4 ms·
> Unlike virtually every other function in a software company, engineers — particularly the good ones — don’t want to move up. This means that the people who wa
by 2bluesc 13y ago
> Unlike virtually every other function in a software company, engineers — particularly the good ones — don’t want to move up. This means that the people who want the engineering manager role are unlikely to be very good at it; and those who could be good at it don’t want anything to do with it at all.
This is an awesome article and resonates with me.
- endlessvoid94 13y agoThere's a huge assumption here -- that the best engineering managers used to be engineers, namely these "unicorns" who went from "wanting to be great engineer" to "wanting to be great engineering manager". That's not the only path.
- watwut 13y agoThe trouble is that even if great engineer moves up, his work will require zero engineering work. Few years later he is just another formerly great engineer out of touch with superficial ideas about current practices. I have seen that happen with programmers that moved to pure architect positions or to pure management. Just a few year later (2-3) and they start to have naive and idealized idea about programming and development process.