I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with demands for me to write PRDs and nag people who refuse to do work to do it, but without me actually having authority to make them.
I finally decided to just not sweat over it, do work that matches my pay in 2-3 days a week and spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills to whoever is willing to learn and has a good attitude about it. With focus on general skills that they can take to their next job rather than internal proprietary tech. I don't care that I am not getting paid extra for that, at least it feels good to be in office.
Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.
A couple jobs ago, when I realized I was doing all of the non-trivial front-end work at about the workload of ~4 of the other engineers, I just went golfing half the time. That way I was getting paid the same but for half the time at work! And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.
Business likes predictability. The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. Hence, unless you are the owner/founder, your replaceability will be valued more than your performance.
I grew up reading all kinds of articles and books about how engineering itself is a career track and I believed it. However, when I looked at the great engineers, it seems they eventually turned into executives. Jeff Dean, for instance, is one the greatest engineers. He has deep technical skills. He is versatile, as we can see that he made key contributions in storages, distributed systems, and machine learning. Yet his end game? SVP of Google. And how many people can really be Jeff Dean?
> there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly.
You’ve now undoubtedly made your life and that of those around you worse basically on the basis that you need to be proven wrong about being a “5x engineer”.
Engineers hate the hand-wavey nature of labour markets almost as much as they hate any attempts to remotely objectively quantify their performance.
The everybody-compromises happy medium is defined career tracks with largely qualitative and certainly subjective measures of actual responsibility. Nowhere in that are you going to get the reassurance that you’re after: that you’re worth 5 other engineers, or whatever. That’s just not how things work, even in IC roles. The fact that you pose this as a means of measurement in my eyes speaks volumes as to where you’d land on this imagined scale.
Honestly 99% of professions out there wouldn’t get away with being as entitled as software engineers are. Which, yes, market forces and all that. But let’s not pretend that there are many if any unreasonable aspects of a typical dev job.
For me there was a fork in the round around age 30 when I was pushed to take on managerial tasks/roles. This was at a company in traditional industry with basically no technical ladder, developers were line-work and the only way to climb was management.
I stuck through it as an IC and at 45 I’m still not in management. I enjoy being an IC and hope to be for another 20 or 25 years.
My only fear is that I have grown stuck in the company because seeking a developer job at 45 or 50 is probably subject to ageism more than a program/product manager job would.
> spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills
Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :)
But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.
I cannot believe I'm not the only one!
Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...
A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dealing with micromanaging the rest and trying to educate them.
I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.
It's an issue of incentives, and sadly my experience is it's often not the immediate management that's the problem, it's structural issues with the company that low-level managers have little if any say in.
Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn't put their money where their mouth is. Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored with a thank-you. Hell more than once I've been forced to spend an entire day in a conference room with all the other relevant devs to do a "Root Cause Analysis" of a given recent crisis, and we took it seriously each time and came up with genuine solutions. But said solutions required more hardware, more maintenance, more stuff that no one wanted to budget for.
You work in that environment long enough, you learn to clock in and clock out. If you allow yourself to give a shit you'll just be constantly tearing your hair out. Those of us with some objective sense of professionalism usually evolve into the functional elites you mention, but I completely understand those who go the other way.
>So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required.
I've found that's due to completely backwards incentives. Most people don't give a fuck because they aren't rewarded properly. If I do an excellent job and complete whatever task I'm given well ahead of schedule the only reward I get is more work. Even if I sandbag a bit and do an excellent job and complete on time, often the reward for being "better" is more responsibility or more difficult tasks (without compensation). Some folks want that, many do not. Dollars to doughnuts if your team members know that quality work on schedule will be actually rewarded then you'll find more of those members capable of producing that quality of work.
Honestly, this sounds to me a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want people to care about things, you have to listen to what they care about... I can influence some of what people care about as a manager, but it's long-term steering a spaceship a few degrees at a time.
