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> unless you happen to have been born with natural leadership skills (you probably haven’t) Leadership skills are important, but I disagree that leadership is

> unless you happen to have been born with natural leadership skills (you probably haven’t) Leadership skills are important, but I disagree that leadership is something you’re either born with or not. Leadership can be taught, learned, and practiced. The real issue is that a lot of people who are pushed or drawn into management roles don’t actually like managing or leading. Some are pushed into management because they’re the most competent IC on the team. Others are drawn to management for the perceived prestige or possible career advancement. Some common failure modes for engineers turned managers: 1. A person who enjoys quietly coding alone for hours at a time is not going to like being removed from the code to do management work 2. Anyone who dismisses relationship building and diplomacy as “office politics” or “brown nosing” is going to struggle to build the required relationships to get things done as a manager. 3. People who get exhausted from context switching or juggling multiple topics will hate the manager’s schedule. 4. People who loathe meetings are going to be miserable as managers. 5. Anyone who struggles to have difficult conversations, broach uncomfortable topics, or confront people who are causing problems is going to struggle to lead. 6. People who assume they’ll naturally be good at leadership or management won’t learn the necessary skills fast enough, unless their company forces it on them. There are many good resources for learning management and leadership skills, but it’s not uncommon for first time managers to assume they’ll learn it on the fly.

gfodor 6y ago
I would argue pretty strongly that if you are not a natural leader, the road to development of leadership is paved by domain knowledge which lets you get respect “for free” to leverage to ratchet up those skills. So I’ll adjust what I said to mean you are racing against your engineering skill atrophy to develop those leadership skills. Once you can’t code anymore, it gets a lot harder to do so.
fatnoah 6y ago
>The real issue is that a lot of people who are pushed or drawn into management roles don’t actually like managing or leading. Some are pushed into management because they’re the most competent IC on the team I think this is spot-on. People, for whatever reason, view management as the next step of a career when it's actually a career change. Yes, it's in the same domain, but it's a totally different job. I've done the transition from IC to Manager, back to IC, and then back to Manager again. Unless you like and want to do "manager" things, you're going to have a bad time.
- coding123 6y ago
  Ugh and it's not usually their fault. Too many orgs are promoting this by making manager pay higher. In a sense higher pay is the career goal. Why stay in coding when you can get a 30k bump for coding plus whipping people?
- dreamer7 6y ago
  I'm curious. Multiple back and forth seems to indicate that you missed your previous role. Was that why you made multiple shifts? Or were they just different opportunities?
- ImprovedSilence 6y ago
  I agree here to that this is the exact issue. I will also add though that I think there is another dimension as well. I think much perceived middle manager "incompetence" stems from middle management juggling direction/pressure/expectations from senior management, and the realities of the program and the engineers. The best managers are capable of managing expectations from above while keeping their team shielded from all that overhead and just keeping the team chugging along and being productive. Other managers seem to have the ability to weigh their team down by allowing too much of the "managment overhead tasks" to leak down to individual engineers. I've seen this vary across programs and managers, and can't say I know all the answers, but I do know I much prefer the role of the IC....
  - yaml-ops-guy 6y ago
    How have you found success balancing these things? It’s been my experience that managers of the first group eventually become unintentional members of the second group, even despite their best efforts to maintain productivity of their subordinates with intentional prioritization and grooming exercises because the business wants that new feature yesterday, and not getting it means lost revenue, angry customers and negative performance reviews. What happens though when the business puts these types of middle managers in the impossible position of not being able to say “no, this isn’t a priority right now” but still expected to maintain the same amounts of engineering productivity and feature throughput? I didn’t write this article, but it sums up my headspace, currently: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-doing-more-less-2019-matt-fawcett https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-doing-more-less-2019-mat...
