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Strong disagree. Many hospital directors still have enough respect for themselves and their profession to see patients. Engineering managers should be no differ

Strong disagree. Many hospital directors still have enough respect for themselves and their profession to see patients. Engineering managers should be no different. A manager who can't deeply understand what their team is doing has no business overseeing any work they do. They could be replaced with a non-technical BA who can do one-on-ones and approve vacations. The only way to deeply understand the work is to do it daily. A hands-off engineering manager instantly starts to lose value as their skills degrade rapidly. A hands off engineering manager is like an editor-in-chief of a newspaper who doesn't think they should have to read and write to be "an effective leader". That is the absurdity of an engineering manager who "stops coding to focus on management." The idea that management is some higher calling beyond lowly technical skills is marketing sold by business schools to justify minting graduates completely unprepared for real leadership. It's a salve to tell their students it's ok they aren't willing to put in the hard work to become technical experts. I can't tell you how many former CS majors who, after switching to business, laughed that they'd be my boss one day, only to find themselves doing retail and office work while I was an becoming an engineering director.

nojito 6y ago
Funny you mention healthcare because I work in healthcare and you’ll be hard pressed to find a hospital administrator with a clinical background or one who still sees patients. Now medical directors sure but their patient load is minuscule and everyone in healthcare knows that the best care is from the person who does the procedure everyday vs once in a blue moon. You’re simply conflating project/product managers with engineering managers. The very best and highest compensated engineering managers do not code anymore and are excellent at managing people and making them productive.
- JackMorgan 6y ago
  I'd like to see what data you use for the claim that the very best engineering managers do not code any more. The idea the person who is chosen by the company to assess and compensate highest performers is also rapidly losing the ability to understand deeply the work being produced seems like a perfect recipe for producing random results. An editor in chief who stops reading and writing to focus on "managing" a bunch of writers cannot effectively know which ones are producing poor work, other than by asking the rest of the writers in a Survivor-style "who gets voted off" competition. Many times in my management career I've seen engineers who weren't really very well liked be my best performers, but I only knew that because I could actually understand exactly what they were doing and why. They weren't liked because they made everyone else look bad. Had I been code illiterate (a process that takes maybe five years, tops) my only option would have been to listen to the rest of the team and push them out. And this isn't about lines of code, or tickets finished, so it can't be easily measured with Jira. If an engineering manager is spending so much time "managing" that they cannot write code to stay current then they are in crises: either inherited, self made as job security, or just lack of skill.

nojito 6y ago

Funny you mention healthcare because I work in healthcare and you’ll be hard pressed to find a hospital administrator with a clinical background or one who still sees patients. Now medical directors sure but their patient load is minuscule and everyone in healthcare knows that the best care is from the person who does the procedure everyday vs once in a blue moon. You’re simply conflating project/product managers with engineering managers. The very best and highest compensated engineering managers do not code anymore and are excellent at managing people and making them productive.

JackMorgan 6y ago
I'd like to see what data you use for the claim that the very best engineering managers do not code any more. The idea the person who is chosen by the company to assess and compensate highest performers is also rapidly losing the ability to understand deeply the work being produced seems like a perfect recipe for producing random results. An editor in chief who stops reading and writing to focus on "managing" a bunch of writers cannot effectively know which ones are producing poor work, other than by asking the rest of the writers in a Survivor-style "who gets voted off" competition. Many times in my management career I've seen engineers who weren't really very well liked be my best performers, but I only knew that because I could actually understand exactly what they were doing and why. They weren't liked because they made everyone else look bad. Had I been code illiterate (a process that takes maybe five years, tops) my only option would have been to listen to the rest of the team and push them out. And this isn't about lines of code, or tickets finished, so it can't be easily measured with Jira. If an engineering manager is spending so much time "managing" that they cannot write code to stay current then they are in crises: either inherited, self made as job security, or just lack of skill.