I think too many people see managing a team as "managing the people to do good work." When, in fact, managing is much more about managing the right projects/opportunities into your team's scope. I very rarely tell people what to do, because ultimately, I don't have any power to change what they do. And they'll respect me, and the project, more if they think they're making the decision instead of me.
I've found that culture is king in terms of governing what's shipped. From day 1 new hires are looking at what their peers are doing, and more importantly what's being tolerated by the manager and the rest of the team.
As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly. I point out opportunities for improvement, and more importantly I call out excellent solutions. The excellence can be in the form of elegance or just hard graft finding a bug. It's a small action that's additive and doesn't interrupt work. But it does wonders at setting the tone.
One thing I've found very hard indeed is if the team you manage is surrounded by peers that "don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality". However, if you reinforce your culture of excellence it becomes resilient to it ... and then the tricky thing becomes avoiding arrogance within the team.
> So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required.
Well they are paid for the hours required. That's the problem (as some commenters have already mentioned).
It's not just the pay. It is often unfair. It might not be you but I've seen plenty of managers reward those that do a lot less compared to others. When people start to experience these things, how. do you expect them to care?
That's kind of why I want to be a manager. As a developer I'm tired of having to work with code written from people who don't give a fuck.
At least as a manager, it wouldn't be my direct problem. If the developers want to crunch to fix last minute issues because they didn't do it right the first time then that's their decision; but I don't want to be part of it anymore.
I look at my director and senior directors schedule in Outlook. It is 6 to 10 hours of meetings per day. They often start at 6am and might go until midnight because the company is worldwide. Meetings with people in India, China, Singapore, Israel, Europe, east and west coast US.
I get annoyed if I have more than 2 hours of a meetings a day. I get really annoyed when they interfere with my personal life outside of normal work hours.
I may be working from home at 6am or 11pm mostly to monitor jobs and check results. But I don't want to have a meeting at those times.
While I think people who organize these meetings might have a benefit of being able to keep track of everyone, I'm usually surprised how much dead time there is when people discuss what they're working on and there are only 2 or 3 people who are involved in the discussion while 20 or so other people are on the clock doing nothing. The manager might reply that everyone should know and care about everything happening but this is never the case.
Companies will say look at all the money we're saving by by hiring people in India/China/whereever meanwhile the managers are stuck taking calls at all hours of the day. The saving are really enabled by the manager working these extra hours to support international teams.
When adults can't be responsible for themselves they need to be managed.
When adults can be responsible they need more than one other adult to address issues and challenges with. To learn from and to teach to.
Management is a industrial and corporate construct. Its put in place to force labour intense industries to tell others what they need to do. Tell is often a monologue.
There is indeed need for adults to be around other adults with a sane understanding of responsibility. That's not management though.
Management is often a bleak blank cover to compensate for what I would call being professional.
Most often management does not work because the construct is that one (the manager) gets to rule more than the other, even though the manager might be completely wrong.
Some management must be in place otherwise things will stagnate.
Most management is a big fucking joke being mostly about looking good upwards. Politics.
The managers I've most worked with are mostly concerned with what will be built (and that is discussed with other managers as well as other stakeholders external to the team), and don't care that much about internal team dynamics. They trust the team to have enough professionalism between its members to do the work as needed, self-organise etc.
I'm an experienced engineer that's been a manager for three years. I'm now returning to an engineering role.
Having been a manager and having learned what it means to scale your ability to have impact and to land impact purely through leveraging others, I feel far more equipped to be the kind of engineer that I would like to manage.
More than that, one of the best experiences I've had as a manager is to be able to dissuade myself of many of the misconceptions and stereotypes that are rife in this thread.
I'd strongly advise non-managers in the thread to read Charity's other blog posts such as the Engineer/Manager Pendulum too.
