Agreed with everything you said, and will add 2 major points:
1) God help you if you choose 80% coding and 20% management. Your team will be very unhappy. Maybe you'll take care of the HR/Admin work that noone else can, but their career growth will stagnate, and morale will be low.
2) If you do pick 80% management, and 20% engineering, understand that your growth as an engineer will completely plateau. Yes, you can still participate in design reviews, even weigh in on code reviews, and ship the occasional bug fix/perf improvement/nice-to-have feature or some operational tool that will save your team a bunch of time and make your oncall happy.
But without hands on struggle with a new paradigm or scaling challenge, you won't grow. And given the choice between improving as a manager or improving as a hands on techie, you have to make the choice to work to improve as a manager, and start doing all the invisible things you never realized a manager does (least known and most annoying is managing UPwards)
SOURCE: Just spent a year stepping into a vacant engineering manager role on my team, tried to do the 80-20, didn't love the management role, am back to a full time senior engineer, and am frustrated with my skills that appear to have atrophied.
I tried to do the same thing too. Here's what I learned.
The people who are "managers" are also splitting their time. They only need to spend maybe 20% of their time in actual supervisory work. The rest of their time is spent on tasks that are delegated to them by their higher-ups. These tasks are largely forms of information processing: Gathering, analyzing, and communicating. Excel and PowerPoint. But they are typically one-time tasks that are not worth automating.
I was happy with the 20% supervision, no problem. But the 80% information processing tasks just weren't interesting to me.
When they finally posted an opening for my old job, I went to the boss and asked: "What do you want me to be, a mediocre manager or a great engineer?" Oddly enough, moving me back to engineering resulted in a second promotion on top of the first. Meanwhile, I did enjoy receiving a fair amount of management training and insider understanding about how the business works.
That's exactly what happened to me. I thought I would love management. I love mentoring, developing people, prioritizing tasks for the team, balancing delivery and long term growth.
But those "information processing" tasks you mentioned are the ones that nobody who's not a manager knows about and i HATED them.
>(least known and most annoying is managing UPwards)
Boy if that ain't the most true statement about moving from engineering into management, I don't know what is. I was so exceptionally bad and unprepared for this when I tried my hand at management.
I will have to second this. I've taken on the role of engineering manager this year and found managing upwards by far the most difficult aspect of the job, and not something I expected at all.
Keeping an eye on the bigger picture at your company. Knowing what the current initiatives are. Knowing and working towards what will make your boss a hero. Empathizing with other parts of the organization and understanding where your team fits in.
“Make your boss a hero” is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say. At my first job out of university, my manager told me my job was to make him look good. I instantly wrote him off as a moron. We worked for a publicly traded company. Nobody cares about how you look or your little empire. This isn’t your money. You are hired to manage it for the shareholders, not to look cool or be a little rentseeker
Sounds like the expression rubs you the wrong way.
How about this instead: a manager is a representative of a team, and vice-versa. Not every senior leader in a company has time to get to know and evaluate every individual member of every team; instead, they evaluate a manager as a proxy for the whole team. You, as a team member, will be evaluated through your manager. It's up to you whether that evaluation is positive.
"Make your boss a hero" isn't a very endearing way to phrase it, but it's a concise way to say that in a traditional corporate hierarchy, your fate is aligned with your boss's fate.
Idk, on the job I was in at that point I worked my specified amount and then worked on developing my skills and education outside work. I watched as my boss’ project floundered, he ran out of budget for contractors, employees who were less weak started leaving and their positions not filled. As my boss started trying to tell me I needed to fulfill more of a “leadership role” I could tell he was trying to pass off a terrible project to me so I demurred. Anyway, I got laid off, got a big severance, got to continue educating and doing things like that while collecting unemployment as I applied for jobs after, and ended up getting basically a position at more or less my dream lab.
I understand it’s different if you’re older with kids and a mortgage or lot of health bills or whatever but I haven’t really felt like my fate has ever been tied to any of my employees.
I feel like it’s just headgames for your manager to try and convince you that making him look good is essential to your career.
Edit: in case this is relevant the shitty project was actually the best project in our department as far as I was concerned before my former manager ran it into the ground by trying to look good by promising dozens of features for people who didn’t use it instead of building something that worked and was extensible
I think the flips side of this is that a great manager deflects most or all of the credit to the team.
