Don't become an engineering manager

Unpopular opinion: either you manage people or you manage work/processes, you shouldn't do both. if you're an engineering manager, either you manage your people and let them be engineers, or you don't manage any people and you focus on engineering solutions and managing the solutions themselves.

It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional choice the author makes.

The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.

There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the realization that senior engineers are completely capable and often willing of managing other engineers directly. The definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding Cats" :facepalm:

In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for shipping software.

The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away from engineers.

I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic compression of these roles going forward.

People should know that you can't "just" turn down a promotion. You might be leaving management in a tough position where they were hoping to rely on you to fill a gap, and by turning it down, you're making it hard for them to be objective. They might default to seeing you as unreliable, and cut off future advancement opportunities (the ones you actually want). It's not fair, but that's how people think. This isn't a big problem when the money is free and everyone is trying to poach employees. You can just jump ship. But in this hellish economy, everyone is stuck. So take that damn promotion.

I took an EM role. About a year later they eliminated all EMs in the US and replaced them with people in Poland. So I guess take the EM role if you're in Poland.

> he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role

Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a promotion.

I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:

> So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy my job

EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an entirely different function from that of a developer. I had tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit. The human management was interesting, especially the continuous improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a nanny.

In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date was not met.

After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a manager:

- if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers, I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll discover things

- at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of working, so good times to experiment!

- don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing your career is important, but you also need to do it a sustainable way. Something I keep telling: it sucks to be good at something you hate. So do something you like.

- it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.

- titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12 people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex, but just because they define things differently.