Being a manager happens organically to some of us because the challenge of getting a system of people to work is an organic next step from getting a system of circuits to work. People create such interesting, unique, and unpredictable problems compared to systems that have become quite predictable after a number of years of experience. Really nailing a people problem gives me that same high a successful compile used to.
Switching jobs is quite hard as an (engineering) manager, at least if you're a bit introverted like me. Often you depend on the number of people who trust you from their experience working with you that have switched companies and have come into a trusted position there.
My career:
ages 20-30: Individual contributor.
ages 30-45: (Engineering) manager, running product development teams of varying sizes (up to about 50 people), being all over the architecture/system design. Not really coding in a focused way.
ages 45-now: Individual contributor, coding most of the time.
I was really concerned I wouldn't be able to keep the interest in actual coding all day long when I went back to that, but lo and behold, I'm actually finding it more fun and rewarding than the management roles. Stress is down too.
I don’t know about the part where Charity mentions it’s really really easy to get an Eng job than a manager one. As someone who got laid off recently, it sure as heck doesn’t feel that way.
And the skills not being transferrable? How is being good in a particular field of tech _more_ transferable than management skills, which is arguably needed everywhere be it tech or not.
Finally the credit/blame - managers and people above them get paid much more than a lowly engineer. Sometimes you get blamed and then paid handsomely, lol.
The hard conversations and emotional drain is true though. But generally, if you love writing code and interfacing with people equally, it’s hard not to be drawn to the appeal of the management position.
1) ownership - the manager does not really own the way the team works, in most cases it's just applying processes defined somewhere else (career progression, expectations, OKRs, sdlc, internal processes and the way the team works)
2) the eternal doubt - managing teams and people is not a science (that's why there are thousands of books claiming they have found the formula) and people are always different (different motivators, interests, personalities), and usually managers don't get proper training, and if they do it's more about facilitating discussions and giving feedback than anything else. This creates a lot of uncertainty over the actions that a manager take as the results, often, arrive later in time than, let's say, building a feature.
And the reality is that it's a complete different job than being an IC and most people don't realize this until they are deep into it.
ps to people talking about meetings, the reality is that this depends a lot on company culture and organization...in general the more the meetings the worse the culture (because it means that there aren't really good processes to share status updates and people don't take advantage of async communication as much as they should, but still want to be on top of everything so there isn't really much delegation and trust).
> Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird.
Software is a new industry, we're only just starting to get it right, and put behind us a litany of failed projects and methodologies. Every decision in a software company has a technical aspect. I personally am absolutely over non-technical managers and the aberrant strategies and directions they set out on. In my jaundiced view, any software company not led by developers is just waiting to be blown out of the water.
But don't let that detract from an intelligent, heart-felt and thought-provoking article :-)
> > Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird.
I don't see the problem here either. Sounds like somebody overheard that comment and had no real answer hence "they're a shitbird".
I want to take instruction from managers who have literally done the thing they're asking for.
There is a reason vast majority of football coaches/managers are former players I don't see why that should be different from software -- even those managers who didn't play professional football often have a pro background in another team sport.
Personally, I don't so much want to be a manager as I want to get away from the BS of being an individual contributor.
I'm tired of having my warnings about things like tech debt and code quality ignored; only to be expected to fix everything and maintain deadlines when everything falls apart.
I'm tired of being compared to engineers who get things done quicker because they cut corners and build up tech debt.
I'm tired of caring about my craft when managers just want people who churn out slop.
The fact that management doesn't directly do the work is definitely a problem. They're ultimately recycling other people's opinions to evaluate performance, perpetually out of the loop, yet they still have to be the bad guy if a project is behind schedule or there are performance problems. They are also in trouble when it comes to actually helping people finish problems: aside from buying licenses or equipment, all they can do is say, "go ask this person".
* The politics and alliance building required to get anything done is both absurd and exhausting.
* You get it from both sides: leadership is pissed off because of X, individual contributors are pissed off because of Y. In both cases they are pissed off at you, or at least pissed off at something and using you as a pin cushion.
