Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers.
Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management.
I make this distinction because even group 1 managers usually have to raise their hand and say something like “can we please stop messing this up. I can help.”
Rarely is an awesome individual magically called upon to become a manager, particularly by poor managers who are already messing stuff up.
In an environment where management is good, there’s a longer cycle of development, mentorship, and nudging of high potential people into management. But if you’re not in that environment, you probably need to ask to help make it better. It won’t happen magically.
> Rarely is an awesome individual magically called upon to become a manager, particularly by poor managers who are already messing stuff up
There's a passage in Platos' Republic which is illuminating about this particular circumstance.
And I quote from [1].
"""
And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for
them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing
and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves
out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being
ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must
be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear
of punishment.
And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness
to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed
dishonourable.
Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who
refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.
And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office,
not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the
idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves,
but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task
of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good.
"""
Stuff that was true two millenia ago, still continues to be the same.
I never wanted to be a manager until I experienced one of the worst managers I had ever run across and decided maybe I should revise that particular opinion.
I'm now a VP and I make it my goal not to be that kind of a manager. I do still sometimes wish I were just a regular coder though. There is a lot of stuff about being a manager I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
I agree with every word of this. I would also add that there's a third category, or maybe a 2.b: individual contributors in their 30s and 40s who look ahead to their future and say "well, I guess I better become a manager at some point" without having any particular aptitude or even an intrinsic desire.
Many organizations have quite intelligently created parallel paths for contributors to keep advancing, which somewhat mitigates this effect. However, in the past, this was a widespread phenomenon, and it's still out there to some extent. You find contributors who think management is easier, or more prestigious, or less prone to ageism, and so will switch tracks.
> Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management.
Pretty much this, but I want to refine the statement: "the worst managers are those who _want_ to manage."
There is how you become a manager as you call out, but what happens after? How to stay an excellent IC as you spend more time in management and become a manager of managers? Picking up a small enhancement it big once in a while can be helpful for you, but also really interruptive for the team. You can code on your own time, but that only goes so far. What are strategies to keep these qualities a manager brings who also is a top IC even after years managing and managing managers?
I have a not-so-small network of people I unofficially mentor, but on the org chart I’m an IC. I’m happy with the situation, but dread the day I need to manage somebody to get things done.
Reminds me of my favourite quote by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord:
"I distinguish four types [of officers]. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
Hardworking and stupid make great employees though. The problem is for doing such a great job as cogs in the machine they get promoted into positions of authority and then it is hard to fault them too much because at least they are hardworking.
More details, from the people behind Apple’s internal leadership training:
Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics:
1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions
2. immersion in the details of those functions;
3. and a willingness to collaboratively debate other functions during collective decision-making.
When managers have these attributes, decisions are made in a coordinated fashion by the people most qualified to make them.
A special kind of disaster happens when a manager thinks they have deep expertise but they don’t. I have to be actively vigilant of what this manager is doing because one statement could lead to hours wasted. Just the other day they were about to launch a whole S3 tangent involving two teams because some report came back saying a few EBS volumes were not encrypted.
But that runs counter to all the arguments professional scrum masters and agile evangelists make. "All you need to do know is agile/scrum/fad du jour". /s
I think the article, and many of the comments here, miss the point badly. No manager of a team doing technically complex and creative work can for very long remain capable of doing all the work themselves. Modern projects and processes simply require too much specialized knowledge to function for that to work. What managers need that (probably) comes from having been a strong individual contributor is sufficient knowledge of the fields involved in what they're managing to be able to understand the critical elements in the project or process in the context of the overall goal, and to be able to evaluate well the value of ideas for improvement or problem solution that come out of their team. But they also need leadership and management skills. The latter are not the same as, and are not developed by, stellar individual contributor skills. Furthermore, it's important to understand that management and leadership are not the same thing.
My personal experience has been that I was a very able individual contributor, and that I was able to learn leadership skills (that is, how to inspire people; how to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and assign work that played to the former, and created opportunities to ameliorate the latter; how to point individuals and teams in fruitful directions without having (or often being able to) do all the hard work of pushing in that direction myself) by diligent study of people and myself. But I was never able to become more than a barely competent manager - I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me from individual contributor to team lead, to product line lead, to CTO of highly successful $10B billion medical and technology organization in 20 years.
>The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers
Duh.
For a technical business to have the most unfair advantage (well above patents, etc.) there has got to be the most technical competence/productivity at the very top.
