Engineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder

I&#x27;m a director of engineering with tech leads&#x2F;engineering managers who are considering their career paths carefully. This post was helpful to us. My highlights from this post:<p>It was interesting to read her reasoning for why a “tour of duty” as a manager should be 2-3 years. That’s a very tight time range, so if she’s right then that increases the stakes for making good decisions along the way.<p>There is a tension between her point that management is painful and engineers shouldn’t pursue it long-term (and in the comments said that she doesn’t know many engineers who are happy doing it) but and her point that if managers earn more than engineers it becomes harder to move back to engineering. The increased salary for managers is at least partially a result of the fact that many people wouldn’t become managers otherwise.<p>My favorite piece of advice was “stop writing code in the critical path”. Someone told me that when I first started moving into management, and it was very helpful.

&gt;The great ones are a treasure: and they are rare. And in order to stay great, they regularly need to go back to the well to refresh their own hands-on technical abilities.<p>Similar to principle 9 from the Toyota Way. &gt;Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.