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Growing from engineer to manager
- gillesjacobs 3y agoGot the advice from several senior architects / managers to never "grow" to manager of you deeply enjoy engineering. The skills for management and engineering are orthogonal it seems.
- gregorojstersek 3y agoYour success is now determined more by the success of your team than by your individual contributions.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agoInterested in moving from Engineer to Manager because I hope to do less work. Happy to do a few meetings, send a few emails, rather than actually having to build stuff that i don't care about. It's even better if as you say the success is determined by the team, because then also the failure can be pushed on the team. Edit: FWIW not that I want to be a bad manager. The environment is what shapes your incentives and behaviours.
- kubb 3y agoSame here, I just need to work on my sophistry skills, and learn to make loyal friends in the right places.
- roenxi 3y agoSuccess and failure are determined by the team. You as a manager would be responsible for the outcome. The thing being managed is the performance of the team. Bad performance == Bad management.
- sideway 3y agoThat's an extremely myopic and immature view of what management is. You have probably only worked with incompetent managers and your experiences reduce a role that can be both stressful and complex to nothingness.
- unicornmama 3y agoIronically, competent managers also make it look easy. Because they must understand that their mood, behavior and what they say can really impact the morale of their reports and their relationships in the organization, many display a calm and professional demeanor. To the untrained, this outward apperance obscures the fact that they work very hard to position their team for success; and navigate, mitigate or repel shitstorms.
- ralphstodomingo 3y agoExactly, what merit is there to putting a manager that pushes failure onto the team? Might as well have the team itself report to senior management if one is too eager to get out of the way.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoI've done both and I can assure you that management is not less work. In fact, you are more likely to work longer hours, and attend meetings at stupid times because that's the only slot you can get the more senior managers to meet at. However, you sound disillusioned with your work, and maybe you do need to transition into something else. A new challenge can revitalise you, and it doesn't have to be forever. I've met plenty of engineers who seem to believe that everyone else's non technical role is easy. Keep an open mind, and don't approach new opportunities with a negative attitude, or you will probably remain discontented.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> I've met plenty of engineers who seem to believe that everyone else's non technical role is easy. Not easy. But it's the difference between being the one who is approving and the one who is doing the work. The one who has some autonomy and the one who doesn't. The one who is valued and the one who isn't. Having to attend OOH meeting is less stress for me, then having to build something OOH and make it work. One requires communication, politics, the other one actual tangible deliverables. > you sound disillusioned with your work yes, you're right.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoMany years ago I did some great courses on team building and management. Also some negotiation skills and assertiveness training. They were really useful to me. Maybe that is something which might help you move into a role with more autonomy.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agothanks, i will look into it
- photonbeam 3y agoBeing glue, like building internal tools and processes, often has a lot of autonomy compared to working on a product
- sokoloff 3y agoThat’s what’s difficult about leadership: success and observable, effusive credit flows down the org chart through the manager to the team. Failure is intercepted and sticks more with the leader. Neither is 100%, but if you try to push failure 100% onto the team, you’re going to have a really bad time personally and be rightly reviled as a weak leader by your team, your peers, and your senior leaders.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> effusive credit flows down the org chart through the manager to the team not in my experience tbh. i worked 16 years as an Engineer across 6 orgs including Fang. What I saw is that the closer you are to management the more valued and rewarded you are. Simply because you are doing the management's dirty work (your influence is direct) and you have more insight into finances, so it's more difficult for them to underpay you. Credit very rarely flows down and when it does, in very generalistic way "thanks to X and Y and also the team for their efforts".
- tkiolp4 3y agoIn my experience engineers have more “free time” than eng. managers. As a senior engineer I have not many meetings per week, and the tasks I need to accomplish I can arrange time for them the best way that fits me. So, on Monday I could work fully focused, let’s say, 4h, and call it a day. On Tuesday spend 2h in meetings and another 2h to do PR reviewing… I have almost absolute control over my day, and that feeling is great. On the other hand, even though eng. managers mostly do meetings, their calendars are usually packed with them. Even worse, they may have one meeting at 8am, another at 12, and another at 4pm… that kills your day completely since you have to stay available during the whole day. Definitely something I would hate.
- taneq 3y agoMeetings filled with endless bike shedding about trivialities, bickering about specs, push and shove over changes in scope and delivery dates… and then every waking moment outside of those meetings, you’re either following up the above from previous meetings or scheduling new ones. Not a fun time.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoThe flip side is if it’s “crunch time” it’s not the manager that needs to work 12 hours or weekends to get something shipped.