There's still an unfair advantage if there's as much competence at the top, but when it's the most that's when it's really the most unfair.
Jobs was an outstanding visionary, salesman, task-oriented and goal oriented manager, but without Woz at the top along with him Apple would have been greatly limited.
Once things took off they could build some bigger teams, on paper it looked like they could afford anything. It was expected to require more than one engineer to design as salable a product as Woz could do single-handedly.
By 1985 Jobs was reminiscing about being burned:
>We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all.
>They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything.
As this took place it required more & more personnel, as well as these non-domain managers to go with them, in order to accomplish less than Woz and a small team. It was a no brainer.
What a person can do single handedly turns out to be the best indication of how much more they can do with a proper high leadership position (if they are willing), especially when compared to "professional managers" without the domain expertise to hold their own when there's no technical team backing them up.
Not how many people the impressive manager has managed before, even if there was legitimate positive financial outcome in their background.
Once there was a competent all-technical team, if less wizardly than Woz himself, Jobs could sell that just as well, Woz was well set, and he was out of there with his shares in Apple wisely held.
If Apple had not recognized this as early as they did, there would be no way Apple could have gotten as big as they are now.
>I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me
Woz could legitimately say this about Jobs which is a true measure of whether there was adequate technical leadership at the very top during his time.
Reading the article, according to Steve Jobs, the best managers are the people who are so good that they realise that they must do it themselves, even if they don't want to. The title of the article thus has only a necessary but not sufficient condition according to what Steve originally meant. In other words: Clickbait.
It appears that outside our bubble software-work enjoys such a low status that management does not possess, or admits to possessing, any technical competence. This is in stark contrast to engineering or manufacturing companies, where engineers make up the highest levels of management and also adjacent areas like running the factories, and generally management prides itself with being hands-on, dropping knowledge and walking through the shop floor frequently.
In an agile environment (the most common structure in software development) the professional class of scrum masters and analysts are often non-technical, and management is sparse and hands-off (teams are "self-organized"). Key technical decisions are relegated to senior individual contributors, allowing for CV driven development, cargo culting, and bad habits. Stories of a Microsoft VP who files a bug report and points out the line of code where the error occured could never have happened anywhere where I worked.
"And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness
to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who
refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office,
not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves,
but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good.
For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention
as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest,
but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of conferring one."
The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying
Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better
The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting shit done) are the ones who make it very far in the IC path and become team leads. Team leads are the best managers, the actual managers are just there to do boilerplate shit and politicking that team leads aren't interested in
(disclaimer: not talking about all managers or all companies, just the ones I've personally experienced)
As someone who went from IC to management, my perspective is that getting PRs merged is still that satisfying. I just don't have to be the author of the PR.
More generally, I think some ICs do think that if managers and meetings went away, ICs could just write code distraction-free. But as anyone who's rushed to merge a PR before a colleague so that they have to deal with the merge conflict can tell you, engineers often don't get along, actually. Managers keep the company from getting stuck or thrashing when the engineers don't agree, and most of managing is brokering agreements of one kind or another.
I miss it so much. But there’s a different satisfaction with seeing a big team happy, motivated and successful (and hopefully the team taking all the credit rather than you!).
I’m hoping I can go back and IC for a bit…
It’s a different reward that’s more subtle than coding.
Outstanding IC wanting to get into management for job security / ageism. Turned out to be a bad manager too focused on team and unable to effectively manage up and sideways.
I'm now a consultant. Ageism is suddenly on my side in consulting. Coding until I die.
Im just curious here. Did your team love you or hate you? Were they happy with your focus on them besides your managing upwards and sideways inefficiencies?
I think the solution is to hire both, because there is also the Peter principle: "promoted to incompetence".
The professional managers should be in a deputy position to the promoted ICs. This way they can bring their skills and expertise in management and empower the promoted ICs who understand the business or problems deeply.
The professional managers can be pretty useful if they don't have people reporting to them and help with processes, compliance, planning, making presentations and excel tables and yet the capacity for damage will be limited as the promoted ICs will need approve anything.
DEC apparently had "administration" instead of management, implying it didn't rule but rather assist, but I don't know the exact details.
The person responsible for paperwork is called an accountant, a secretary or officer, not a manager.
A person handling presentations is usually a salesperson.
The person with deep knowledge about how a particular business runs and steps required to do so is called a business analyst.
Many so-called professional managers are actually salespeople who have leveraged themselves - sold themselves as managers regardless of how good they are at actually managing. The closest equivalent is politicians.
