR Engineer -> Senior? -> Manager -> Senior Manager -> Director In both scenarios though, they've been a more senior engineer.
- scruple 6y ago
  I've seen people go from Engineer to Manager, skipping over, for want of better phrasing, the senior engineering ranks. In both cases it went poorly and a founders child was involved, indirectly at first and then later directly.
  - angrais 6y ago
    What do you mean a founders child was involved? Was that the person who skipped the senior rank?
    - scruple 6y ago
      One of the founders children was hired on to a low ranking managers team as an entry level Software Engineer. They were hired specifically by the low ranking manager and without the typical interview process. That low ranking manager, inside of a calendar year, became the director of an entirely new division in the engineering org. That division eventually went defunct, having never shipped a single product to production or having accomplished anything else of note. The other was a founders child being promoted from SE I or SE II into a middle management role. That also did not end well.

ska 6y ago

> ... as a lowly engineer was I wanted a role model to learn from and help upskill my career. There is no reason this has to be your manager. Your managers job was to understand that this was something you needed, and find a way to try and provide it for you; it's unfortunate that didn't happen for you. > It's my goal as a manager to be that manager Can I make a suggestion? As a manager it's important that you respond to what your team actually needs, rather than your perception of what you would have needed in their place. There are a number of ways to do this well, and a much larger number of ways to mess it up.

ska 6y ago

> I wanted a role model to learn from Another general comment on this theme. In my experience people making the engineer to manager transition typically need a mentor and guidance in management even more than they ever needed a technical mentor.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

kvutza 6y ago

I guess you talk about group leaders, not project managers. Group leaders are from developers, with added responsibilities (and that means with added work).