Therefore the team works hard on things that will make the manager and the manager's managers look great in the woder scope of the company, and the manager says, correctly, that the team is responsible for the work.
I think this kind of manuevering is fundamental to large human organizations with scarce resources (you know, all of them) so the goal is to make it as healthy as possible.
"Make your boss a hero" is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say.
Why? If my bosses boss is happy with my boss then our department gets a bigger budget, more interesting projects and, most important, we get more autonomy and get left alone more. All of those things directly improve my quality of life. If I can keep my bosses boss off my bosses back, then my boss won't be on my back.
The challenge for some people is the issue of whether to accept and forgive your boss for appearing to be stupid or mentally deranged. Bosses may fail to share all the information they have. The results are that their decisions may look crazy stupid, having no apparent justification. And some bosses ARE stupid or have mental problems. (For example, I once worked for one who had a brain tumor.) For some people this starts a vicious cycle of resentment -> poor communication -> more resentment -> worse communication. Other workers accept that part of a job is to supervise bosses and try to diminish their foolish/harmful/incompetent behavior -- to make them look good in spite of themselves. For these accepting reports, there is no perception of injustice in the need for reports to manage wayward supervisors: it's just how things are. This sets up a virtuous cycle of improved communication -> more mutual good will -> improved communication -> more good will. The boss-critical employees tend to endorse meritocracy. The boss-accepting employees see no moral issue in who is assigned leadership responsibility and compensation. If you see nothing morally wrong with your having to rescue your bosses from themselves, you're probably a boss-accepting employee.
Your boss is entrusted with other people’s money, resources, employees to manage it in a way that generates value for them. How he looks and how his image impacts you feeling like you got an interesting project is irrelevant except exactly insofar as it influences this.
I was on the same boat, went back to senior dev but found myself missing the leadership side of the job (improve engineering process, cross team architecture etc) so I'm moving to principal SWE which seems to be the sweet spot in my current company.
The amount of time management takes depends on the size of your team. I've done 80% engineering and 20% management with small teams for more than a decade of my career. It's not for everyone, certainly.
In a smaller company where teams are more cohesive and you have pretty clear objectives, management can be easy. But in larger corps, management becomes this big firestorm of meetings where if you as a manager don't represent your team well enough they will be starved off resources, projects and perhaps more importantly, recognition. Team members will see this and jump ship quickly enough.
This is perhaps the biggest reason I personally prefer smaller companies. Its statistically more likely to have a more effective manager, because a manager doesn't have to be a superstar to get their teams what they need.
Current Manager. It's "Support Engineering" but currently:
- Metrics for the business to understand what our pain points are
- 1:1 Prep and post 1:1 vision planning ("Is everyone aligned?")
- Performance review prep (time of year)
- Chasing down other managers to try and get problems fixed that were surfaced in 1:1s
- a "net" above the team, to filter out any business side bs that would go their way that would be a distraction. (The team has to trust that I have their best interest in mind. That's why a net, I let them know, and they can see)
- Capacity Planning (Do we have enough people for the growth plan? Oh, did the growth plan get updated? Lemme take another look...)
- Hiring
- Reviewing Resumes
- Are our policies up to date?
- Process thinking (usually surfaced by pain points from 1:1s)
Off the top of my head, these are the kinds of things engineering managers often have to deal with:
Hiring:
- Writing job specs.
- Dealing with recruiters
- Reading CVs/résumés
- Interviews
- Onboarding
- Outreach
- Who do you need to hire next quarter to avoid capacity problems?
People:
- How do you level up your developers? What new responsibilities can you delegate to them so that they can grow without swamping them? Are you available enough to them so you can help them take these new tasks on?
- Evaluating training courses / conferences etc.
- Are there any personal or interpersonal problems that need sorting?
- What can you do to help your team gel better and feel like they are part of a team?
- Where are your team members' careers heading and how can you help them get there?
- Your team has grown too large to manage effectively by yourself. How do you split things up?
Process:
- What is everybody working on? What will everybody work on next?
- What are people blocked on? How do you unblock them? What is likely to block them next?
