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Don't become an engineering manager

• UK-Al05 7mo ago
  The document is comparing salaries of staff engineers, and EM's. In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions.
  • makapuf 7mo ago
    sure, as long as we're talking about 110 to 170k$ non-managing, technical roles in EU, I'd like to see a full eclipse soon (both exist but I think the latter could be easier to find)
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    > In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM positions. Where do you work?!? If you are in Western Europe then the blogpost is irrelevant for you. The Western European market is weird.
    • DDerTyp 7mo ago
      Can you elaborate more about this? Why is it irrelevant in Western Europe?
      • alephnerd 7mo ago
        Western Europe has a very different hiring market for SWEs due to how traditional industries like financial services, media, law, government, pharma, chemicals, and automotive are overrepresented. In these kinds of organizations, software is viewed as a cost-center and as such the only way you as a SWE can protect yourself is to climb up the management chain as soon as possible.
• ZitchDog 7mo ago
  Saying that becoming an EM is "moving away from tech" is crazy. As an EM you will be steeped in tech, just as you would be as an IC. It just may not be the tech you want to be steeped in. Again, same as an IC. In either case, unless you are working in AI, you will need to "play" with things like OpenClaw in your spare time. The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder.
  • CoffeeOnWrite 7mo ago
    > The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes our jobs 10x harder. This is true, but our job was getting kind of boring anyway. Time to lead, not manage. We should be having just as much fun as the ICs, and the best I know are having the time of their lives.
• halper 7mo ago
  I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.
  • BillinghamJ 7mo ago
    Main distinction I tend to see is just whether you're doing line management or not, which tends to be the EM track Beyond that, agree it seems like it can just be anything in virtually any title
  • qsort 7mo ago
    Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's not absurd on its face.
  • simonw 7mo ago
    One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other. If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies. You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up". Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful. I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.
• elzbardico 7mo ago
  I agree with that. The way I see the marketing going forward with AI, you need to be able to have proven outstanding technical skills and deep understanding across several technical domains to be able to add value to the chain. This mean staying in the trenches along with serious self-education schedule. You should be reading books now and doing hard stuff.
  • bsza 7mo ago
    Alternatively, this is all a psy-op by AI companies to make engineers willing to work harder for less money so they can pretend all that productivity growth is thanks to their stuff.
• skeeter2020 7mo ago
  This article is not very helpful, just like any sort of absolute yes/no advice. The ad in the middle that looks exactly like the "content" makes it worse. Using OpenClaw as an example of exploding technology and why it's a bad time to move away from this (not sure how EM is a move away?) is ridiculous. And stating the career path is too competitive shows they don't really know what a true technical ladder looks like. Most organizations are going to have about as many staff developers as senior EMs and principal developers as senior directors. If it's stability you're after neither is particularly at risk in my experience, but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
  • piltdownman 7mo ago
    // but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train. Well that's a given, isn't it? The contemporary CTO is looking for quantitative proof of productivity increases via Agentic AI adoption based on things like delivery cadence or SLAs. Management is a qualitative function, and guaranteed to be skilled in 'mapping' their role to the delivery of value and reporting such things upward anyway. Engineering Management are there to make firm commitments and reasonable compromises around the ability to deliver features generally already committed to hard dates by either Sales or by virtue of external market forces. How this is achieved using social and political capital alongside Domain Knowledge is the distinguishing factor between an IC and a Technical Manager imo.
• DJBunnies 7mo ago
  Totally agree, completely different skillset. Every engineer I've seen "promoted" as such becomes miserable, and frankly is not very good at their new role, effectively making it a double loss.
  • SlightlyLeftPad 7mo ago
    Honestly, I’m pretty good at it but yes indeed quite miserable, particularly now, in this market. With hiring very slow, companies know people are trapped.
  • coredev_ 7mo ago
    It's totally different skill sets yes, but some developers can become good managers.
• ecshafer 7mo ago
  There is a major gap in this analysis by not controlling for industry or companies. Engineering Manager is a very generic title, so this is going to get Start Ups, Big Tech, Little Tech, Enterprise, Contract Shops, etc. Staff Engineer is very uncommon in Enterprise or Contract shops, there you typically see SWE 1/2/3 -> Tech Lead -> Architect. Most Tech companies I think have more of a SWE 1/2/3 -> Staff Engineer -> Principal. The other part is that Engineering Manager is a terminal position, I've known a few people who were manager for 20 years without ever going to Director / Exec whatever, its just a competitive jump and mathematically most will never go up. This is ALSO true for Senior -> Staff and Principle though. But Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get. Finally it is ultimately a career change, and that should be the primary factor to consider.
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    > Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get Not really. Staff Eng and above will end up making similar to an EM including bonuses and has much more job mobility. You have to remember that most EM roles only open up once you hit Staff, so you are basically taking much more responsibility and longer hours for a marginal salary impact. Engineering Manager jobs are hard to come by and your job security is actually less than an individual contributor, because even if an initiative was delivered late due to no fault of your own, if sales is braying for blood in order to protect themselves after failing to meet quota, it's the EM's head that is offered on a silver platter.
    • willahmad 7mo ago
      > Staff Eng .... has much more job mobility Not really. Above Staff and Staff+ companies are usually looking for expertise in domain, in addition to cross org leadership. Unless you want to get hired with Sr title. Management is different though, you have highly transferrable skillset, managing people, up and down.