* You have to pretend to care about things. A good individual contributor can get away with an attitude of "I'll work on whatever you want me to work on, but this is just a job to me", whereas a manager is expected to be a loyal and excited booster of whatever stupid shit the company is up to.
* Generally I worked harder as a manager than as an IC, and the work was more stressful. The pay bump was not as significant as the stress bump. I've also worked at places (like my current job) where ICs make more than PMs. I am an IC here, and have no idea why anyone would ever take a PM job here. Sure enough, we can't keep them around.
* Do you like to consider all options and really think through a decision before you make it? Well, get used to being asked for definitive, snap judgments all day, every day.
Reason number 1: I don't want to manage stuff. It's not my forte. I want your hardest problems and devise technical solutions for it. I want to write code.
I don't to manage a bunch of developers. Or stakeholders, annoying everybody every day for an update.
I just did the move back from management to ic and boy does that resonate with me.
I agree with every single reason.
There are some that might push you to be an manager though, and I've had some fun time with that in the past. The two main ones to me are
1. The technical side of managing, things like how do you organize work for the best, process, etc.
2. Helping people grow - which you can have as an IC but is your main goal as manager. That system of taking a step back when someone asks a question, and figure if it's a problem of skill or clarity.
Both of these cannot be done when most of your energy is sunk into useless bureaucracy, as is often the case in large companies.
Management is about having authority. That is, you're a vector: you must defend the company's values (which you may disagree with) in front of your team (which may disagree with them too).
So you'd better be very aligned on those values to be happy in the job.
(for example, when I was a manager, my manager's goal was to "show the rest of the company we can make websites much faster", which meant putting pressure on everyone. I disagreed with that, making things faster just to "show it can be done" at a very high human price, didn't look like a good idea. So I suffered.)
It’s possible that I’m misreading sarcasm or something.
But point 6, “engineers can be little shits”, about how asking if the person in charge of you understands the work going on is mildly offensive for the obvious reasons, and extremely offensive for how fucking stupid it is.
Knowing how to do something is not an absurd ask of being responsible for that thing being done.
I only ever got up to 3 dozen-ish reports as an EM, but to the extent I ever lapsed in being able to read a diff, that was me just failing.
EMs should know a lot about engineering. That’s what “Engineering” and “Manager” mean. Like, in the dictionary.
That's just not reality. Many EMs are not necessarily proficient or even knowledgeable in the stack. It depends on the company.
EM doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. Last week I applied to an EM role that was 100% people management where my tech experience did not matter much. I also applied to one that was still a majority technical/architecture design, that some would consider a 'tech lead' or something like that.
Being offended by it is kind of funny. You'll probably have a boss like that eventually.
Lots of good points in the article. I would add the language that managers are required to speak is mind-numbing. It is Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" come to life.
> And also, the people who excel at all those management tasks, the ICs who would actually make great managers but don't want to do it? They make the best ICs. Literally a dream. They make my job so much easier in so many ways. Wouldn't trade them.
Ah the cliche Steve Jobs quote. Any driven person who wants to make change at an organization knows that they have to become a manager to scale. These are all day-to-day reasons that distract from why people get into the role in the first place.
At the current FAANG I work for, managers are so consumed by organizational overhead that there’s plenty of room for IC (ie staff engineer) to influence direction.
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|2 years ago|reply
I finally decided to just not sweat over it, do work that matches my pay in 2-3 days a week and spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills to whoever is willing to learn and has a good attitude about it. With focus on general skills that they can take to their next job rather than internal proprietary tech. I don't care that I am not getting paid extra for that, at least it feels good to be in office.
[+] [-] mook|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andirk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matrix_overload|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmpX7dMeXU|2 years ago|reply
You’ve now undoubtedly made your life and that of those around you worse basically on the basis that you need to be proven wrong about being a “5x engineer”.
