7 ms·

>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 b

>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...
  - SergeAx 6y ago
    > business wants that new feature yesterday, and not getting it means lost revenue That's just plain bad planning on a business side of the company. They should either fix that, or face gradual departure of their workforce, from best to mediocre.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > not getting it means lost revenue, angry customers and negative performance reviews Staying in exactly the same place won’t affect revenue, customers or performance reviews at all. It’s when people work under the mistaken assumption that they have to increase at all costs that you have a problem.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Organizations should strive to: - reduce Peter Principle and pyramid org-chart building - retain, train, and invest in good managers as a profession, not a will to power - hire more administrative and secretarial people to navigate the minutia to unblock highly-paid employees from finding answers in the bureaucracy and doing unnecessarily-dumb paperwork
gfodor 6y ago
I don't agree with this. I enjoy management and coding. However, when I'm in a manager role, I consider contributing with coding to be an essential part of the job, to maintain my ability to lead the team with credibility, truly understand what their job is like, and differentiate myself relative to other managers, who by and large have bought into the narrative they can't and shouldn't try to code. This cuts directly against the narrative by the article, and the narrative of the article is the common one. The argument seems to be "you just don't have enough time to do both well!" but in general, there's no free lunch here, you are choosing between different trade-offs. Management is hard no matter what, but if you already have the skill to contribute to a team's efforts, you're not just leaving money on the table you're lighting it on fire by abandoning it by letting yourself atrophy into becoming a manager who's skill stack is shallowly scoped to people management and leadership skills. Whenever you see a commonly held narrative like this that has clear negative consequences to those acting on it, all other things being equal it pays to be contrarian as long as you don't fall into the obvious traps, since you're going to differentiate yourself. I'm surely not the best manager and I'm sure I suck at a lot of it, but everyone does somehow. I'll go head to head anytime with an engineering manager who doesn't ship anything anymore any day of the week in terms of who engineers would rather have as their leader when building something difficult.
- humanlion87 6y ago
  I would like to add my perspective as an IC who is reporting to a technically-focused manager. I feel frustrated that my manager does not spend even 10% of the time they spend coding on coaching/guiding/giving feedback to me. I feel that part is more important aspect of being a manager compared to churning out code. I understand the need to keep on top of the codebase, especially when coding is something you really like. But if you don't spend enough time on the growth of your reports (amongst other responsibilities of a manager), why bother becoming a manager? Edit: Just to clarify, the question in my post is kind of directed to my manager and not to parent commenter :)
  - gfodor 6y ago
    Yeah I think this just shows the trade-offs. The path forward for your manager here is to grok they need to turn the dial, at least in their relationship with you. What I reject is the idea that the dial needs to be dialed all the way away from coding, especially permanently, or that doing so is not without immense costs. It certainly makes the job of a manager harder when you are forced to reckon with the fact that you can't just throw out coding without it undermining your ability to be a good manager. In practice, I would try to ebb-and-flow with the teams' needs - it's a dynamic, challenging process. Also, there's a tricky issue of, as a report, being able to identify what is intentional vs unintentional. Your manager is probably failing you, but there's also a chance they are forcing you to grow by disengaging a bit and letting you fall into a few ditches. Sometimes a good coach will just shut up and let you make mistakes. Until you see the net effect of their behavior on you over an extended period, you can't know if you have a good coach who is pushing you in a way that you can't see, or a bad coach who is just failing you. A lot of people with good coaches resent them in the early days for being too hard, too disengaged, or other things, which forces them to push themselves harder.
mattbk1 6y ago
I was pushed into it because they needed a supervisor in that position. I might be a decent leader from a technical standpoint, but not a good manager after a year into it.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Yep. It doesn't scale well. Technical lead != technical manager. It's also myopic because it's two jobs and two completely different professions.
  - HellDunkel 6y ago
    What is a technical manager?
    - airhead969 6y ago
      Manager of technical people. I guess we could recast the term "technical manager" as "one who attempts to both do and manage."
      - HellDunkel 6y ago
        Guess it all boils down to management vs leadership. I just wish we could go back to not calling every second employee a manager of something. „manager of technical people“ is great example. You would expect a technical person who the team respects with equally great management skills, farsight and vision.