      • janalsncm 7mo ago
• jollyllama 7mo ago
  > My friend was afraid that as a manager, he'd have less time to experiment and adapt. Especailly with a bigger team (he was offered to manage 6), you don’t have much time to play around. You guys get time to play around? As lead/staff? > You can be a great EM for years and find yourself stuck. Better start now then, right?
  • fusslo 7mo ago
    yeah? my job is basically self-directed. I'm expected to predict the future for what we as a business will need in 6 months to a year and become the expert in it now. lay the framework, prototype, sell to the larger org, integrate and move onto whatever else. This is in addition to the normal jira-driven feature/bugfix bullshit. I am looking at the problems we might run into then derisk them by figuring out what to build. But I'm at a large org where timelines are about as flexible as jello. I think I'm also overqualified and underpaid so my boss just lets me do whatever. Like I've been porting firmware from C to rust a day or two a week while I also am directing some more jr devs for our VP's latest product obsession.
    • duzer65657 7mo ago
      this is peak "the majority of people in this role are garbage but I'm a rockstar". 98%+ of people identify as special snowflakes.
• general_reveal 7mo ago
  Might be worth talking about peer respect. Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering? Not really right? Some won’t ever take that position out of sheer self respect. Many EMs are not ready to roll their sleeves up and do the full work, they are only ever riled up enough to roll their sleeves up and begin hiring like a maniac or going batshit crazy with micro management. You see, we all saw you too at work. Just know that. This is the LinkedIn comment you won’t see to your stupid fucking work achievement post - fuck you. Morning rant over. But for my real EMs, much respect :)
  • piltdownman 7mo ago
    // Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn’t or doesn’t do soldering? Yes, just like an Office Hierarchy there's an expectation that they respect the Rank - based on the caveat that the Officer/Manager doesn't confuse Rank with Authority. Also, to clarify some previous assertions, VP title is often needed to empower a given member of staff to sign contracts on behalf of the company in certain jurisdictions or configurations.
• zkmon 7mo ago
  Not quite. In most companies managers are seen as 'inner circle' people while technologists are just workers. Managers get exposed to a lot more comms, giving more visibility and get ability to act like a smart person purely because they have more emails and get into more calls than the others. They not only get more power, but also get more info.
  • jollyllama 7mo ago
    If you already don't know that though, are you really cut out to be a manager? You're joining the company "mafia", with all that implies, for good or ill.
  • tamimio 7mo ago
    I agree, and they have more power because they have more info and are given more visibility, and because they lack the deep technical knowledge in xyz, they compensate it with all sort of office politics.
  • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    Line level managers are the most easily replaceable and in my experience powerless people in an organization. When I was being hired as an IC in product companies before to lead major initiatives. One of my requirements was to report to either the director or CTO (startup). Even after the startup grew and they hired a EM, the CTO carved out a position for me so I wouldn’t report to an EM.
• charles_f 7mo ago
  > he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion. I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end: > So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my job EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny. In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met. After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager: - if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things - at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment! - don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like. - it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same. - titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.
  • piltdownman 7mo ago
• gozzoo 7mo ago
  I don't get this argument: don't do it, you have better otptions, but it is good for me because i enjoy it.
  • temp8830 7mo ago
    This article periodically surfaces in some shape or form. There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one. This is a lie, and the sooner we stop telling it to the young generation - the better. Human societies have always rewarded and valued those who built hierarchies more than those who built things. If you focus on building a thing - you will forever be a cog in someone's big project. There's a reason that management ladder is more competitive.
    • alephnerd 7mo ago
      > There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one It is not a lie. It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment. Companies where the underlying stack is a revenue generator and not a cost center are companies where these kinds of dual tracks exist, but these are only found in the major tech hubs and are not available if you are remote first. They also require you to be both technically and socially adept.
      • temp8830 7mo ago
        Sorry, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The ladders are simply not comparable, even in the Bay Area. Sure, at the entry point where one transfers from the IC ladder to management compensation can even drop. However, that's the bottom rung - and one typically can't get straight into management as a new grad. The management ladder goes higher.
        • terminalshort 7mo ago
          Best to remember this isn't a ladder but rather a tree. Yes, it goes much higher, but you chances of ever getting there is minimal because it narrows so quickly.
• padjo 7mo ago
  Some people seem to genuinely enjoy being people managers and excel at it. It's not always obvious in advance who those people are so I'd still recommend people try it out early in their career if they get the opportunity, particularly if their company allows them to back out if it's ultimately not a good fit
• jimnotgym 7mo ago
  > It’s a bad time to move away from tech It continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory accounts I get referred to the Audit Partner, the most senior manager. The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff. So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech? Isn't this just a sign of disfunction in those organisations rather than anything about the role. Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'? And what do these managers even do if they have moved away from tech? Approve holidays and expenses? My personal theory is that in these kind of organisations a manager is the person who is better with PowerPoint than the other people!