Sometimes an owner is actually forced to take on multiple such roles at the same time, especially in a small company or a startup. Then they tend to fail thanks to their shortcomings unless they get or hire help.
For example Jobs was not particularly any good manager. He was a salesman and a designer. He hired good managers.
When he managed directly he got abject failures, that only his skill in sales partly covered.
The article described a case where someone hired a manager to actually do the job of a process quality engineer/quality officer.
Worth mentioning that management vs. IC is not a decision for life.
Charity Majors wrote about the opportunities and challenges when switching throughout one's career between management and individual contributor [1] and [2].
There are different flavors of not wanting to be a manager.
The good kind Jobs refers to are people who see the necessity and that no one is doing it (or doing it well). They aren't the kind of people who don't understand people and fall into the trap of simply controlling and micro-managing people.
Let me give you an example of the bad kind. Google's SWE ladder goes all the say from L3 (new grad) to L9 (ignoring exceptions like Google Fellow and execs). There is an expectation of growth from L3 to L5 (Senior SWE). There is a lot of reward if you can get promoted to L6 (Staff SWE) but it is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of luck (eg being on the right project that doesn't get cancelled). Getting to L6 now is much harder than it was 10-15 years ago.
One of the things Ruth Porat did when she came in was to control costs by reducing the promotion target percentage because it wasn't visible to people (there was a leaked memo). All promo candidates go to committee and effectively get stack ranked across committees. There is a quota ("target percentage") of who gets promoted. This creates a backlog and raises the bar for getting promoted. It gives more time for your impact to dissipate or your project to get cancelled (which was your promotion case).
Compare this to getting promoted as a manager. Your manager level (M0 to M2, which is the same level as L5 to L7) is effectively a function of your head count with the added requirement that M2 requires you to have managers as reports. So if you're an M0 (which is rare), getting to M1 is typically as easy as getting to 10-15 reports (as long as you don't screw up so badly).
So there is a breed of SWEs that bridge these worlds. They're half an IC and half an EM in the hopes that this gets them over the line.
In my experience, these managers were generally the absolute worst. They had no interest in ever being a amanager and were just ticking a box for an L6 promotion case. Career development tended to be zero. Everything was seen through the lens of what helped them get promoted. If that means throwing someone under the bus, so be it.
I think one of the best things Facebook did was they effectively didn't allow this. Having reports as an IC generally wasn't allowed. Being an L5 with reports was mostly not allowed. I mean there were some exceptions in some orgs and for some people but it was exceedingly rare. You'd see people ask "why can't I be a manager at L5?" and you heavily suspected the main motivator for this question was an inability to get promoted to L6 as a SWE.
I know an amazing IC at a software company I once worked at that I still keep in touch with. He has extremely deep technical knowledge, which you can simply deduct from basically everyone in the company (even from other teams) coming to him for advice. He's been at the company for >10 years.
He has strong opinions on current processes and just getting things done.
This post resonated deeply with me, since I've discussed before with him his role and how it could evolve. I know for a fact that he dislikes lots of meeting and really likes working on the core product, and so far hasn't really jumped on the opportunity to go into management - he doesn't really want to be manager. So he is kind of exactly the guy the post is describing. The company is growing though and he is very slowly getting pushed by the head of development into a more managerial role..
Let's see how it works out. I believe he is going to be a great manager though.
Some of the best I've seen are highly technical people who moved into management and then realized they can actually do more by leveraging their people. It's not the same hands-on, but they enjoy working with others to get things done.
I've gotten a lot of pushback (from two different companies) when I suggested openly that any PM should have an extensive if not intimate understanding of the projects they're managing. They should realistically be able to do the work they're delegating, because you routinely need that level of understanding if the ones you're managing expect to get useful information out of you. If the manager doesn't understand the project, it becomes a repetitive effort of "let me ask the client, I'll get back to you" and you end up wasting tremendous amounts of time.
As a manager, I want to see myself in what he said because I really enjoy writing code and engineering solutions. But honestly , I don’t think the “want to” matters all that much when it comes to management.
I do think many good managers are problem solvers. They are often hands-on, in the thick of ideation and problem-solving.
They have the knowledge necessary to evaluate the competence and solutions submitted by the people being managed. And that knowledge and skill also helps them understand what their reports need to succeed.