Engineers hate the hand-wavey nature of labour markets almost as much as they hate any attempts to remotely objectively quantify their performance.
The everybody-compromises happy medium is defined career tracks with largely qualitative and certainly subjective measures of actual responsibility. Nowhere in that are you going to get the reassurance that you’re after: that you’re worth 5 other engineers, or whatever. That’s just not how things work, even in IC roles. The fact that you pose this as a means of measurement in my eyes speaks volumes as to where you’d land on this imagined scale.
Honestly 99% of professions out there wouldn’t get away with being as entitled as software engineers are. Which, yes, market forces and all that. But let’s not pretend that there are many if any unreasonable aspects of a typical dev job.
[+] [-] alkonaut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jader201|2 years ago|reply
> spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills
Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :)
But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.
[+] [-] f1shy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] black_13|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] baz00|2 years ago|reply
I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.
[+] [-] scottLobster|2 years ago|reply
Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn't put their money where their mouth is. Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored with a thank-you. Hell more than once I've been forced to spend an entire day in a conference room with all the other relevant devs to do a "Root Cause Analysis" of a given recent crisis, and we took it seriously each time and came up with genuine solutions. But said solutions required more hardware, more maintenance, more stuff that no one wanted to budget for.
You work in that environment long enough, you learn to clock in and clock out. If you allow yourself to give a shit you'll just be constantly tearing your hair out. Those of us with some objective sense of professionalism usually evolve into the functional elites you mention, but I completely understand those who go the other way.
[+] [-] rndmwlk|2 years ago|reply
I've found that's due to completely backwards incentives. Most people don't give a fuck because they aren't rewarded properly. If I do an excellent job and complete whatever task I'm given well ahead of schedule the only reward I get is more work. Even if I sandbag a bit and do an excellent job and complete on time, often the reward for being "better" is more responsibility or more difficult tasks (without compensation). Some folks want that, many do not. Dollars to doughnuts if your team members know that quality work on schedule will be actually rewarded then you'll find more of those members capable of producing that quality of work.
[+] [-] xracy|2 years ago|reply
I think too many people see managing a team as "managing the people to do good work." When, in fact, managing is much more about managing the right projects/opportunities into your team's scope. I very rarely tell people what to do, because ultimately, I don't have any power to change what they do. And they'll respect me, and the project, more if they think they're making the decision instead of me.
[+] [-] starwatch|2 years ago|reply
As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly. I point out opportunities for improvement, and more importantly I call out excellent solutions. The excellence can be in the form of elegance or just hard graft finding a bug. It's a small action that's additive and doesn't interrupt work. But it does wonders at setting the tone.
One thing I've found very hard indeed is if the team you manage is surrounded by peers that "don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality". However, if you reinforce your culture of excellence it becomes resilient to it ... and then the tricky thing becomes avoiding arrogance within the team.
[+] [-] re-thc|2 years ago|reply
Well they are paid for the hours required. That's the problem (as some commenters have already mentioned).
It's not just the pay. It is often unfair. It might not be you but I've seen plenty of managers reward those that do a lot less compared to others. When people start to experience these things, how. do you expect them to care?
[+] [-] zgluck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harimau777|2 years ago|reply
At least as a manager, it wouldn't be my direct problem. If the developers want to crunch to fix last minute issues because they didn't do it right the first time then that's their decision; but I don't want to be part of it anymore.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] teslashill|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lizknope|2 years ago|reply
I look at my director and senior directors schedule in Outlook. It is 6 to 10 hours of meetings per day. They often start at 6am and might go until midnight because the company is worldwide. Meetings with people in India, China, Singapore, Israel, Europe, east and west coast US.
I get annoyed if I have more than 2 hours of a meetings a day. I get really annoyed when they interfere with my personal life outside of normal work hours.
I may be working from home at 6am or 11pm mostly to monitor jobs and check results. But I don't want to have a meeting at those times.