  • DauntingPear7 7mo ago
    > Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'? Yes I believe so. At uni i see soooo many people who are in software to make a startup (before even knowing how to code) and make a quick buck instead of being good programmers
    • jimnotgym 7mo ago
      I suppose what really escapes me is that companies are willing to pay people to do a pointless job. I wonder if the most senior are just more comfortable listening to a meaningless PowerPoint meeting than hearing complicated stuff about the work their company does
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    > The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff. So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech... Because a manager at a structural engineering company is essentially acting as the equivalent of what a Product Manager or Forward Deployed Engineer is in the tech industry, because they are expected to be a technical domain expert and own delivery. Meanwhile, for most software companies the underlying codebase isn't want generates revenue - it's the codification of business logic that does. Additionally, companies tend to have a separate Princiapl Eng to Distinguished Engineer/Architect track that outranks EMs and is in direct contact with leadership. > Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others' Most Engineering Managers and Beancounters aren't MBAs - no company wants to sponsor an employee at a PTMBA which can cost upwards of $250K now.
• GlibMonkeyDeath 7mo ago
  The arguments: * It's a bad time to move away from tech As a manager your role isn't to be the "best technical person" anyway. You still need to understand fast-changing capabilities of course. But you are managing people now, and the required skills are different. See below. * The ladder is very competitive It's always competitive, and in my experience it was the exact opposite - there were far fewer VP-level technical roles than VP people managers. * The pay is lower (for senior managers vs. senior technical track) Again, this is the opposite of my experience (besides at the first-line manager level, where pay was comparable.) Where I worked managers could quickly get paid more with more responsibility. I always thought it was because managing people is actually a lot less fun (at least for me it was.) The biggest reason not to become a manager is because _it is a completely different job_. Although managers need to be technically competent, management skills are much more about people (and politics.) If that isn't your jam, then don't become a manager.
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    I think you underestimate the job mobility that is lost when you transition from being an individual contributor into someone on the management track. The reality is, there are very few EM and above jobs, and job security is tough - if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE, I'd fire the EM first because I can always find another replacement or split their responsibilities across multiple individual contributors and the PM. If an EM is laid off or fired, it's extremely difficult to find another role, and it truly is a terminal position. Why would I hire a laid off or fired EM or Director when I can promote internally or hire someone from within my network? Additionally, back when I was an SE, if we had a deal go bad in order to protect our ass we'd blame the EM so that we can have a head on the platter to hand our CRO, unlike a seasoned SWE who can push back and argue PM requirements were unclear and PM can argue that sales+product was aligned.
    • ahtihn 7mo ago
      > if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE When does this choice ever come up? My experience is that most engineers are seen as interchangeable while most EMs aren't. Only time I've seen EMs fired for economic reasons is when a larger amount of engineers were also laid off.
• mystraline 7mo ago
  Flagging due to being an advert in disguise.
  • neogodless 7mo ago
    > Here are the main arguments from our conversation: > Thanks Unblocked for supporting today’s article! > AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap in rework and tokens. > Unblocked changes the economics. Yeah I was reading through this going... huh? This is the same font and layout as the article. uBlock let this slip through. Maybe there's good content here, and maybe they need advertisements to pay the bills (as a well-paid Engineering Manager...) but I couldn't finish the article knowing that it was deceptively formatted.
• brettgriffin 7mo ago
  It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes. The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years. There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm: In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software. The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers. I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager. I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.
• siliconc0w 7mo ago
  My experience is that the 'separate but equal' dual engineering track is largely a myth and that if you want advancement, the manager track is a much more viable track. Even with some of the recent flattening, there are still far more higher level roles for management than ICs. They are also given far more visibility and access inside the company which is extremely valuable in a large org. It also seems a good choice if you're not very good - I've seen bad managers hang around far longer than bad engineers.
• jedberg 7mo ago
  Not sure I agree (and I made the jump from IC to management). Look at the parallel tracks. A VP is the same level as a distinguished engineer, roughly. To be a VP, you have to be a great manager and got lucky with a few big projects. To be a DE, you basically have to be famous within the industry. And when I look at a large tech company, while there aren't a lot of VPs, usually the number of DEs is countable on one hand (or maybe two). They are very different skill sets. You shouldn't choose your role based on money or career progression, you should choose based on what you love to do, because especially in this world of AI replacing all the "boring" work, the only people who will be left will be the ones passionate about what they are doing.
• tewr 7mo ago
  There is so much going on in the industry right now that it is not fun to be an EM with rusty tech skills. However, the claim that staff engineers are more in demand is unsubstantiated. Hiring will slow to a crawl as everyone is watching to see where this is going. The EM role is not being replaced as fast by agents as much as the IC role, simply because EMs don't have as much to gain from agents yet.
• jf22 7mo ago
  I'm a former EM who would never go back in an AI age. EMs deal with friction and from my experience more output is more friction. You have org leaders and businessy people putting their foot on the gas because AI is so productive and then programmers shipping 2-3x more code. These two forces collide and you're stuck dealing with the friction so 10x the amount of initiatives you did before. The friction is like sandpaper on sandpaper.
  • coredev_ 7mo ago
    As an EM I don't get this. You are the sole responsible for quality. You are the sole responsible for what tools use. AI is voluntary to use. If AI produces code that no one knows and is hard to maintain, don't use AI in that way. If you can't make that decision, are you really the EM?
    • jf22 7mo ago
      I don't understand he comment. AI produces code that people can understand and is easy to maintain if you ask it for that.
      • coredev_ 7mo ago
        Maybe I misunderstood your initial comment
    • rapfaria 7mo ago
      > You are the sole responsible for what tools use. Sure, but now competitors are shipping like crazy (at their EM's sanity expense?). What to do? > AI is voluntary Until the company mandate. And also there 10 other EMs that I am competing with on my org tree alone, and their teams are all AI-heavy. Is that really a matter of choice?