- AQuantized 3y agoThat should never happen at any 'good' company imo, and I haven't personally experienced it.
- lanstin 3y agoIf it is a project I strongly believe in and mostly said we should do, and it is more fun than frustrating, I will get into big focus and work or think about it continually until it is finished, then I slump and relax for a while, going around and bragging to my friends and writing docs and maybe tech talks. But if it a project without intrinsic motivation or large and clearly present business value (like fixing an incident or saving a $10M client contract but not some hopeful!thing that might pay off in two years), then I keep my weekends to maintain myself as a human being (which ironically also happens to benefit the company on that two year time scale).
- moffkalast 3y agoIn a similar boat and have tried this recently, but I can't say it worked. The only real solution seems to be to go elsewhere. There is something supremely disgusting in being forced to work on projects ("hey client X needs this Y thing done asap") that you don't care about, know they have a close to zero chance of working to an acceptable degree and also know you'll be blamed for their failure. Over and over and over.
- djohnston 3y agoI transitioned to EM and I assure you it’s a lot more work. If you don’t want to fight with your company’s trash IDE, then maybe. But if you think you’ll have less on your plate as an EM then either 1. You’re wrong and you’ll find yourself working more 2. You’re right and you are screwing over your team.
- stcroixx 3y agoNot how it works. You now are responsible for making other people complete work you don’t care about. If they fail, you also fail. Way more risk, way less control over the outcome. Plus your tech skills atrophy the whole time, making you less valuable outside your org leading to a kind of employer lock in.
- taway1874 3y agoHa! Love the honesty. You must have some very good managers who make their work seem effortless. Perhaps get them to be a mentor when you make the shift so when reality strikes you won't have to deal with it by yourself.
- mattchamb 3y agoI have one week left as a manager before I start a new job as an IC. I am so excited to change back to being responsible for only my own output.
- grumpyprole 3y agoIf it were only that simple. Often one needs to be at least a team lead to set the technical direction. As an IC, I sometimes found myself being asked to implement a solution in a form that I did not agree with.
- mattchamb 3y agoI don't think that changes much. To oversimplify; by telling you how to do it, the team lead is taking responsibility for the outcome of your output. You are just responsible for doing it how they said.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ralphstodomingo 3y agoWith the right team/leader, there'd be room for your inputs on the matter. Even if you find yourself in a not-so-good team setup, I'd argue there's still merit in letting your opinion be known, regardless of whether you end up implementing said solution in the way you were told or not.
- Aeolun 3y agoYou can only have that shot down so many times before you give up.
- Dextro 3y agoVery much this. And when people give up it can take one of two forms: Either the person quits. Or the person resigns to giving mediocre output and coasts. Neither is good for the business and yet people keep pushing workers (not even just in tech) into that position to the point it's now a cliché.
- austin-cheney 3y agoThere is a massive difference in maturity crossing from individual contributor to manager between the military and corporate world. Never in the corporate world have I seen a junior manager tell their boss ”no” and pushback as I have in the military. In the corporate world it’s all about hiring/firing versus the military where it’s all about developing people and liability at all levels. The key consequence of that is that in the corporate world people are eager to play it safe and follow trends versus the military where its generally considered a safe environment for learning more tolerant of controlled failure. Tolerance of controlled failure is how I learned to become a developer while working at Travelocity a billion years ago and I have not seen that since (in the corporate world).
- pgorczak 3y agoAnother possibly related difference is the training managers get. There are military careers where you know on day one which leadership responsibilities you will take several years down the line. That’s a stark contrast to starting out as an engineer and then transitioning as described in the blog post.
- arnvald 3y agoThis. The state of leadership training in our industry is abysmal. Most managers I've met get little to no training when they transition to leadership roles. It's slightly better in larger companies, but as you say - a stark contract with military
- Arcanum-XIII 3y agoThere’s the little issue that most formation are cargo cult crap. They’re teaching you some kind of method or canvas, but not much more - and cost a lot. Good formations exists, somewhere. But they’re well hidden.
