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.

I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.

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.

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...

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.

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 :).

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).

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 :-)

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 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.

I don't to manage a bunch of developers. Or stakeholders, annoying everybody every day for an update.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

Anecdotally I am seeing many more managers being laid off on my personal LinkedIn timeline than ICs...

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.

Is my thinking completely wrong?

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.

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)

ah. have fun.

www.svilendobrev.com

edit: and the lesson is: you can only be a proper manager if you have proper "manager" above..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

hoping that by using more of my "soft skills" and thinking about architecture at work, I'll be able to come home and work something like a solitaire solver without feeling like it's "non-productive"

* who the different personalities are within the specific organization in order to get things done and who's opinion you need to take into account and who you can safely ignore

* who you can escalate to in order to get more resources (perhaps get a email pushed up to the CEO if needed) and who to apologize to if things go bad

* when to let your team self-manage and when you're going to need to assert your opinion

These are all highly specific to an organization.

The two ways to achieve this are through being in the trenches and observing for many years or have the social skills to hack your way in.

As such I think the interview for an engineering manager would be less than straightforward than a standard fizz buzz test.

More importantly if you do somehow pass the gatekeepers to such a job, your ability to actually hack into the new organization in order to keep your job for more than a year becomes a challenge.

Managers are viewed the same way engineers are when it comes to skill transfer, in that their "expertise" is limited to the field. Which is why it's rare to find managers who made leaps that way across fields, as they always get overlooked in favor of someone who's either already in the field or is ok with switching from a technical role into a managerial one.

Managers are not having any easier of a time finding jobs right now.

Measured qualitatively in terms of 6 months performance

Charity is not a man!

In other words, sure, management is about authority, but there are many things from which authority can be derived: the authority of a respected teacher is very different from the authority of a coercitive cop.

Also, from a sociologic perspective, values are an outcome. If someone has to defend "the company's values", that means they are wishes, not values.

Of course, it's always possible to end up with a boss who refuses to listen or just doesn't understand, and then you're in trouble.

You're so amazing aren't you. You even know precisely what the customer wants. Are you saying that if I offered a service with a 2 second response they're not going to take it? Nah they only want 3-5 seconds!?

> Technical excellence has very little impact on the revenue, compared to other factors (product/market fit), so people making business decisions don't care about it.

If you don't care about it how do you know it doesn't impact? If you don't care you don't know the details. So problem is, maybe if you cared it'd make a difference?

Also what does this have to do with technical excellence or whatever you're referring to? The whole point was the 1 person that could do a job better than potentially 5. It is about delivering business value.

> Business is always a gamble.

And? It was the poster above that said business preferred predictability and I responded to that. You're now taking it out of context and trying to derive other meaning from it.

So is it predictability or a gamble?

> It's like you are trying to navigate a ship in a storm, and the mechanic keeps telling you how he can shove coal 5x faster than others and hence needs to be paid more. Except, you never need it that fast, and need to have 2 onboard anyway, in case one gets sick.

Again we're back to assumptions. How do you know this mechanic that shoves 5x faster will get sick? Maybe they never get sick? So it'll be better than hiring 2 that might get sick. Again, that was the original argument. If you change it - then whatever. You might as well say those 2 you have onboard ALWAYS get sick so I still prefer the 1 that can shove coal faster.

You're making it sound black and white when is not. You do make some decisions. Judgement is required around what decisions can be made by you (+ provide reasoning) and which ones require building consensus or just be delegated.

> I think the thing that makes someone a good manager, is that they can make anyone effective. Everyone can grow and flourish under you.

If that were true good managers never would PIP or let go anyone, and that's just not true. The opposite is true. If you think everyone can flourish and never let go poor performers you're the one doing a disservice to your team.