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...
- SergeAx 6y ago
  > business wants that new feature yesterday, and not getting it means lost revenue That's just plain bad planning on a business side of the company. They should either fix that, or face gradual departure of their workforce, from best to mediocre.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > not getting it means lost revenue, angry customers and negative performance reviews Staying in exactly the same place won’t affect revenue, customers or performance reviews at all. It’s when people work under the mistaken assumption that they have to increase at all costs that you have a problem.
airhead969 6y ago
Organizations should strive to: - reduce Peter Principle and pyramid org-chart building - retain, train, and invest in good managers as a profession, not a will to power - hire more administrative and secretarial people to navigate the minutia to unblock highly-paid employees from finding answers in the bureaucracy and doing unnecessarily-dumb paperwork

gfodor 6y ago

I don't agree with this. I enjoy management and coding. However, when I'm in a manager role, I consider contributing with coding to be an essential part of the job, to maintain my ability to lead the team with credibility, truly understand what their job is like, and differentiate myself relative to other managers, who by and large have bought into the narrative they can't and shouldn't try to code. This cuts directly against the narrative by the article, and the narrative of the article is the common one. The argument seems to be "you just don't have enough time to do both well!" but in general, there's no free lunch here, you are choosing between different trade-offs. Management is hard no matter what, but if you already have the skill to contribute to a team's efforts, you're not just leaving money on the table you're lighting it on fire by abandoning it by letting yourself atrophy into becoming a manager who's skill stack is shallowly scoped to people management and leadership skills. Whenever you see a commonly held narrative like this that has clear negative consequences to those acting on it, all other things being equal it pays to be contrarian as long as you don't fall into the obvious traps, since you're going to differentiate yourself. I'm surely not the best manager and I'm sure I suck at a lot of it, but everyone does somehow. I'll go head to head anytime with an engineering manager who doesn't ship anything anymore any day of the week in terms of who engineers would rather have as their leader when building something difficult.

humanlion87 6y ago
I would like to add my perspective as an IC who is reporting to a technically-focused manager. I feel frustrated that my manager does not spend even 10% of the time they spend coding on coaching/guiding/giving feedback to me. I feel that part is more important aspect of being a manager compared to churning out code. I understand the need to keep on top of the codebase, especially when coding is something you really like. But if you don't spend enough time on the growth of your reports (amongst other responsibilities of a manager), why bother becoming a manager? Edit: Just to clarify, the question in my post is kind of directed to my manager and not to parent commenter :)
- gfodor 6y ago
  Yeah I think this just shows the trade-offs. The path forward for your manager here is to grok they need to turn the dial, at least in their relationship with you. What I reject is the idea that the dial needs to be dialed all the way away from coding, especially permanently, or that doing so is not without immense costs. It certainly makes the job of a manager harder when you are forced to reckon with the fact that you can't just throw out coding without it undermining your ability to be a good manager. In practice, I would try to ebb-and-flow with the teams' needs - it's a dynamic, challenging process. Also, there's a tricky issue of, as a report, being able to identify what is intentional vs unintentional. Your manager is probably failing you, but there's also a chance they are forcing you to grow by disengaging a bit and letting you fall into a few ditches. Sometimes a good coach will just shut up and let you make mistakes. Until you see the net effect of their behavior on you over an extended period, you can't know if you have a good coach who is pushing you in a way that you can't see, or a bad coach who is just failing you. A lot of people with good coaches resent them in the early days for being too hard, too disengaged, or other things, which forces them to push themselves harder.

mattbk1 6y ago

I was pushed into it because they needed a supervisor in that position. I might be a decent leader from a technical standpoint, but not a good manager after a year into it.

airhead969 6y ago
Yep. It doesn't scale well. Technical lead != technical manager. It's also myopic because it's two jobs and two completely different professions.
- HellDunkel 6y ago
  What is a technical manager?
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Manager of technical people. I guess we could recast the term "technical manager" as "one who attempts to both do and manage."
    - HellDunkel 6y ago
      Guess it all boils down to management vs leadership. I just wish we could go back to not calling every second employee a manager of something. „manager of technical people“ is great example. You would expect a technical person who the team respects with equally great management skills, farsight and vision.