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I'm sorry you've had that experience. In my early career, I never had any managers, we were just "the developers" and left to figure stuff out on our own.. Bu

by sbarre 5y ago

I'm sorry you've had that experience. In my early career, I never had any managers, we were just "the developers" and left to figure stuff out on our own.. But in the last 5 years of my coding career, I had some excellent managers who really helped me grow and do my best work, which is what inspired me to go that route myself and try to do the same for other developers who are earlier in their careers. I will say, there actually is formal management education. It's just not often a requirement for promoting developers into management positions, and a lot of time the people who get put into those manager positions are either the least-good coders, or people who don't want the job but take it to get the promotion and (maybe) salary increase. And once they're in the roles, they are not properly trained or supported in the new skills they absolutely need to do a good job. That's not a recipe for success... but it's also an organizational problem just as much as an individual problem.

fnord77 5y ago
is there a formal engineering management education, though? at the risk of sounding exceptionalistic, I think managing engineers is a different beast than managing other roles
- sbarre 5y ago
  That's very exceptionalistic (to stick with your word). You could apply this logic to any practitioner discipline, like medicine, research, sports, construction, cooking, etc.. Of course someone with practitioner experience will be (or appear?) better able to manage people doing that work, because they understand the finer details. But people management itself is also a learned skill, and that's where in my experience companies fall down on the training sometimes. They assume that the practitioner experience and the seniority is enough, and it's not. Then there's the whole empathy/EQ side of things. Being a manager requires a ton of emotional labour and that's not for everyone.

by sbarre 5y ago

fnord77 5y ago

is there a formal engineering management education, though? at the risk of sounding exceptionalistic, I think managing engineers is a different beast than managing other roles

sbarre 5y ago
That's very exceptionalistic (to stick with your word). You could apply this logic to any practitioner discipline, like medicine, research, sports, construction, cooking, etc.. Of course someone with practitioner experience will be (or appear?) better able to manage people doing that work, because they understand the finer details. But people management itself is also a learned skill, and that's where in my experience companies fall down on the training sometimes. They assume that the practitioner experience and the seniority is enough, and it's not. Then there's the whole empathy/EQ side of things. Being a manager requires a ton of emotional labour and that's not for everyone.