> <i>When you're an engineer, you are responsible for the software you develop, deploy, and maintain. When you’re a manager, you are responsible for your team and the organization as a whole.</i><p>Maybe, in the article's startup with 40 engineers, if they want to structure it as compartmentalized worker drone resources, who mostly only do what they're tasked to do, and someone else has their eye on the bigger picture and what all the teams need.<p>Depending on the nature of the project, 40 engineers could be a lot, and might have big coordination overhead and risk. Then maybe managers and/or cross-team technical roles can help with that.<p>Or maybe the bulk of it is something easily parallelizable and straightforward, like systems integrations for many customers around a shared core that they don't much change. Or they're building something that they're sure fits a routine pattern, with little cross-team thinking to do (e.g., "simple CRUD, with Web backend, Web frontend, and iOS and Android apps"). If the work is that simple, but still voluminous, you don't need many people who aren't either typing code or determining&selling product.