I completely agree with this. The best leaders are those who have proven themselves to be great individual contributors before moving into a management role. This gives them a deep understanding and appreciation for the work that their team members do, which is crucial for effective leadership. Professional managers, on the other hand, may not have the same level of experience and can sometimes struggle to effectively support and lead their team.
Yes, but, the problem with ic becoming managers is that they are too involved with eng work. Often dictating how things should be done. Also, they have hard time letting their beloved legacy code go.
Best managers are IC who have the ability to trust their eng to do the work. Their main role should be “advice”, provide context and connections within the company.
Empirically speaking 90% of the managers out there became so because they were intentional in becoming managers. The reasons are myriad. Most want the power so they can hire or fire. Others with reaching the job safety inherently built into the role.
A lot of IC historically become managers not because they particularly care about doing performance reviews but because they want more influence and to work at a larger scale. This leads to a situation of people managers who care less about managing people than managing delivery and technology strategy. The best of those also have a lot of empathy and inadvertently are good at people management.
Another reason, often related in my experience, is a lot of companies careers plateau for ICs pretty early on. Your comp stops growing beyond COLA, titles exhaust, and despite being young you’re at a terminal career velocity. The only thing way to break up is to become management. This isn’t surprising - who controls promotion and comp other than managers, and why on earth wouldn’t they structure things to reward themselves and people like them? There are many companies that have recognized this and created IC paths parallel to management, at least up to the C level. However the relative difficulty in achieving them is disproportionately weighted against the IC vs manager. At Amazon there’s a crap ton of VP and Director managers. But it’s absurdly hard to get senior principal or distinguished engineer. The rationale is they want to keep the prestige of the level high for IC. But that’s weird - the prestige of the same level in management must therefore be low and why is the bar different for the same level if you’re managing vs building?
Real leaders understand the burden of command and take it seriously and the stress is not sustainable for nearly anyone for the long term, so experienced leaders don’t want to do it unless it’s absolutely essential.
[+] [-] obblekk|3 years ago|reply
Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers.
Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management.
I make this distinction because even group 1 managers usually have to raise their hand and say something like “can we please stop messing this up. I can help.”
Rarely is an awesome individual magically called upon to become a manager, particularly by poor managers who are already messing stuff up.
In an environment where management is good, there’s a longer cycle of development, mentorship, and nudging of high potential people into management. But if you’re not in that environment, you probably need to ask to help make it better. It won’t happen magically.
[+] [-] gopalv|3 years ago|reply
There's a passage in Platos' Republic which is illuminating about this particular circumstance.
And I quote from [1].
""" And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment.
And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable.
Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.
And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. """
Stuff that was true two millenia ago, still continues to be the same.
[1] - http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.mb.txt
[+] [-] zaphar|3 years ago|reply
I'm now a VP and I make it my goal not to be that kind of a manager. I do still sometimes wish I were just a regular coder though. There is a lot of stuff about being a manager I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
Many organizations have quite intelligently created parallel paths for contributors to keep advancing, which somewhat mitigates this effect. However, in the past, this was a widespread phenomenon, and it's still out there to some extent. You find contributors who think management is easier, or more prestigious, or less prone to ageism, and so will switch tracks.
[+] [-] mdorazio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatwasunusual|3 years ago|reply
Pretty much this, but I want to refine the statement: "the worst managers are those who _want_ to manage."
[+] [-] ajmurmann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nr2x|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|3 years ago|reply
Key point. People are political creatures, and in a workplace this is very often dominant.
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
"I distinguish four types [of officers]. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
[+] [-] amai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antipaul|3 years ago|reply
Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics:
1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions
2. immersion in the details of those functions;
3. and a willingness to collaboratively debate other functions during collective decision-making.
When managers have these attributes, decisions are made in a coordinated fashion by the people most qualified to make them.
Article: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
[+] [-] lovehashbrowns|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawgabbit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walnutclosefarm|3 years ago|reply
My personal experience has been that I was a very able individual contributor, and that I was able to learn leadership skills (that is, how to inspire people; how to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and assign work that played to the former, and created opportunities to ameliorate the latter; how to point individuals and teams in fruitful directions without having (or often being able to) do all the hard work of pushing in that direction myself) by diligent study of people and myself. But I was never able to become more than a barely competent manager - I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me from individual contributor to team lead, to product line lead, to CTO of highly successful $10B billion medical and technology organization in 20 years.
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|3 years ago|reply
Duh.
For a technical business to have the most unfair advantage (well above patents, etc.) there has got to be the most technical competence/productivity at the very top.
There's still an unfair advantage if there's as much competence at the top, but when it's the most that's when it's really the most unfair.
