> If someone figured out how to be a good engineer, they can probably figure out how to be a good manager, too, if they wanted.
The "if they wanted" part is key. It's hard to become extremely good at something unless you really enjoy doing it. I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers would rather be doing engineering than anything else. If you make them a manager, they're going to enjoy that less and not be as good at it -- but a lot of people get pressured into becoming managers nonetheless.
> "You'd have a really good engineer who wanted more money and more status and recognition, and it took him away from being a really good engineer and often into being a really bad project manager."
Exactly. So many engineers follow a default career progression into management, and then end up losing their edge from replacing an IDE with excel spreadsheets and powerpoint, and going from meeting to meeting all day.
This also results in folk being managers, who do not have the skill and character needed to manage people.
- Management is a skill, not a career path. - Gabe Newell
> I see many good engineers getting pushed into management roles to advance their careers.
A lot of people whom I see in this category are people who fall more under the "engineer" banner than the "developer" banner - they tend to look for hard problems to solve, and are still happy solving logistical and financial problems.
> Unlike virtually every other function in a software company, engineers — particularly the good ones — don’t want to move up. This means that the people who want the engineering manager role are unlikely to be very good at it; and those who could be good at it don’t want anything to do with it at all.
:-) I am not convinced engineers cannot be trained to also be great managers. A lot of managers were devs in the past choosing to take management roles to increase salary and forsake programming to satisfy rules implemented in their environment. Forsaking dev work is a mistake.
Management is not something complex. Almost all of management is expectations management.
-"Instead of code and interfaces, we have processes and expectations. (By hiring career engineering managers, industry norms are imported. Firing a low performer may be a quick solution to a bigger underlying problem, deferred for the next manager.")
-This year, Meta laid off all their engineering managers that don’t code. It’s the same move that Google pulled 20 years ago, spawning Maps, Chrome and Gmail.
Agreed, in fact at our company it's the opposite: engineers mostly don't want to manage, and director level managers keep trying to push us into the positions. For the managers we do have we are mostly thankful that someone is willing to do that thankless job and sacrifice their coding time :-)
One thing missing from my recent engineering managers is lack of relevant coding experience.
You don't need to be an great engineer to be a good manager, but it definitely helps when your manager knows enough about the battles fought in the trenches and can offer actual feedback/support instead of nodding for 30m, then going to another 1:1.
"When I was an engineer I focused on work that improved my career, but then I became a manager and realized that my engineers actually should work to improve my career!"
I thought we were all in clear agreement that promoting engineers into managers creates poor managers? Engineers are good engineers, management is an entirely different skill set.
Promoting engineers into managers loses you a good engineer and creates a poor (and unhappy) manager.
If the person wants to be a manager, great! But otherwise, don't do it.
> I think most people on here (but sadly few company structures) would agree that engineering and engineering management are two nearly orthogonal skillsets, but for some reason we insist on "promoting" people who are good at the former into positions that require the latter.
I don't think they're orthogonal skillsets. A major part of management (arguably the most important part) is helping your team improve their skills, which works much better if you're a skilled engineer yourself.
> I would basically worry about stunting my development as an engineer if I switched to focusing on management, and I'm not even convinced my role models for career development are really in primarily "managerial" roles (I'm thinking of both famously very good backend devs both at my company and at the big SV companies).
Yes, becoming a manager will stunt your growth as a developer.
> Separately, I have relatively little interest in being in a role where my output is judged as the output of a team of people who aren't me. I get that that's the best way to judge managers, and that managers do very valuable intangible things in unblocking their team, but I'm skeptical that I'd be able to feel satisfied by this.
You probably wouldn't enjoy managing then.
> I write all these things, because it really seems like a foregone conclusion of both this article and the industry as a whole that an engineer will eventually become a manager. Is that what I most likely have to look forward to in my career if I wind up working at the well-established/mature companies?
Definitely not. Most big companies have separate technical and management tracks, and most developers shouldn't go into management.
> Can someone explain to me why I should want to become good at management?
The major reasons to become a manager are: (1) you can have a much greater impact on the business as an Xth percentile manager than an Xth percentile engineer, or even an (X-20)th percentile manager; (2) you enjoy teaching and watching people grow; (3) you're more interested in causing good software to happen than you are in building it personally.
in a lot of places they refuse to let engineers become managers. Technical experts, distinguished engineers, CTOs, etc, but management is distinctly different then writing code. Human beings are not computer programs. Being good at one doesn't mean you'd be good at the other whatsoever.
> An engineer who is good at leading through influence.
That's rare. In most companies managers aren't engineers, don't understand the craft and are picked by their buddies. They also have completely different incentives which allows them to throw engineers who spent ages to master the craft under the bus without any regards/regrets.
Most engineering managers I've worked with were engineers with strong technical background who have good people or project management skills. I had managers who wrote or knew every line in the code base. When someone left they could take over on a pinch and cleanup the mess. These days I think it is more common in startups to promote engineers to management too early before they develop these skills.
> Taking on the role of a manager means giving up time doing what they love — solving challenging technical problems — in exchange for what they see as taking out the trash every night.
I can't help but feel that there is more than just a kernel of truth in this otherwise cynical statement. I feel that I fall at least in part to this group - while I try to manage engineers, I constantly have this nagging feeling that I am not doing enough. After all, there are things to be done in the code world that require attention and nobody has the bandwidth.
> Most managers get promoted into their role with no training. “Oh you’re a good engineer? Great! Now manage a team of engineers and stop coding”.
I wish this was true. Well, these days people want Engineering Managers to code and manage plus also on the side win a Nobel Prize.
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