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It’s possible that I’m misreading sarcasm or something. But point 6, “engineers can be little shits”, about how asking if the person in charge of you understan
by benreesman 3y ago
It’s possible that I’m misreading sarcasm or something.
But point 6, “engineers can be little shits”, about how asking if the person in charge of you understands the work going on is mildly offensive for the obvious reasons, and extremely offensive for how fucking stupid it is.
Knowing how to do something is not an absurd ask of being responsible for that thing being done.
I only ever got up to 3 dozen-ish reports as an EM, but to the extent I ever lapsed in being able to read a diff, that was me just failing.
EMs should know a lot about engineering. That’s what “Engineering” and “Manager” mean. Like, in the dictionary.
- BowBun 3y agoThat's just not reality. Many EMs are not necessarily proficient or even knowledgeable in the stack. It depends on the company. EM doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. Last week I applied to an EM role that was 100% people management where my tech experience did not matter much. I also applied to one that was still a majority technical/architecture design, that some would consider a 'tech lead' or something like that. Being offended by it is kind of funny. You'll probably have a boss like that eventually.
- benreesman 3y agoI’ve known lots of people who aren’t technical to the level of an engineer but still crazy smart and high-value in teams. They’re usually called project managers. Calling them engineering managers and acting like it’s good to have EMs who can’t code is an anti-pattern. Just call them PMs and let them do all the high value stuff they do.