Jobs was an outstanding visionary, salesman, task-oriented and goal oriented manager, but without Woz at the top along with him Apple would have been greatly limited.
Once things took off they could build some bigger teams, on paper it looked like they could afford anything. It was expected to require more than one engineer to design as salable a product as Woz could do single-handedly.
By 1985 Jobs was reminiscing about being burned:
>We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all.
>They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything.
As this took place it required more & more personnel, as well as these non-domain managers to go with them, in order to accomplish less than Woz and a small team. It was a no brainer.
What a person can do single handedly turns out to be the best indication of how much more they can do with a proper high leadership position (if they are willing), especially when compared to "professional managers" without the domain expertise to hold their own when there's no technical team backing them up.
Not how many people the impressive manager has managed before, even if there was legitimate positive financial outcome in their background.
Once there was a competent all-technical team, if less wizardly than Woz himself, Jobs could sell that just as well, Woz was well set, and he was out of there with his shares in Apple wisely held.
If Apple had not recognized this as early as they did, there would be no way Apple could have gotten as big as they are now.
>I always had, by design, an "administrative partner" on my team who brought those abilities to the table - and I always paid attention to what they had to say. That combination (technical knowledge, leadership skills, and sub-contracted management skills) carried me
Woz could legitimately say this about Jobs which is a true measure of whether there was adequate technical leadership at the very top during his time.
[+] [-] tartrate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UweSchmidt|3 years ago|reply
In an agile environment (the most common structure in software development) the professional class of scrum masters and analysts are often non-technical, and management is sparse and hands-off (teams are "self-organized"). Key technical decisions are relegated to senior individual contributors, allowing for CV driven development, cargo culting, and bad habits. Stories of a Microsoft VP who files a bug report and points out the line of code where the error occured could never have happened anywhere where I worked.
[+] [-] Victerius|3 years ago|reply
Plato, The Republic
[+] [-] zolland|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
Great kings know it is effective to disguise their desire for the role.
[+] [-] elgar1212|3 years ago|reply
Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better
The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting shit done) are the ones who make it very far in the IC path and become team leads. Team leads are the best managers, the actual managers are just there to do boilerplate shit and politicking that team leads aren't interested in
(disclaimer: not talking about all managers or all companies, just the ones I've personally experienced)
[+] [-] msteffen|3 years ago|reply
More generally, I think some ICs do think that if managers and meetings went away, ICs could just write code distraction-free. But as anyone who's rushed to merge a PR before a colleague so that they have to deal with the merge conflict can tell you, engineers often don't get along, actually. Managers keep the company from getting stuck or thrashing when the engineers don't agree, and most of managing is brokering agreements of one kind or another.
[+] [-] pantojax45|3 years ago|reply
I’m hoping I can go back and IC for a bit…
It’s a different reward that’s more subtle than coding.
[+] [-] refsab|3 years ago|reply
Outstanding IC wanting to get into management for job security / ageism. Turned out to be a bad manager too focused on team and unable to effectively manage up and sideways.
I'm now a consultant. Ageism is suddenly on my side in consulting. Coding until I die.
[+] [-] tartoran|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimitar|3 years ago|reply
The professional managers should be in a deputy position to the promoted ICs. This way they can bring their skills and expertise in management and empower the promoted ICs who understand the business or problems deeply.
The professional managers can be pretty useful if they don't have people reporting to them and help with processes, compliance, planning, making presentations and excel tables and yet the capacity for damage will be limited as the promoted ICs will need approve anything.
DEC apparently had "administration" instead of management, implying it didn't rule but rather assist, but I don't know the exact details.
[+] [-] AstralStorm|3 years ago|reply
Many so-called professional managers are actually salespeople who have leveraged themselves - sold themselves as managers regardless of how good they are at actually managing. The closest equivalent is politicians.
Sometimes an owner is actually forced to take on multiple such roles at the same time, especially in a small company or a startup. Then they tend to fail thanks to their shortcomings unless they get or hire help.
For example Jobs was not particularly any good manager. He was a salesman and a designer. He hired good managers. When he managed directly he got abject failures, that only his skill in sales partly covered.
The article described a case where someone hired a manager to actually do the job of a process quality engineer/quality officer.
[+] [-] thewileyone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrpnk|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
[2] https://charity.wtf/2022/03/24/twin-anxieties-of-the-enginee...