    • aranelsurion 7mo ago
      > AI is voluntary to use. > If you can't make that decision, are you really the EM? You'd be served well as an EM by this part of the Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Depending on your organization, odds are high that AI use is one of the things you cannot change. Perhaps not even something you're ought to change. If your team is delivering x% more, "it makes my job x% more difficult so don't do that" won't fly neither upwards nor downwards. > If AI produces code that no one knows and is hard to maintain I think you're making an assumption here that the main problem with AI use is necessarily quality. OP wasn't even talking about AI producing bad code, just that it creating more code, and enabling more things to happen. More things going on at the same time, means you'd have more friction points and more things that can go wrong. Whenever those happen, the EM is pulled in.
• rixed 7mo ago
  The author forgot one very important reason to go for engineering manager: the hiring process does not include X slow rounds of leet code.
• ark4n 7mo ago
  There will always be a place for EMs and ICs. This goes back generations, there have always been labourers and managers of labourers. Perhaps the balance may tip one way or the others due to AI but something else will come along and tip it back again. Do what you enjoy and are the most effective at.
• saltyoldman 7mo ago
  I took an EM role. About a year later they eliminated all EMs in the US and replaced them with people in Poland. So I guess take the EM role if you're in Poland.
• phendrenad2 7mo ago
  People should know that you can't "just" turn down a promotion. You might be leaving management in a tough position where they were hoping to rely on you to fill a gap, and by turning it down, you're making it hard for them to be objective. They might default to seeing you as unreliable, and cut off future advancement opportunities (the ones you actually want). It's not fair, but that's how people think. This isn't a big problem when the money is free and everyone is trying to poach employees. You can just jump ship. But in this hellish economy, everyone is stuck. So take that damn promotion.
• notepad0x90 7mo ago
  Unpopular opinion: either you manage people or you manage work/processes, you shouldn't do both. if you're an engineering manager, either you manage your people and let them be engineers, or you don't manage any people and you focus on engineering solutions and managing the solutions themselves.
  • coredev_ 7mo ago
    Why unpopular? Sounds about right to me. I understand that some people take the manager path for the title/pay and never understands that the role is about handle people - not the tech. But they will not be very appreciated or it's a very small shop.
    • notepad0x90 7mo ago
      Because being a manager is the only way you can move up in most companies. And engineers who end up being engineering managers don't really want to let go of their former life, they'll end up managing people and doing the work at the same time causing all manners of issues. Of course there are exceptions, and the environment plays a factor as well.
• Eridrus 7mo ago
  One thing I will say is: I wish I had had some EM/hiring experience before starting a startup. My technical skills served me very well in year 1/2, but once we started hiring enough people I could definitely feel my lack of experience. Maybe big tech EM experience wouldn't have helped me a lot, the context is definitely very different, but at least it would have been some sort of baseline to draw from.
• xannabxlle 7mo ago
  If you're reason to not become an engineering manager is because you live so much under a rock you're unaware of a glorified MCP ensemble tool blowing up as number one, then you're not really fit to be an engineering manager in the first place, and obviously not a very enthusiastic engineer at that.
• 80sdave 7mo ago
  There is also another aspect of title that needs to be considered. A part of a company I used to work for did work with the banking industry. There is the meme of everyone is a VP at a bank, but for those of us who interacted with customers, we did have VP in our title, which caused internal angst, otherwise at some institutions it was seen as a snub to be dealing with anyone below a VP in title and did actually cause customer relationship problems. So sometimes there are business justification for titles outside of employee relations.
• ceramati 7mo ago
  After years of being asked to be a manager I finally said yes and started on Monday this week. This article could've come out a little sooner! j/k What tipped it for me is I spend most of my time managing agents now, why not manage some human agents too.
• arttaboi 7mo ago
  He makes good arguments, but so did all my managers throughout. I think EMs telling ICs to stay in the IC role is an age-old talk. To me, it sounds a bit like “the grass is greener on the other side.” Although, I’m not disregarding his points. I’m just saying that this article feels less about the challenges of becoming an EM and more about the challenges of stepping down from EM to IC.
• alistairSH 7mo ago
  For my friend specifically, staying on the IC track, becoming a Staff engineer and switching companies would have given him ~20-30% more than the EM promotion he was offered. This is missing something... the friend wouldn't immediately become a staff engineer - that could take just as long, or longer, than a promotion to middle management. At least where I am, the staff engineer equivalent (called Technical Fellow here) is considered Director or VP equivalent. In an engineering org of thousands, we have tens of these positions. Or, if I've misjudged what "staff engineer" means, our next lower position would be principal engineer (typically 1 in 10-15 engineering ICs, roughly). And their salaries are in the ballpark of our engineering managers. Anyway, all this sort of misses the point - it's two completely different jobs. I know plenty of people who don't want to manage people. Or tried and hated it. And plenty of people who are bored with coding and want a chance to put their management skills to work. EDIT - grabbed this from another comment... - L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff - L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow We have fewer levels than that... - Engineering Intern - Engineer 1 - Engineer 2 - Senior Engineer - Lead Engineer - Principal - Senior Principal - Tech Fellow So, staff is somewhere close to our Lead or Principal, who earn similar money as line managers. And only Principal+ are on a bonus plan (where all people managers are). For any of the lower ICs, a bonus is a rare thing (where for higher positions and managers, it's part of the comp package).