bzzt 6y ago
I don't get it, doesn't everyone dislike/struggle with these things? Who likes context switching, office politics, sitting in meetings and having difficult conversations
- bulek 6y ago
  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- gfodor 6y ago
  The truth is that if you’re a manager who has no other marketable skills, you can only hate pointless meetings so much since without them you’d probably be putting your resume in down at the local Starbucks. Clear an engineer’s calendar and you probably make a more productive engineer, clear a manager’s calendar and regardless of the consequences to everyone else one thing is sure: that person’s job function is no longer obvious. If you’re in sanitation, you have a more nuanced relationship with trash than those who aren’t, even though everyone dislikes trash.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    Good managers should abhor pointless meetings as much as anyone else - their task is to make useful meetings. Anything else is just a waste of time and wasting everyone’s time is not exactly the hallmark of a good manager. Now, there’s people that hate all meetings and regard them all as a waste of time and if you’re one of those, you’ll never acquire the skill to actually make meetings useful - this is a skill which needs training like any other skill does.
    - gfodor 6y ago
      If you work in an organization where such meetings are the norm, please share what led to such a magical place. I've heard Amazon is such a place but I'm very skeptical. My general presumption based upon years in the industry is that by far the majority of scheduled, large block meetings are not worth the opportunity cost of having them. Effective meetings don't come from an individual transforming normally ineffective ones into effective ones by some form of wizardry over everyone else in the room, they come from a culture where everyone makes them effective together through shared values. In a large enough organization, this seems basically intractable to maintain. IMO the only way to win is to not play and move most meetings to short, unscheduled ones with timeboxes in conjunction with asynchronous communication tools.
gopalv 6y ago
> Some are pushed into management because they’re the most competent IC on the team. So Plato's Republic describes how this comes about since ancient times, I wrote something a bit more detailed[1] about it. But here's the TL;DR - the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help ... because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. Some are pulled into management because of the existing mastery and a looming management vacuum. This isn't something new in tech - it has always been that competent people leave their mastery work to do management (rather politics of ensuring funding), because they see no other choice. Until I found a manager who was better than I was (and once I understood how they did it and what they did all day), I did think in very similar lines, a little bit aided by the "I'm a smart guy" ego clouding my judgement. [1] - http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/leading-up?h=1 http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/leading-up?h=1
- Aeolun 6y ago
  This is definitely true for me. I cannot imagine wanting to inflict some of the managers I’ve had on the members of my team. Better me than the chance of someone worse (and I’m pretty bad, I just judge the chance of someone worse taking it up if I stop to be higher).
samvher 6y ago
Do you have recommendations for how to go about 6? I've been moving into a more manager-like role and your list makes me a bit worried, though I was already considering this to be somewhat temporary. So far it's been a valuable experience though (harder than I thought). About 2 - I actually really enjoy relationship building. However, if you have issues like nepotism or problems around equity in the organization, I think it can be really hard to have to work with people who make decisions that you find distasteful. That's the main thing that makes me miss the solitude of coding.
airhead969 6y ago
Yep. One of the biggest hurdles is most people don't want to be responsible for thinking for themselves, their judgment, and their decisions. And then poo-pooing things outside of their current role that they either don't understand or don't appreciate. In large orgs, I think one day a month staff should have to intern in a random department to appreciate what others have to go through to build morale and empathy. A good leader is a humble, messianic therapist, salesperson, and accountant.