- Can you do things in a better way? How?
- You've got a lot of bugs in the backlog. Is there a root cause? Are there any patterns?
- You aren't performing as well as you thought you were. Where is the time being spent? What's the cause? Are the estimates wrong or the performance?
- Some people want to shift their hours or work remotely. Can you accommodate this? Do you have to adjust process and if so, how?
Line management:
- Approving invoices
- Approving holidays
- One on ones
- Salary review
- Getting people back to work after sickness / parental leave / sabbaticals
- Disciplinaries / performance problems
- Firing / redundancies
- Exit interviews
Planning:
- How well is your team performing? How do you measure this and how do you improve?
- Do you have enough capacity?
- If not, which features do you bump?
- Are there any bottlenecks in the pipeline?
- What are you telling the shareholders you're delivering next quarter?
Product:
- Does marketing know what you are building next? What information do they need from you to sell it?
- Do CS know how to support your customers with the new features?
- Feedback from the rest of the business about the product and how the tech team works.
- Are the specs precise, correct, complete, and achievable?
- Features have been requested. Are they technically feasible? What's the general size of it and what quarter can we deliver it by?
- A big customer has a major problem with your product. It's not your fault, but it has a disproportionate affect on the customer. How do you prioritise solving this problem?
External:
- A shareholder owns a business with a related product that they want integrated ASAP. How do you deal with that pressure without disrupting your plan?
- One of your suppliers has a data breach that has leaked your data. How do you deal with that? Have you defined processes for reporting security issues?
- A supplier is failing to perform adequately. Can it be fixed? How do you move away? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule?
- A supplier has changed their pricing structure. Do you have to move? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule?
- New legislation has been passed and you have to make changes to your product. What are the requirements?
- A complaint has been made about the accessibility of your product. Does it have merit? What's the impact of fixing it, and how urgent is it?
- A big prospective customer is on the verge of signing, but they must have one feature that you weren't planning on building until next year. How do you rearrange things to get the customer with minimum impact?
- A service you use is changing their API. What's the risk of staying on the deprecated version until it can be planned in?
Amazingly thorough list. Did you compile it from your experiences? What field of engineering are you involved with? Hopefully you did not experience all these problems personally.
Yeah, virtually all of it is from personal experience, although the most negative ones are fortunately rare! I manage a team working on a platform that lets non-technical people build communities through web & mobile apps, so the tech we're dealing with is roughly Rails / PostgreSQL / VueJS / Swift / Kotlin / AWS and you could loosely describe us as a social media startup.
I guess if I could summarise the above, it's that there's an awful lot of very ill-defined and irregular things that need deciding about and acting upon, and it's an engineering manager's job to corral that into some sort of order and make sure it all happens. Lots of spinning plates and dealing with things that don't really fit neatly into a job description, especially at smaller companies.
I'm an engineering manager. It is Friday. I have 10 scheduled events on my calendar today:
1 phone call with a candidate that accepted an offer
3 scrum team demo sessions
3 standups
1 standing meeting for escalated support case review
2 1:1 meetings
In addition, I will spend a chunk of time reading and sorting resumes, preparing a presentation I'm delivering next week, following up on a few blocking issues that came up last night/this morning, and reviewing the progress of software upgrade that's on-going.
1) God help you if you choose 80% coding and 20% management. Your team will be very unhappy. Maybe you'll take care of the HR/Admin work that noone else can, but their career growth will stagnate, and morale will be low.
2) If you do pick 80% management, and 20% engineering, understand that your growth as an engineer will completely plateau. Yes, you can still participate in design reviews, even weigh in on code reviews, and ship the occasional bug fix/perf improvement/nice-to-have feature or some operational tool that will save your team a bunch of time and make your oncall happy.
But without hands on struggle with a new paradigm or scaling challenge, you won't grow. And given the choice between improving as a manager or improving as a hands on techie, you have to make the choice to work to improve as a manager, and start doing all the invisible things you never realized a manager does (least known and most annoying is managing UPwards)
SOURCE: Just spent a year stepping into a vacant engineering manager role on my team, tried to do the 80-20, didn't love the management role, am back to a full time senior engineer, and am frustrated with my skills that appear to have atrophied.