• Esophagus4 7mo ago
  In addition, I think the roles of manager and engineer will blend and management layers will flatten - companies are mostly looking for managers who code some of the time. It helps them run lean and avoid layers of management which slow down execution. As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we’ll be demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading. So if you do go into management, keep in mind you can’t let your engineering skills atrophy… you now have to be good at both. There aren’t many people who can do both well, but companies will expect this moving forward.
  • stronglikedan 7mo ago
    > that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading That never lasts. No one can do do both and do them effectively.
    • Esophagus4 7mo ago
      I happen to agree with you entirely… but I just have this feeling things will go this way as companies put more and more cost pressure on middle management layers.
  • cjblomqvist 7mo ago
    Or, because coding is now not a bottleneck, it'll become increasingly important to ensure all your developers know what to do/achieve, and you'll need to put more effort into setting up structures, processes etc to do that. More collaboration (instead of lone wolf coder) may actually increase the need for good managers.
    • Esophagus4 7mo ago
      That could be - I hadn’t thought about it that way, actually
• Crowberry 7mo ago
  I’m going to be giving off: ”Grandpa screams at clouds”-vibe with this comment. But I’m so sick and tired of ads and popups online. I’ve barely gotten far enough to be drawn in by the article and then I get a giant popup (on mobile) to subscribe to read more posts like this. Put it at the very end and I might. I’ve made it a habit to just exit the article whenever this happens. Nobody respects each other’s time in today’s internet, more intrusiveness = numbers go up. Rant done
• saghm 7mo ago
  > The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy, and it’s not stopping. > But even if you don’t give in to the constant FOMO - it’s impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn’t changed. Almost every part of our work looks different, and will continue to evolve. My experience is anecdotal, but this seems to be overblown. I'd say that almost every part of my work looks pretty identical to how it did a few years ago, and that the changes are relatively small in scope so far. Most of the arguments I've heard from those who advocate adopting AI tools are that the rate at which the tools are improving is exponential (or super-exponential, or whatever), which is a prediction about how it will change rather a claim that it has already reached a point that it's necessary. I don't pretend to have any expertise that lets me evaluate those predictions better than anyone else, but unless I happen to be a severe outlier, it seems like gross hyperbole to claim that every part of our work has already changed.
  • dirkc 7mo ago
    That comment made me wonder how long the person advised have spent working in tech, I'd wager that it's < 5 years. I'm not saying that to be snide. When you come from a academic CS setting like university, there are so many new things to learn in industry that after 5 years you could still be completely unfamiliar with a lot of things.
  • tomgp 7mo ago
    Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time? seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising version will be wasted.
    • generic92034 7mo ago
      It is just so that the CEO can claim they are an "AI first" company and the shareholders might believe that the company is not being eaten by AI but profits from it. Check the claims of the software vendors whose stocks have fallen by some 30% in the last few months, without any reason in the fundamentals.
• pflenker 7mo ago
  I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience. Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable. A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now. I don’t mind - it’s exciting! But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.
• softwaredoug 7mo ago
  Manager or not I think the real risk is overly adapting your skills to one company. Managers becoming experts at one companies politics and cannot instead of general organizational dynamics. The devs who seem to only get by in this one team / codebase, and neglect general skills, looming down on outside info as buzzwords. It seems smart at the time, and makes you more effective in the near term. But it might cause many of your skills to lose portability.
• etothet 7mo ago
  If you are reading this and you are thinking you want to become an engineering manager, I urge you to think long term what you want that to look like. I've seen too often that developers who want to become managers because they think it's the next inventible step aren't prepared for the people management and HR part of that role. And, as you move up to Director and beyond, those higher often have much less to do with actual engineering than tasks that sort of surround the world of engineering - lots of organizing information and attending meetings. I've seen too many developers who though they wanted to manage become victim to the Peter Principle [1]. There is nothing wrong with staying a developer, even if you're not "moving up" to some idealized title. If you like the work and you can tolerate the place you work, you're probably ahead of most people in our field. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    This. EM is a terminal position that does not own the product roadmap (Product Management) nor the underlying implementation (Staff/Principal Engineers). They primarily own delivery and execution because orgs can't be bothered to hire program managers anymore. If you are great at managing upwards and ensuring delivery by hook or by crook, you will make a great EM. But the next jump after EM is extremely difficult because you are competing with Principal Engineers and technical-minded PMs making a lateral move and cofounders who are being managed out by the board; and dealing with micromanaging CTOs or CPTOs.
    • Illniyar 7mo ago
      Are you saying principal engineers and tech minded PMs make lateral moves into director level manager without going through being entry level EMs first? I've never heard of something like that. Usually the requirement for being director level manager of engineers is to at least have managed people as an EM for several years before.
      • lukevp 7mo ago
        At my company it’s lateral. Lead -> EM Sr. Lead -> Sr. EM Principal -> Director Sr. Principal -> Sr. Director The pay is aligned with the level whether or not you’re a people leader. To your point though, it may be difficult to go from Principal to Director. I see the lateral moves happen more at the Lead/Sr. Lead levels. They might do a Principal to a Sr. Manager as a trial period with the expectation that you’d be Director after a short time if you perform well. I’ve definitely seen directors become principals as well, so it goes both ways.