[+] [-] cletus|3 years ago|reply
The good kind Jobs refers to are people who see the necessity and that no one is doing it (or doing it well). They aren't the kind of people who don't understand people and fall into the trap of simply controlling and micro-managing people.
Let me give you an example of the bad kind. Google's SWE ladder goes all the say from L3 (new grad) to L9 (ignoring exceptions like Google Fellow and execs). There is an expectation of growth from L3 to L5 (Senior SWE). There is a lot of reward if you can get promoted to L6 (Staff SWE) but it is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of luck (eg being on the right project that doesn't get cancelled). Getting to L6 now is much harder than it was 10-15 years ago.
One of the things Ruth Porat did when she came in was to control costs by reducing the promotion target percentage because it wasn't visible to people (there was a leaked memo). All promo candidates go to committee and effectively get stack ranked across committees. There is a quota ("target percentage") of who gets promoted. This creates a backlog and raises the bar for getting promoted. It gives more time for your impact to dissipate or your project to get cancelled (which was your promotion case).
Compare this to getting promoted as a manager. Your manager level (M0 to M2, which is the same level as L5 to L7) is effectively a function of your head count with the added requirement that M2 requires you to have managers as reports. So if you're an M0 (which is rare), getting to M1 is typically as easy as getting to 10-15 reports (as long as you don't screw up so badly).
So there is a breed of SWEs that bridge these worlds. They're half an IC and half an EM in the hopes that this gets them over the line.
In my experience, these managers were generally the absolute worst. They had no interest in ever being a amanager and were just ticking a box for an L6 promotion case. Career development tended to be zero. Everything was seen through the lens of what helped them get promoted. If that means throwing someone under the bus, so be it.
I think one of the best things Facebook did was they effectively didn't allow this. Having reports as an IC generally wasn't allowed. Being an L5 with reports was mostly not allowed. I mean there were some exceptions in some orgs and for some people but it was exceedingly rare. You'd see people ask "why can't I be a manager at L5?" and you heavily suspected the main motivator for this question was an inability to get promoted to L6 as a SWE.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] instance|3 years ago|reply
He has strong opinions on current processes and just getting things done.
This post resonated deeply with me, since I've discussed before with him his role and how it could evolve. I know for a fact that he dislikes lots of meeting and really likes working on the core product, and so far hasn't really jumped on the opportunity to go into management - he doesn't really want to be manager. So he is kind of exactly the guy the post is describing. The company is growing though and he is very slowly getting pushed by the head of development into a more managerial role..
Let's see how it works out. I believe he is going to be a great manager though.
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldstrangers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhte415|3 years ago|reply
So, to play Devil's Advocate, a study [1] of a technology company, Microsoft, that finds that
> technical skills are not the sign of greatness for an engineering manager.
[1] What makes a great manager of software engineers? https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8094304
[+] [-] trentnix|3 years ago|reply
I do think many good managers are problem solvers. They are often hands-on, in the thick of ideation and problem-solving.
They have the knowledge necessary to evaluate the competence and solutions submitted by the people being managed. And that knowledge and skill also helps them understand what their reports need to succeed.
[+] [-] antipaul|3 years ago|reply
It’s a somewhat tricky balance between “micromanagement” and problem-solving, but then problem solving is a bit of a discipline after all.
[+] [-] RustLove|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Patrol8394|3 years ago|reply
Best managers are IC who have the ability to trust their eng to do the work. Their main role should be “advice”, provide context and connections within the company.
[+] [-] qwertyuiop_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|3 years ago|reply
Another reason, often related in my experience, is a lot of companies careers plateau for ICs pretty early on. Your comp stops growing beyond COLA, titles exhaust, and despite being young you’re at a terminal career velocity. The only thing way to break up is to become management. This isn’t surprising - who controls promotion and comp other than managers, and why on earth wouldn’t they structure things to reward themselves and people like them? There are many companies that have recognized this and created IC paths parallel to management, at least up to the C level. However the relative difficulty in achieving them is disproportionately weighted against the IC vs manager. At Amazon there’s a crap ton of VP and Director managers. But it’s absurdly hard to get senior principal or distinguished engineer. The rationale is they want to keep the prestige of the level high for IC. But that’s weird - the prestige of the same level in management must therefore be low and why is the bar different for the same level if you’re managing vs building?
[+] [-] newsclues|3 years ago|reply
Real leaders understand the burden of command and take it seriously and the stress is not sustainable for nearly anyone for the long term, so experienced leaders don’t want to do it unless it’s absolutely essential.