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.<p>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.
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.<p>I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.
15) Meetings.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
When adults can't be responsible for themselves they need to be managed.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There is indeed need for adults to be around other adults with a sane understanding of responsibility. That's not management though.<p>Management is often a bleak blank cover to compensate for what I would call being professional.<p>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.<p>Some management must be in place otherwise things will stagnate.<p>Most management is a big fucking joke being mostly about looking good upwards. Politics.<p>More wine...
I'm an experienced engineer that's been a manager for three years. I'm now returning to an engineering role.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
(Context: Northern Europe)<p>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 <i>and</i> have come into a trusted position there.<p>My career:<p>ages 20-30: Individual contributor.<p>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.<p>ages 45-now: Individual contributor, coding most of the time.<p>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.<p>You too can recover from being a manager :).
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
To me there are 2 main reasons:<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But don't let that detract from an intelligent, heart-felt and thought-provoking article :-)
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.<p>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.<p>I'm tired of being compared to engineers who get things done quicker because they cut corners and build up tech debt.<p>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".
Some more:<p>* The politics and alliance building required to get anything done is both absurd and exhausting.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>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.<p>I agree with every single reason.<p>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<p>1. The technical side of managing, things like how do you organize work for the best, process, etc.<p>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.<p>Both of these <i>cannot</i> 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).<p>So you'd better be <i>very</i> aligned on those values to be happy in the job.<p>(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.<p>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.<p>Knowing how to do something is not an absurd ask of being responsible for that thing being done.<p>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.<p>EMs should know a lot about engineering. That’s what “Engineering” and “Manager” mean. Like, in the dictionary.
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 <i>great</i> managers but don't want to do it? They make the <i>best</i> ICs. Literally a dream. They make my job so much easier in so many ways. Wouldn't trade them.<p>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.
Anecdotally I haven't observed managers having more difficulties job hopping than engineers. In fact managers are often the first to jump the ship in stormy weather.
As I see there is an advantage for managers in terms of rising up the corporate ranks. Management titles form a strict hierarchy. So if your company grow from 10 engineer to 100 engineers then someone needs to be a Director because you "can't" have EMs report to other EMs. You can, however, have a Senior Engineer be a tech lead or help provide broader architectural plans.
Holy smokes this was a timely post... I am strongly considering moving into a team lead role with the idea that I might move into engineering management afterwards.<p>What's the trend w.r.t mgmt in healthy companies? I have seen the atherosclerosis-like effect of many many fiefdoms at the current "${JOB}" and the crushing burden of too many middle managers. Will the successful companies of the future (today?) have fewer managers and many more engineers?<p>Anecdotally I am seeing many more managers being laid off on my personal LinkedIn timeline than ICs...<p>One reason I'd like to get into leadership/mgmt is to have a greater say in team culture, tech choices, what gets done and what gets sidelined, etc. I feel currently very little power. Sure I could become a staff level or higher engineer and have some pull but it'll only be something that: "gets taken into advisement" rather than some edict given/decided by a manager or managers.<p>Is my thinking completely wrong?
well, i think i did my 2 years term (eh) trying to be CTO/head-of-eng in not-that-organised setup.. and heh, was never given the manager powers/tools. But got things like deciding over my head and workarounding me.<p>before i started, i read the Managers Path of Camille Fournier... REALLY good book - and the only thing that did not match with me was "you cannot be friends with them (below) anymore". Which, sadly, is mostly true. But i did not expect the other parts. Politics that is not called politics.<p>So, yeah, looking for Mentoring/ Principal/ Staff/ Whatever-you-call-that - in my 35years making software i have-been even life coach (of few chosens) but seems not a Manager (of whoever run-of-the-mill is there)<p>ah. have fun.<p>www.svilendobrev.com<p>edit: and the lesson is: you can only be a proper manager if you have proper "manager" above..
One of my reasons: as an engineer you maintain much stronger "makes things done" skills, and have much better opportunity to build side business with high pay reward: it could be android/macos/windows app/saas you sell, or mvp which will attract investments.
I used to think that it's much harder to find a manager job than a dev job. Eventually I learned that this is not the case - quite the opposite. There is obviously lack of good managers. After reading "Peoplewhare" I understood why. There are two main manager objectives: 1) Advance the project 2) Advance the people. I can't even imagine how one finds a symbiosis between people's ambitions and project needs. Someone has to get hurt.
I was a technical IC for the majority of my career and apart from leading small teams technically, didn't do much management.<p>However, i picked it up when i started my own company and it has considerably changed my pov. Hard conversations, managing time, developing people, building the organisation, delivering value to clients and a ton of other things which i couldn't dream of doing as an IC have been possible and extremely rewarding.<p>I think the article makes a few good points but on the overall, I feel that an younger, immature and less clued in me would resonate with it more than me now.
Also see this comment of mine to get the full picture: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697404#36700085">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697404#36700085</a>
Was nearly fired once for telling the truth. Made me realize I'm not sociopathic enough to laud power over people nor do I kiss enough ass to be coddled by higher ups. I'm quite happy with my IC/senior role.<p>I am running into the situation where pay bands are tied into titles. Once you reach the upper end of your pay band you have to gain a new title. So you'll be pushed into management track or pushed out the company. I'm pretty sure I'm headed for the latter.
Being a manager often involves additional time commitments, including meetings, administrative tasks, and mentoring employees. Some people may prefer to prioritize their personal time or work on other projects without managerial responsibilities.
Not everyone aspires to climb the corporate ladder or take on higher management roles. Some individuals may be content and fulfilled by pursuing specialized expertise or contributing in other ways.
> 12) Joy is much harder to come by.<p>Joy is an internal energy, orthogonal to the (tangentially) flat Earth that sits external to us.<p>We might take pleasure or find satisfaction in our work, but joy is a mystical thing derived from one's faith.<p>Whether a manager or Individual Contributor, one's capacity to find joy in the most suck-tacular experiences is the key to the next iteration of One Little Victory => <a href="https://youtu.be/o_dzB1EX_2I" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/o_dzB1EX_2I</a>