• madrox 7mo ago
  Every job in engineering is changing right now. Managers aren't immune. I've been an EM for almost 20 years in some flavor or another, and I've been thinking a lot about how I want to adapt to this era. This is the first time I've seriously considered swapping out of management. Not for any of the reasons the author says, but because: - I don't feel as confident mentoring others through this period given how much the work is changing - I find myself enjoying the work more - EMs tend to have more difficulty justifying their existence at the best of times let alone a period of change like this The AI world will still need EMs. It's just unclear what those EMs will be doing every day and how it will work.
• chad_strategic 7mo ago
  In all honesty, I don't think I have met one dev that could be a manager. Also from my perspective, the article doesn't make any sense.
• callamdelaney 7mo ago
  I will stay as an individual contributor as long as possible. My one step into team management at 23~ was very enlightening.
• mgraczyk 7mo ago
  The part about pay is wrong, it's not comparing apples to apples. I've been a staff engineer at Google and other companies, I have been an EM and a very senior IC at big and small companies. If you're a very good IC, you can make a lot at a small number of good companies If you're a relatively worse manager you can make a similar amount at many other companies So the decision tree I would use is (focusing exclusively on compensation), if you're a very good IC, go somewhere willing to pay you >1M/year. If you can't get that you should be a manager
• arnvald 7mo ago
  > It’s a bad time to move away from tech Working at big tech these days I see EMs and directors playing with AI, building tools, contributing to codebase through AI agents. Today when there's less hiring and building the org, becoming EM doesn't mean moving away from tech > The ladder is very competitive Just like on IC path. You think that being a great builder will move you from staff to principal role? Nope. It's about setting direction, aligning people, finding opportunities. A set of skills that's very close to what managers do. > The pay is lower When you compare EM against staff engineers. Is EM and staff the same level? In some companies, yes. In some companies, EM is at senior or between senior and staff. So yes, on average it will be lower than staff, but EM is not a promotion, it's a change of career path. In any case, if someone's wondering whether they should try EM role given a chance, I still say: go for it. Going back has never been easier, a lot of companies now cuts manager roles and allows people to move back to IC, so if you have a chance to become EM and are curious about it, give it a try.
• jillesvangurp 7mo ago
  I have a few different reasons why you might think twice about this role. - if you transition from a technical role into this, beware your technical skills need regular usage to stay relevant. Not a show stopper for this role and I've had good non technical managers. - Be ready for a lot of relatively short lived jobs as a CTO or VP Engineering. Many startups create engineering manager type roles around the time they start scaling struggling a bit. Maybe the founder CTO wasn't so good at management or whatever. You'll inherit a mess. And they might not like you after all. I've had a few friends facing a lot of churn in this role. Just one company after another, do ungrateful work, and then move on to the next. It can pay well but it's not stable work. And quite stressful. Some people get lucky of course. - Make sure that this is really what you want to do the rest of your career and see the above two points. If you find the right employer, then this can be a great role of course. I've had a few excellent engineering managers (some of them retired now) in my career. But I have heard of people burning out or getting a rough deal, repeatedly trying to do VP Engineering roles in messy startups/scaleups as well. I know a few more of those.
• nmeofthestate 7mo ago
  What exactly is an engineering manager?
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• andy_ppp 7mo ago
  I genuinely think everything would work far better without management, from what I’ve seen most managers make organisations need more managers…
  • greenchair 7mo ago
    The manager role is inevitable once scale reaches certain thresholds.
  • fogzen 7mo ago
    Yeah. There's always such a lack of realpolitik in these discussions. They turn into endless bike shedding about what a manager is supposed to do according to some ideology of management, rather than the reality of the decisions managers are actually in control of and their actual tangible outputs.
  • hocuspocus 7mo ago
    I work at a tech-adjacent company with no middle management and no, it sucks even more. The work doesn't disappear, it simply gets divided and spread out over a lot more people, many of those with no real executive power. I don't even think this saves my employer any money in the long run.
• corndoge 7mo ago
  > You've probably seen this tweet - the creator of Claude Code asking why Anthropic still needs software engineers: In fact that is the creator of claude code answering, not asking.
• ashutoshstark 7mo ago
  True 100 % A lot of strong engineers move into EM roles expecting deeper technical impact, but end up spending most of their time on coordination, hiring, performance reviews, and cross-team alignment. That’s valuable work — just very different from building systems. More orgs should invest in strong IC tracks (Staff/Principal) so people can lead technically without managing people. Not everyone who’s good at engineering wants to optimize calendars and org charts.
• d_burfoot 7mo ago
  It's a bad idea to phrase advice as "Don't Do X", for most values of X that are often undertaken: - Don't move to Detroit - Don't go into academia - Don't use dating apps - Don't buy Google stock It's most obvious for the last one: you should buy Google (or any other) stock if you think it's underpriced and sell it if you think it's overpriced. But even for the other advice, a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis holds. If there were a massive exodus of people from academia, causing universities to increase salaries and reduce administrative burdens, going into academia might be great for the right people. For many people Detroit is a terrible city, but I know a guy who worked for the Tigers, and bought a large house for a small amount of money, and did a lovely job renovating it, so Detroit worked well for him. Life is all about finding underpriced value: options that you will appreciate more than others, for whatever reason.