- vsareto 3y agoFWIW IC training is also bad. You can have a career just winging it (having done so myself) and any standards of competency are left to individual teams/companies or simply who you chose to imitate
- usrnm 3y agoThis trope of "growing" from an engineer to a manager needs to die. I grow as an engineer when I learn new stuff or become better at building things. Becoming a manager is changing jobs, not growth in any meaningful way. Not even in salary in many places
- Aaargh20318 3y agoCongratulations, you've been working as a baker for 10 years and have perfected the art of making bread. You have now been promoted to butcher.
- ranguna 3y agoHmmmm a butcher would be like a business analyst in the software development world maybe? Both still put they hands on the product, but in completely different perspectives. Maybe a store manager would be more applicable?
- ddmichael 3y agoInstead of having been "promoted" to a shepherd?
- xbryanx 3y ago
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoManagement is where engineers stop growing. Managers aren't regularly cultivating new skills as engineers are.
- arnvald 3y agoI think there's a difference in how visible these skills are. As an engineer it's easy to practice many new skills and also to see improvement. I might be interested in orchestration, I pick up Kubernetes course. I want to build iOS app, I start learning Swift. After a month or two I can see a difference in my skills. Others can see it too - I contributed to iOS app at work which I haven't done before, it's a new skill I learned. As a manager, I need to be better at negotiating with stakeholders, or recognizing underperformance, or interviewing candidates. I can read books, take courses, but I can only see my improvement over longer period of time. What's more, most of people around me won't see that I'm a better interviewer now, or that I'm better at helping to improve individual performance. It doesn't mean I stopped growing, it doesn't mean I don't cultivate new skills. They're just different skills.
- refurb 3y agoI don't understand this view point that is so common on HN. I can only assume that most engineers on here are quite junior. Of course you grow as a manager. But you're right you're not growing as a technical expert - that's not the goal of managing. Managing becomes more about the business and less about the technical details. It's a very different job and an important one if you know anything about running a larger company. The technical work you do as a IC is one part of many that drives the business forward.
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoManagement doesn't drive a business forward. Leadership does. Managers are not leaders but some leaders are managers.
- revskill 3y agoWe don't need manager at all. An automation tooling with AI can do that job better than any human. We need real engineer.
- Euphorbium 3y ago*Regressing
- stavros 3y agoAs others here have said, you don't grow from engineer to manager, you grow from engineer to lead engineer, or architect, or another similarly technical role. I was recently promoted from Principal Engineer to Director of Technology in $JOB, and the difference has been striking, mostly in the ability to influence things so we can build the right technology before we start. That feels like a much more natural step for an engineer than throwing away their entire skillset and moving them to a position that requires an entirely different one. If you want to grow your engineers, give them more (and higher-level, higher-impact technical stuff to do. If they want to become managers, great, but there's not as much overlap between engineering and engineering management as most people seem to think. A coworker and friend is both an engineer and a manager, and he happens to be great at both of those. Instead of losing one of the skillsets, he has a role where he both manages his team and sets the technical direction for them. This means he manages a much smaller team than he would otherwise, but he loves doing both, so this a natural fit for him. All this is to say, build your roles according to your people, don't shoehorn them into labels that other companies have told you is "how to do things".
- Aeolun 3y agoAre you trying to say the Director of Technology is not a management role? Because that doesn’t align with what I’ve seen.
- stavros 3y agoI'm trying to say my Director of Technology role isn't a management role (our Director of Engineering is). I'm responsible for the technologies that we use, develop, maintain, etc, but not the people or teams that do it, and it works very well for us.
- Aeolun 3y agoI’ve just never seen any director titles without a massive nr of reports. TIL, thanks!
- dudul 3y ago
- mirekrusin 3y agoMore often than not I've seen engineers moving to manager roles because they weren't great at engineering.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoOne should be very wary of any blanket assumptions of management roles implying any kind of more seniority than engineering roles. They are different activities, different jobs. That's it. Not every engineer must be made a manager at some point to grow. An engineer can grow in engineering, becoming more specialist in various areas. I wish people stopped to conflate these things. I know engineering manager can be loads of work. I wouldn't want to do the job my engineering manager is currently doing. I would probably die of boredom in meetings or completely fail, as my brain shuts off during the meetings or something. I want to build things. With code. That does not make me any less of a senior.
- fweimer 3y agoSome companies just don't have a full career track outside of people management. It's not really a matter of company size or age. I suspect most developers are okay with stunted career tracks for office management, system administration, or customer support. In some companies (including organizations that view themselves as software companies), the same attitude simply extends to software development as well. I wish these different organizational choices would be more widely known. My current employer nowadays has these non-management career tracks, but I'm not sure if we communicate them clearly as one of the reasons to join the company.