[+] [-] sirsinsalot|2 years ago|reply
Even if I am paid hourly (I am) ... it's rare.
I am not sure what kind of people do that, but if it's managers, then EM/Lead is as far down that path I want to go.
[+] [-] havblue|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdgrech23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cvhashim04|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielovichdk|2 years ago|reply
When adults can be responsible they need more than one other adult to address issues and challenges with. To learn from and to teach to.
Management is a industrial and corporate construct. Its put in place to force labour intense industries to tell others what they need to do. Tell is often a monologue.
There is indeed need for adults to be around other adults with a sane understanding of responsibility. That's not management though.
Management is often a bleak blank cover to compensate for what I would call being professional.
Most often management does not work because the construct is that one (the manager) gets to rule more than the other, even though the manager might be completely wrong.
Some management must be in place otherwise things will stagnate.
Most management is a big fucking joke being mostly about looking good upwards. Politics.
More wine...
[+] [-] gundmc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badpun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KnobbleMcKnees|2 years ago|reply
Having been a manager and having learned what it means to scale your ability to have impact and to land impact purely through leveraging others, I feel far more equipped to be the kind of engineer that I would like to manage.
More than that, one of the best experiences I've had as a manager is to be able to dissuade myself of many of the misconceptions and stereotypes that are rife in this thread.
I'd strongly advise non-managers in the thread to read Charity's other blog posts such as the Engineer/Manager Pendulum too.
[+] [-] notjustanymike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zgluck|2 years ago|reply
Switching jobs is quite hard as an (engineering) manager, at least if you're a bit introverted like me. Often you depend on the number of people who trust you from their experience working with you that have switched companies and have come into a trusted position there.
My career:
ages 20-30: Individual contributor.
ages 30-45: (Engineering) manager, running product development teams of varying sizes (up to about 50 people), being all over the architecture/system design. Not really coding in a focused way.
ages 45-now: Individual contributor, coding most of the time.
I was really concerned I wouldn't be able to keep the interest in actual coding all day long when I went back to that, but lo and behold, I'm actually finding it more fun and rewarding than the management roles. Stress is down too.
You too can recover from being a manager :).
[+] [-] pixelatedindex|2 years ago|reply
And the skills not being transferrable? How is being good in a particular field of tech _more_ transferable than management skills, which is arguably needed everywhere be it tech or not.
Finally the credit/blame - managers and people above them get paid much more than a lowly engineer. Sometimes you get blamed and then paid handsomely, lol.
The hard conversations and emotional drain is true though. But generally, if you love writing code and interfacing with people equally, it’s hard not to be drawn to the appeal of the management position.
[+] [-] bl4ckm0r3|2 years ago|reply
1) ownership - the manager does not really own the way the team works, in most cases it's just applying processes defined somewhere else (career progression, expectations, OKRs, sdlc, internal processes and the way the team works)
2) the eternal doubt - managing teams and people is not a science (that's why there are thousands of books claiming they have found the formula) and people are always different (different motivators, interests, personalities), and usually managers don't get proper training, and if they do it's more about facilitating discussions and giving feedback than anything else. This creates a lot of uncertainty over the actions that a manager take as the results, often, arrive later in time than, let's say, building a feature.
And the reality is that it's a complete different job than being an IC and most people don't realize this until they are deep into it.
ps to people talking about meetings, the reality is that this depends a lot on company culture and organization...in general the more the meetings the worse the culture (because it means that there aren't really good processes to share status updates and people don't take advantage of async communication as much as they should, but still want to be on top of everything so there isn't really much delegation and trust).
[+] [-] bbsimonbb|2 years ago|reply
Software is a new industry, we're only just starting to get it right, and put behind us a litany of failed projects and methodologies. Every decision in a software company has a technical aspect. I personally am absolutely over non-technical managers and the aberrant strategies and directions they set out on. In my jaundiced view, any software company not led by developers is just waiting to be blown out of the water.