• hintymad 7mo ago
  Isn't being an engineering manager about leverage? Someone needs to organize people, allocate resources, or even decide the direction of products. We may say that ICs can make equally good such decisions, but every company has a hierarchy and someone does call the shots. And for better or for worse, some people are indeed good at navigating company dynamics and driving an organization forward, even though they may suck at building. An example would be IBM's Watson Jr. He was known for being awkward at mastering IBM tech as a salesperson. Even in a holacratic company like Zappos or Valve, some people still manage, right?
• laalshaitaan 7mo ago
  The IC vs EM debate always skips the third option: neither. Start something. You end up writing code, managing people, doing sales, and shipping product in the same week. Way harder, but you never have to wonder if the ladder is worth climbing because there is no ladder
• deet 7mo ago
  It is a precarious time to look backwards on the definition of the roles of an IC or an engineering manager and make any extrapolations to what those will look like in the future. In my own team, I have seen ICs increasingly function like engineering managers, and even suffer some of the pitfalls of the role switch, as they change from reasoning about creating code to delegating to teams of software agents. Increasingly, ICs are needing to understand the product roadmap more deeply, figure out how to spec a problem and constraints on a solution in the right way to get their subordinates to produce reasonable output, and be the communication bridge between other jobs functions and the entities actually producing the code. I've also heard concerns of skill atrophy, as these team members spend less brain energy on language syntax, low level logic, etc, and more on interpreting abstract strategies to solving a problem and pattern matching those strategies against their software engineering wisdom. If anything, ICs should consider that the skills that will make them successful managing agents might be the ones that have made first-level engineering managers successful: the ability to coordinate with other job functions, map implementation strategies to product and organization needs, and deliberately and carefully delegate and coordinate work of others writing the actual code.
• dangus 7mo ago
  Bad advice. You want to have at least one managerial role on your resume before you turn 40/45/50 so you can get hired as you age, and being offered one is something that doesn’t happen often. It’s far easier to go back to IC than to hope someone offers you an EM role later. I say take it while the offer is there. There’s far less age discrimination when you’re looking for management and strategy oriented roles. Those roles want experience, not the raw energy, output, and fresh skills of a younger IC.
• unethical_ban 7mo ago
  Oh no, someone might be "stuck" as "just" an IC manager for years, making a comfortable salary to provide for their family and their retirement. Not everyone wants to move up. Some people are happy doing a job they're good at until the times comes to move to something else.
• tkel 7mo ago
  We shouldn't move away from tech, because Anthropic is hiring 100+ people to prompt a chatbot to write code? Hahaha, how fast we've fallen. Not to mention Anthropic has a huge conflict of interest in making you think nothing is wrong. And the author fell for it.
• gorjusborg 7mo ago
  I came to read an article, and all I got was a crummy advertisement.
• socketcluster 7mo ago
  The key is to stay hands-on. I go for the tech lead role. Actually at my current company I'm co-lead of a team of 10 people. I've been CTO and also the sole team lead in the past but I was always hands-on coding. I'm glad I have a co-lead at my current company; in fact, I'm the one who recommended to the big boss that he promote both of us. Normally, I'm the sole leader but in this company, we deal with corporate clients and so there is a fair amount of compliance work, team coordination and stakeholder management and also the project itself is very complex on the tech side. AI adds a lot of complexity. My co-lead is really good with coordination, planning, meetings, stakeholder management and alignment but at the same time he has less experience on the tech side so I have the last say on technical matters like architecture and choice of technologies and I'm in charge of general-purpose modules, configurations, migrations, data management... I think staying hands-on is very important, especially now with LLMs. Managing complexity is itself a separate concern from managing people. There is a human/psychological component to managing complexity but it's different than pure time management and coordinating work based on priorities. On a project with 10+ people, with AI, the complexity can grow rapidly and so it needs to be managed.
  • master_crab 7mo ago
    Staying hands on matters. I think it also matters how you stay hands on. Initially, I was in the weeds quite often with my engineers. Over the years I’ve learned to maintain side projects that directionally follow what my teams are doing. It gives me some dispassionate separation and a unique look at things that my engineers appreciate.
• leowoo91 7mo ago
  Tbh, lots of EMs/VPs in wild that only behave like salespersons without the actual context. I sometimes find it hard to justify them making as much as senior engineers but could be considered as a stress-pay for those meetings..