- didgeoridoo 3y agoIn my experience, IC tracks in general tend to cap out based on the complexity and value of the skillset/domain to the business. A major accounting firm may have some senior engineers, marketers, etc. but since their work isn’t “core” to the business, the top tiers of the technology and marketing tracks will tend to be exclusively management roles — whereas accountants will be allowed to… account… up to a much higher seniority level before they get forced into management.
- jsonking 3y agoTest
- igiveup 3y agoFail
- jsonking 3y agoTo put it politely I have a distaste for being referred to as an ‘individual contributor’ (or even worse a ‘resource’). I also don’t like being ‘managed’ and have gained little from ‘line management’ over 20+ years developing software systems. I do however find it extremely motivating to help a true leader solve their problems in a self-organising team of collaborative peers. I can’t fathom why so many software organisations are still structured for hierarchical command and control, with the trend of good engineers being ‘promoted’ to management? Yes I think we need more leadership: with organisations cultivating a culture of leadership, communication, openness and trust. Everyone can display leadership skills depending on the context/task within a team. It is not something reserved for the ‘manager’ (appointed leader). Do we really need more ‘management’? I don’t think so. Management != Leadership. Would be keen to see some more articles along the lines of ‘Growing leadership skills for engineers’.
- jbmsf 3y agoI can fathom it: the larger the organization, the more important it is to the people with power to treat everything else as abstraction. I'm told Seeing Like a State shares this insight. I also hate it. But it's unfortunately "left as exercise for the reader" to come up with an alternative that concentrates power differently.
- jsonking 3y agoI have been trying to research alternative(s) - with limited success. For example book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moose-Heads-Table-Karin-Tenelius/dp/9151954508/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moose-Heads-Table-Karin-Tenelius/dp... , podcast: https://leadermorphosis.co/ https://leadermorphosis.co/ , training: https://www.tuffleadershiptraining.com/ https://www.tuffleadershiptraining.com/ , jobs: https://info.jobswithnoboss.com/ https://info.jobswithnoboss.com/ At current workplace trying to subtly suggest/introduce that there’s an alternative way…
- jbmsf 3y agoIt's hard to convince the people with the power and money that they should get out of the way. If you're lucky, they are mostly unaffected by the structures of power and believe in "servant leadership". If you're unlucky, well, good luck. I don't think you can make an existing company change it's stripes; you can only start a new one that believes in collective power and try to find a way to make that stick. Maybe B Corps help? At least you can prioritize something other than maximizing shareholder value. But even then, I'm not sure how you deal with bad actors without some degree of strong power.
- rmrfchik 3y agoIt's downshifting from Engineer to manager.
- taway1874 3y agoYou also downshift gear(s) in an automobile to go faster :-)
- epups 3y agoThe subject of seniority and progression to management pops up from time to time here in HN, and we usually see the same tired arguments. Managers are useless, it's not real work, seniority is an illusion, etc etc. There's nothing wrong with being good at your job and not wanting to change your role. But it's obvious that in most situations, progressing to other roles is necessary if you want to have more influence and control over your product - and usually higher compensation as well. In a professional kitchen, obviously the person actually cooking has to be really good. That doesn't mean this person gets to choose the menu of the restaurant, and their name also won't be displayed outside. They are more easily replaceable than a chef, even if they are very competent technically. As most things in life, it's all about trade-offs, I just think that ignoring what the actual pros and cons are will lead you to bad decisions down the line.
- treprinum 3y agoCan't wait for "how to automate away engineering manager" articles in a few years.
- taway1874 3y agoYou can't wait to report to a bot?
- g051051 3y agoEngineer to manager isn't "growth", it's a complete career shift. Fine if you want it, torture if you don't. "Dear Engineer, you are so good at your job we've decided to have you stop doing it and do a different job with an almost completely disjoint skill set. You get to do something that you will most likely hate and be bad at. Plus you can never go back to your old life."
- skhm 3y agoI mean, you can definitely go back, there's just friction to doing so and it won't happen unless you are intentional about it. Might be more accurate to say you can go back, but it will never be the same now that you've had the veil pulled back on how things are being coordinated behind the scenes.