But don't let that detract from an intelligent, heart-felt and thought-provoking article :-)
[+] [-] s_dev|2 years ago|reply
I don't see the problem here either. Sounds like somebody overheard that comment and had no real answer hence "they're a shitbird".
I want to take instruction from managers who have literally done the thing they're asking for.
There is a reason vast majority of football coaches/managers are former players I don't see why that should be different from software -- even those managers who didn't play professional football often have a pro background in another team sport.
[+] [-] harimau777|2 years ago|reply
I'm tired of having my warnings about things like tech debt and code quality ignored; only to be expected to fix everything and maintain deadlines when everything falls apart.
I'm tired of being compared to engineers who get things done quicker because they cut corners and build up tech debt.
I'm tired of caring about my craft when managers just want people who churn out slop.
[+] [-] havblue|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
* The politics and alliance building required to get anything done is both absurd and exhausting.
* You get it from both sides: leadership is pissed off because of X, individual contributors are pissed off because of Y. In both cases they are pissed off at you, or at least pissed off at something and using you as a pin cushion.
* You have to pretend to care about things. A good individual contributor can get away with an attitude of "I'll work on whatever you want me to work on, but this is just a job to me", whereas a manager is expected to be a loyal and excited booster of whatever stupid shit the company is up to.
* Generally I worked harder as a manager than as an IC, and the work was more stressful. The pay bump was not as significant as the stress bump. I've also worked at places (like my current job) where ICs make more than PMs. I am an IC here, and have no idea why anyone would ever take a PM job here. Sure enough, we can't keep them around.
* Do you like to consider all options and really think through a decision before you make it? Well, get used to being asked for definitive, snap judgments all day, every day.
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|2 years ago|reply
I don't to manage a bunch of developers. Or stakeholders, annoying everybody every day for an update.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charles_f|2 years ago|reply
I agree with every single reason.
There are some that might push you to be an manager though, and I've had some fun time with that in the past. The two main ones to me are
1. The technical side of managing, things like how do you organize work for the best, process, etc.
2. Helping people grow - which you can have as an IC but is your main goal as manager. That system of taking a step back when someone asks a question, and figure if it's a problem of skill or clarity.
Both of these cannot be done when most of your energy is sunk into useless bureaucracy, as is often the case in large companies.
[+] [-] wiz21c|2 years ago|reply
So you'd better be very aligned on those values to be happy in the job.
(for example, when I was a manager, my manager's goal was to "show the rest of the company we can make websites much faster", which meant putting pressure on everyone. I disagreed with that, making things faster just to "show it can be done" at a very high human price, didn't look like a good idea. So I suffered.)
[+] [-] benreesman|2 years ago|reply
But point 6, “engineers can be little shits”, about how asking if the person in charge of you understands the work going on is mildly offensive for the obvious reasons, and extremely offensive for how fucking stupid it is.
Knowing how to do something is not an absurd ask of being responsible for that thing being done.
I only ever got up to 3 dozen-ish reports as an EM, but to the extent I ever lapsed in being able to read a diff, that was me just failing.
EMs should know a lot about engineering. That’s what “Engineering” and “Manager” mean. Like, in the dictionary.
[+] [-] BowBun|2 years ago|reply
EM doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. Last week I applied to an EM role that was 100% people management where my tech experience did not matter much. I also applied to one that was still a majority technical/architecture design, that some would consider a 'tech lead' or something like that.
Being offended by it is kind of funny. You'll probably have a boss like that eventually.
[+] [-] OldGuyInTheClub|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenerdhead|2 years ago|reply
Ah the cliche Steve Jobs quote. Any driven person who wants to make change at an organization knows that they have to become a manager to scale. These are all day-to-day reasons that distract from why people get into the role in the first place.
[+] [-] jnwatson|2 years ago|reply
Not sure if this applies at the VP level.