gfodor 6y ago

I would argue pretty strongly that if you are not a natural leader, the road to development of leadership is paved by domain knowledge which lets you get respect “for free” to leverage to ratchet up those skills. So I’ll adjust what I said to mean you are racing against your engineering skill atrophy to develop those leadership skills. Once you can’t code anymore, it gets a lot harder to do so.

fatnoah 6y ago

>The real issue is that a lot of people who are pushed or drawn into management roles don’t actually like managing or leading. Some are pushed into management because they’re the most competent IC on the team I think this is spot-on. People, for whatever reason, view management as the next step of a career when it's actually a career change. Yes, it's in the same domain, but it's a totally different job. I've done the transition from IC to Manager, back to IC, and then back to Manager again. Unless you like and want to do "manager" things, you're going to have a bad time.

coding123 6y ago
Ugh and it's not usually their fault. Too many orgs are promoting this by making manager pay higher. In a sense higher pay is the career goal. Why stay in coding when you can get a 30k bump for coding plus whipping people?
dreamer7 6y ago
I'm curious. Multiple back and forth seems to indicate that you missed your previous role. Was that why you made multiple shifts? Or were they just different opportunities?
ImprovedSilence 6y ago
I agree here to that this is the exact issue. I will also add though that I think there is another dimension as well. I think much perceived middle manager "incompetence" stems from middle management juggling direction/pressure/expectations from senior management, and the realities of the program and the engineers. The best managers are capable of managing expectations from above while keeping their team shielded from all that overhead and just keeping the team chugging along and being productive. Other managers seem to have the ability to weigh their team down by allowing too much of the "managment overhead tasks" to leak down to individual engineers. I've seen this vary across programs and managers, and can't say I know all the answers, but I do know I much prefer the role of the IC....
- yaml-ops-guy 6y ago
  How have you found success balancing these things? It’s been my experience that managers of the first group eventually become unintentional members of the second group, even despite their best efforts to maintain productivity of their subordinates with intentional prioritization and grooming exercises because the business wants that new feature yesterday, and not getting it means lost revenue, angry customers and negative performance reviews. What happens though when the business puts these types of middle managers in the impossible position of not being able to say “no, this isn’t a priority right now” but still expected to maintain the same amounts of engineering productivity and feature throughput? I didn’t write this article, but it sums up my headspace, currently: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-doing-more-less-2019-matt-fawcett https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-doing-more-less-2019-mat...

bzzt 6y ago

I don't get it, doesn't everyone dislike/struggle with these things? Who likes context switching, office politics, sitting in meetings and having difficult conversations

bulek 6y ago
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
gfodor 6y ago
The truth is that if you’re a manager who has no other marketable skills, you can only hate pointless meetings so much since without them you’d probably be putting your resume in down at the local Starbucks. Clear an engineer’s calendar and you probably make a more productive engineer, clear a manager’s calendar and regardless of the consequences to everyone else one thing is sure: that person’s job function is no longer obvious. If you’re in sanitation, you have a more nuanced relationship with trash than those who aren’t, even though everyone dislikes trash.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  Good managers should abhor pointless meetings as much as anyone else - their task is to make useful meetings. Anything else is just a waste of time and wasting everyone’s time is not exactly the hallmark of a good manager. Now, there’s people that hate all meetings and regard them all as a waste of time and if you’re one of those, you’ll never acquire the skill to actually make meetings useful - this is a skill which needs training like any other skill does.
  - gfodor 6y ago
    If you work in an organization where such meetings are the norm, please share what led to such a magical place. I've heard Amazon is such a place but I'm very skeptical. My general presumption based upon years in the industry is that by far the majority of scheduled, large block meetings are not worth the opportunity cost of having them. Effective meetings don't come from an individual transforming normally ineffective ones into effective ones by some form of wizardry over everyone else in the room, they come from a culture where everyone makes them effective together through shared values. In a large enough organization, this seems basically intractable to maintain. IMO the only way to win is to not play and move most meetings to short, unscheduled ones with timeboxes in conjunction with asynchronous communication tools.

gopalv 6y ago

> Some are pushed into management because they’re the most competent IC on the team. So Plato's Republic describes how this comes about since ancient times, I wrote something a bit more detailed[1] about it. But here's the TL;DR - the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help ... because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. Some are pulled into management because of the existing mastery and a looming management vacuum. This isn't something new in tech - it has always been that competent people leave their mastery work to do management (rather politics of ensuring funding), because they see no other choice. Until I found a manager who was better than I was (and once I understood how they did it and what they did all day), I did think in very similar lines, a little bit aided by the "I'm a smart guy" ego clouding my judgement. [1] - http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/leading-up?h=1 http://notmysock.org/blog/philosophy/leading-up?h=1

Aeolun 6y ago
This is definitely true for me. I cannot imagine wanting to inflict some of the managers I’ve had on the members of my team. Better me than the chance of someone worse (and I’m pretty bad, I just judge the chance of someone worse taking it up if I stop to be higher).

samvher 6y ago

Do you have recommendations for how to go about 6? I've been moving into a more manager-like role and your list makes me a bit worried, though I was already considering this to be somewhat temporary. So far it's been a valuable experience though (harder than I thought). About 2 - I actually really enjoy relationship building. However, if you have issues like nepotism or problems around equity in the organization, I think it can be really hard to have to work with people who make decisions that you find distasteful. That's the main thing that makes me miss the solitude of coding.

airhead969 6y ago

Yep. One of the biggest hurdles is most people don't want to be responsible for thinking for themselves, their judgment, and their decisions. And then poo-pooing things outside of their current role that they either don't understand or don't appreciate. In large orgs, I think one day a month staff should have to intern in a random department to appreciate what others have to go through to build morale and empathy. A good leader is a humble, messianic therapist, salesperson, and accountant.