- gpgn 3y agoSounds a lot like the Peter principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- ddmichael 3y agoApparently this is a junior person's blog promotion and hence the controversial (or plain wrong for me) title which has raised several discussions here. Since we are talking about it though, let's apply the 5 whys: 1. Why do companies need managers? Because they need they're employees to be managed 2. Why do companies need their employees to be managed? Because they are not certain that they will follow the company's short/long-term strategy and vision 3. Why are they not certain? Because they're having trust issues 4. Why are they having trust issues? Because they are not investing in proper hiring 5. Why are they not investing in proper hiring? Because it's expensive and requires tremendous multidisciplinary skills, time and effort We are dealing with one night stands masked as serious dates ladies and gentlemen. Managers are just pawns which patch the original issue. Solving hiring would make them redundant.
- Macha 3y agoAlternatively, when an organisation reaches a certain size, there becomes enough high level coordination needs for it to be a full time job, and also some HR-type functions work better when distributed to the edges rather than the central org.
- djohnston 3y agoThat’s a pretty remarkable leap you’ve made from 2-3. Coordinating activities across large organisations is hard.
- ddmichael 3y agoI see what you mean and you're not wrong. However given that you hire good senior engineers and that you trust them, most companies can resolve these issues. Coordinating activities is a project manager's thing which should have to do with gantt diagrams and not with micro-managing engineers. Very few companies are having complex software similar to OS, therefore being in need of the management that you're referring to. It's astonishing how managers responsible for building a button are reading the mythical man month and think they are the same.
- nickpeterson 3y ago
- osigurdson 3y agoThe problem with management roles today is they are watered down to the point of being basically pointless. Product people determine the shape of things and priorities. Tech leads determine how things should be done. The manager is supposed to shepherd career growth and decide how much people should get paid. In my view this is a really part time job at best. I think we need to go back to coupling more of these roles together, similar to what would happen in a startup. A strong leader should be able to fill product, tech lead and management roles.
- qprofyeh 3y agoLike a team ceo. I strongly believe this person should be responsible for a teams success or failure. Grant this person the right to hire/fire members of various disciplines. Tell this person to chase certain revenue numbers or another mission. Give this person the bonus money/product dividends to share with the team. I believe all this will drive this person to really build a team, instead of just managing it. But demote them to smaller projects when they fail to deliver. And allow team members to apply to work for a different team if they trust the team ceo there more. Like an internal startup environment but teams. This is how I would try relentlessly to structure my company.
- jen20 3y agoThis should only be the case if the _team_ can fire a failing manager.
- osigurdson 3y agoMaybe that is the other approach. No manager, no product person and no project manager, just a team that is fully responsible for outcomes.
- jahewson 3y agoThe problem is that it’s 10x harder to find someone who’s good at two things vs two people who are good at one thing.
- vpastore 3y ago[dead]
- 29athrowaway 3y agoYou don't "grow" into a manager, you just delegate problems to other people. The manager is a meta problem solver, the individual contributor are the real problem solvers. Understanding the meta problem is not the same as understanding the problem and vice-versa. Michael Jordan's supervisor is not Michael Jordan. They're people with valuable, non trivial skills that take time and effort to cultivate, but people don't buy tickets to go see a manager, just like customers don't buy manager deliverables, they buy individual contributor deliverables. The customer doesn't buy issue tracker tickets, or speeches, or gantt charts, or burndown charts, or diagrams, or whatever manager deliverable of your choosing. They buy working software that is stable, performant and that has an ergonomic and polished interface. The manager's job is to facilitate an environment where that can happen. They are not the neurons of the team, they're more like the glia of the team. That is, if you build a team consisting solely of managers and ask them to solve a problem, and designate one of them as the manager, they won't be an effective team. Did they really "grow"? Or they pursued a different track?
- taway1874 3y agoMJ was a great player but there is no way the Bulls would've won all those championships without his team mates (who themselves were of great caliber). It takes a great coach to harness talent and manage it in a team. Software engineering is a team sport in that same regard. If we're lucky we have a MJ on the team but still needs to be managed for their own (and the team's) good.
- FpUser 3y agoIt is not "growing". It is changing the work which can be good or bad. I "grew" to a manager (CTO in this particular case) in 100 person company some 20+ years ago and this got me to the point that I said fuck it, went on my own and am still happily doing creative work designing and implementing (including programming) products for clients and for my own company.
