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A four person team would typically have a "team lead" who is rarely responsible for providing feedback to their engineering manager with performance reviews, go

A four person team would typically have a "team lead" who is rarely responsible for providing feedback to their engineering manager with performance reviews, goal setting, and so on. I however wouldn't expect the EM to do more than glance at PRs and see if they are moving along and the comments are constructive. But it is very rare that someone who is not working regularly with the code would be able to maintain a useful mental model of the code. Thus the glance might just be at a dashboard to determine if PRs are "too big" or are having unexpected amounts of time being ignored.

icedchai 3y ago
I'm mostly talking about smaller companies where the EM is the team lead. A lot of these companies have bloated managerial structures, even in smaller orgs... You didn't see this 10 to 15 years ago. It disgusts me when I go to a meeting, and there's literally 10 people on the call, only 3 of which actually do any direct work on the project.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > I'm mostly talking about smaller companies where the EM is the team lead. A lot of these companies have bloated managerial structures, even in smaller orgs... You didn't see this 10 to 15 years ago. This has been my experience as well. What are all these non-technical EMs doing in an engineering org? Why are they spending so much time on HR work or org structure work? The problem with EMs spending so much time on non-technical stuff is that they lose sight of what they are managing - the services and the team building the services. They start focusing only on org structure, perf reviews, promos etc. all of which have nothing to do with the job of managing services. Then they start imposing non-technical workload on their reports because that non-technical stuff will improve their own ratings e.g. boosting PR counts, JIRA story points etc. - once again, these have nothing to do with the actual services they are responsible for. The whole org turns upside down with far too many managers on the management track asking for work that has got nothing to do with actual services - and yet the burden is imposed only on engineers. This leads to disgruntled engineers because engineers don't want to follow a HR leader. They want to follow technical leaders. The EM solution for this is to hire a staff engineer. But once again - they are imposing the same non-tech burden of PR counts, JIRA points on this staff engineer and all other engineers. The problem is management itself. But they will never recognize that.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    I think it got worse with the pandemic. We created a culture of perpetual Zoom meeting attenders.

icedchai 3y ago

I'm mostly talking about smaller companies where the EM is the team lead. A lot of these companies have bloated managerial structures, even in smaller orgs... You didn't see this 10 to 15 years ago. It disgusts me when I go to a meeting, and there's literally 10 people on the call, only 3 of which actually do any direct work on the project.

nine_zeros 3y ago
> I'm mostly talking about smaller companies where the EM is the team lead. A lot of these companies have bloated managerial structures, even in smaller orgs... You didn't see this 10 to 15 years ago. This has been my experience as well. What are all these non-technical EMs doing in an engineering org? Why are they spending so much time on HR work or org structure work? The problem with EMs spending so much time on non-technical stuff is that they lose sight of what they are managing - the services and the team building the services. They start focusing only on org structure, perf reviews, promos etc. all of which have nothing to do with the job of managing services. Then they start imposing non-technical workload on their reports because that non-technical stuff will improve their own ratings e.g. boosting PR counts, JIRA story points etc. - once again, these have nothing to do with the actual services they are responsible for. The whole org turns upside down with far too many managers on the management track asking for work that has got nothing to do with actual services - and yet the burden is imposed only on engineers. This leads to disgruntled engineers because engineers don't want to follow a HR leader. They want to follow technical leaders. The EM solution for this is to hire a staff engineer. But once again - they are imposing the same non-tech burden of PR counts, JIRA points on this staff engineer and all other engineers. The problem is management itself. But they will never recognize that.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I think it got worse with the pandemic. We created a culture of perpetual Zoom meeting attenders.