• tabs_or_spaces 7mo ago
  >If you are a senior engineer, the bottom line is that I wouldn’t recommend the jump to management right now. I would wait a couple of years to see how things will look like. > BUT, and it’s a big but - if your gut tells you to do it (and not your brain), if it’s truly a path you want to pursue - then go for it! It feels more like the purpose of this article was to get the sponsored segment out than to actually give useful advice. Like how is this the conclusion? > For my friend specifically, staying on the IC track, becoming a Staff engineer and switching companies would have given him ~20-30% more than the EM promotion he was offered. Company promotions do not give a higher salary bump than moving companies. The friend could be at a company that pays less for all roles. Additionally, that visualisation does a low-high representation and doesn't take outliers into account. Staff engineer roles tend to have outliers when it comes to salaries. EM roles do not If anyone wants some advice from an engineering director * If you only want to become an EM for the money, you probably won't like it. It's the same as an engineer that's only coding for the money. The more you like something, the more you would want to learn it * The EM title means different things at different companies. Some companies are only/mostly about line management duties. In other companies, you're expected to do project + stakeholder management. In other companies, you're also expected to do operations, budgeting and technical + business strategy. As you can see, it's different to an IC who is building software and there's more of a focus on the things around building software. * Being hands on is one thing. But what distinguishes one EM from another is engineer empathy. If you're an EM on the team and haven't did a PR (with or without ai), then you have zero empathy for your engineers because you have no idea what it takes to build a feature for your team. Using LLMs improves engineer empathy, but you need to learn it despite it. * AI/LLMs will change two main things: the ability for an EM to be more hands on and the way EMs design team processes. Just like it changes engineer's ability to code, the EM needs to think holistically on how the development process will change and adapt accordingly. Do you have a path for the team to use AI agents? Do you have ways to reduce meetings and achieve the same level of alignment with LLMs? This is the type of thing EMs will/should be thinking about. * The career path of an EM is largely dependent on the growth of a company. You will only get "stuck" if your company is not growing. If a company grows, there will be a need to hire engineers, then hire someone that manages those engineers and eventually someone that manages those managers. * The other thing about EM careers. Advancement also depends on how well you are fitting into the business. For small companies, being more hands on as an EM is better. For larger companies, fitting in well with the company values, culture and leadership principles of the company is better. I really don't appreciate the author's lack of understanding on how engineering leadership works and the general gatekeeping in this article. Sure AI is changing things, but there's really no need to steer people away and gatekeep roles like this role implies.
• SurvivorForge 7mo ago
  One thing I rarely see discussed: the best engineers I've worked with who moved into management didn't do it for the title or the career ladder. They did it because they noticed they were already doing the job informally — unblocking people, aligning priorities, having the hard conversations. The role just formalized what they were already spending 40% of their time on. If you're not already gravitating toward those activities naturally, that's a strong signal the role isn't for you.
• mvdtnz 7mo ago
  Personally with the impending changes in the industry I feel like I'm better positioned as an engineering manager than an IC. If the bullish predictions come true and software development teams shrink dramatically or disappear I will not just be a developer - I'll be a manager. There is still an entire world of industries not impacted as much by AI - I could manage a team of mechanical engineers or conservationists or business analysts. These skills are more transferable outside of tech.
• Paddyz 7mo ago
  [dead]
• BatFastard 7mo ago
  As someone who has been a coder/em/vp/founder for over 40 years. The last 3 months of using Claude Code has convinced me that in order to have a job in software very soon you will have to a both a coder and an engineering manager. It takes both of those skills to effectively manager AI, and managing AI teams is all it will be about within 2 years. Problem is if you dont understand coding, its hard to see the traps AI falls into. They are both amazingly smart, and incredibly dumb at the same time. Just like people!
• onion2k 7mo ago
  While my friend was offered a bump with the promotion to EM, the total compensation was less than the offers he received for Senior/Staff Engineer at other startups. "At other startups" is the important bit here. I assume 'startup' means less than 100 people, at which point it switches to 'scaleup', but whatever definition you use the question should really be 'When does an EM actually start being useful?' Startups don't really need EMs because they don't really need managers at all. There is a strong expectation in a startup that the staff there are capable of managing themselves, plus there are usually fewer business functions that developers need to work with. Where an EM is useful is in a larger business that has many competing demands of engineering teams: features, roadmaps, BAU, KTLO, tech debt, compliance, etc ... it's a long list. There's a necessity for someone to manage that, and support the teams to be doing the right work at the right time, without letting standards slide, and to support the team to navigate and negotiate the political maze of multiple stakeholders wanting their thing to be priority #1. I've been an EM for a few years and I would not recommend someone takes an EM role in any company that has less than 70-100 staff (assuming about 1/3 is engineering). Once you get to that scale I think the role starts getting interesting, and valued, but if the company is smaller it should be managing those processes fairly easily already. If it isn't then that's a signal there's problems with the way the business works that an EM probably can't solve because they're rooted in the business's leadership culture.
• siren2026 7mo ago
  I have been both an EM and a Staff software engineer at a bigtech. Both are great career choices but lately being an EM means spending over 6 hours a day in meetings and having very little agency over your time. Your whole job is basically being in meetings and being a human router for information between people. This changed when BigTech redefined the roles of an EM. Back in the days, the EM would naturally be the best engineer in the team that wanted to stay technical and grow the team. Since 2010, Bigtech has decided that EM should especially NOT be technical. They should do "People things" only. I think that was a turn for the worse in our industry, As an IC I have way more control over my time. I can decide when I work. That being said it depends what I want to optimize for. I think if your goal is to climb up the ladder you will do that more easily as a driven EM than a driven IC. As an EM if you are driven and put the hours in and play the game well, you could get promoted to Director/Sr. Director. The skills here are not especially difficult. Getting promoted is all about being at the right time at the right place and playing the right game. If you are an EM in a growing company, you will almost certainly grow with the compant and get more scope. As an engineer it feels way more difficult to get promoted past Staff. After Staff you are competing with people that are absolutely cracked coders and dedicated 12+ hours a day working. Most of them have a talent level that is almost unmatchable. But really, if you want to manage your time, don't become an EM.
• croes 7mo ago
  > Thanks Unblocked for supporting today’s article! > Unblocked changes the economics. > It builds organizational context from your code, PR history, conversations, docs, and runtime signals. Is that article an ad?
• flashybaby 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• mamaluigie 7mo ago
  god dam the ads on this website are embedded into the article in a way where you dont know what is an add or part of the article til you are finished. What the fuck. am not reading because of that