- cosmiccatnap 3y agoI don't see managers who grow and the reason is because they often weren't growing as engineers... The most common reason I see people become managers is because they weren't cut out for engineering work or it burnt them out over time. Many couldn't keep up with the ocean of new technologies and philosophies software has gained in the last few decades and so they are relegated to being a machine that checks email for twice a starting engineers salary. Some managers really have done so to steward a company or team through a problem but so many more of them just want to "check out" essentially and in just a few short years loose most of the engineering context value they had and become some degree of roadblock to progress because sadly they want their cake and they want to engineer it too...they often create tasks and conversations they don't make sense or deliverables that are missing the point because they are no longer engineers no matter how badly they still want to identify as one after leaving a organic growing codebase. I get it they have families and they are getting older and the kids coming out of college are honestly intimidating sometimes but that's a problem with the absolute lack of upward mobility within engineering and they unhealthy standards of modern corporate culture. It's sad really. Very intelligent opinionated people slowly go from talking about solutions in concrete terms to a mix of language about deliverables, burn charts, agile, circling wagons, getting on the same page, and determining a funnel for Q4 while the software they are talking about has no unit tests and they themselves have determined that it's not part of the MVP... If they could go back 10 years and hear themselves I wonder what they would think of the people they've become...
- AlbertCory 3y agoGood timing: I have a post all ready for tonight on things a first-level manager can learn from a famous jazz leader, Art Blakey. I'm not going to say it's better than this, but let's just say it's different.
- snowman647 3y agoI'm building a game about engineering management at FAANG that shows the spectrum of managerial role. Might be good to stop reading about managers but try it out, not sure everyone has opportunity to try it at work - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2436030?utm_campaign=hn1 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2436030?utm_campaign=hn1
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoThis is a fun idea. When do you expect to release?
- willcipriano 3y agoLike what I see so far
- HumblyTossed 3y agoAs someone who has done both, they're very different skill sets. You do NOT grow from one to the other. Just stop this nonsense.
- moneywoes 3y agoAre managers also stack ranked and pipped like engineers at many companies?
- photonbeam 3y agoIm curious about this too
- master_crab 3y agoThey definitely are. But the metrics looks different. For example, if managers start losing a significant amount of people (because they can’t do a good job retaining and developing talent) it will be obvious to higher ups that the person has to go.
- lightbendover 3y agoI’ve seen FAANG managers with atrocious 360 reviews have their entire teams quit (the company) and hit director 5 years later. It usually takes breaking a law or total role/team/project/program/org elimination to oust a manager.
- melvinmelih 3y agoI always like to think of EMs as engineers who rely on other people to write code, instead of writing code directly themselves. As anyone who has played a game of telephone can attest, writing code through people is a lot harder than writing it yourself.
- tflinton 3y agoManagers have to manage up, down and outward. Most ICs will generally see downward management, but not the hours put in reporting up to executives, aligning and planning initiatives, resource/ allocations/PI’s, budgeting, procurement, audits, client/product demos/presentations, hiring and sometimes firing. Managing down tends to be the easy part, career planning, 1:1’s, performance/development and running rituals is a cake walk. The only real hard part of managing down is when you have an employee that’s poisoning the well or is on a PIP. Oh, and some managers also have to still pick up cards and push code in some orgs.
- taway1874 3y agoNailed it! Most posts here are from those who have never walked in a manager's shoes so only know what they see (or hear/read). Think about it, minus a few exceptions, most managers are paid better than the engineers they manage. Now why would exec/sr mgmt. do pay more unless they are getting their money's value?
- thunkshift1 3y agoThis article was a nothing burger.. so id say it was a successful EM type message
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smcleod 3y agoThat use of “growing” seems… backwards. I usually see managers as being far less competent (in general) or valuable than engineers and leaders.
- taway1874 3y agoClassic example of "you don't know what you don't know" :-) Maybe get a job as a manager, manage a few software engineers for a couple years and then see if your original (bold) statement holds true.
- ttyyzz 3y agoManaging people is the last thing I want to do professionally as a software developer. If I wanted to manage people, I would've gone that route a long time ago. Now sadly this is also the only way for me to "rank up" further in the company I've been working for the last 10 years. I guess I'm either stuck for now or I'll need to leave.
- ochronus 3y agoShameless plug: https://leadership.garden/the-5-common-mistakes-of-new-engineering-managers/ https://leadership.garden/the-5-common-mistakes-of-new-engin...