An effective manager cares for their team, their work, and its effect beyond the immediate organization. I agree with this take, but with a whopping great cave

An effective manager cares for their team, their work, and its effect beyond the immediate organization. I agree with this take, but with a whopping great caveat - the 'team' is far bigger than the manager's direct reports. Once you accept that the team includes people like product leads, QA, and the leadership team then you start to understand why engineering management is hard. You're trying to get the best work out of your dev team of course, but you're also wrangling a whole bunch of things that intentionally make the dev team's life more difficult, whether that's discussions about the broad direction for the team to go in relative to the wider scope of the business, or the minute little nitpicky bugs that QA won't let slide.