- The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was lucky to be in a growth area.)

- The skills feel transferrable, but every pure EM I know who got laid off is still looking for work and ready to give up. Meanwhile, those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work. Corporate management cultures are actually incredibly variable across companies and not directly transferable. The single most transferable skill I know in this industry is Linux internals.

- The idea that 5 years of experience is enough to solve most problems is crazy to me. 18 years in the industry, and I’m still very aware of things I don’t know and need to get better at. I know amazing engineers with 40 years of experience who are still learning and getting better.

IMO the best thing about being a manager is that you get to spend a lot of your time thinking about the future, and you are more likely to be “in the room where it happens,” talking to and hearing from C-levels. It’s also the worst thing, because you see how the sausage gets made.

I do agree with the things the author dislikes, but they get better. As a new manager, the author possibly hasn’t yet run into the thing you come to hate the most: senior management in many companies is basically a high school clique. Behavioral problems that would get normal people fired are sometimes tolerated in VP, C-levels, even directors sometimes, and working in such environments is trying.

This sounds like an anecdote tainted with confirmation and survivorship bias. Most SWEs get stuck at senior (especially at Google), getting clustered at L6 is already a privilege relatively speaking. Promotions to L6 are not super rare but less than a majority get them. Promotion to a L7+ is a struggle, if you say most of your peers get there naturally maybe you discounted those who left because they can't get promoted, or you just didn't happen to make many friends with people below your job level ? Or, as a senior manager, are you really sure you see that more than half of the team you manage reach L6+ and a good number to L7 just by waiting?

Now I do agree that the EM path doesn't open as many doors as some old school people think (especially since high level ICs tend to lead in some way too), but at least promotion opportunities doesn't seem to be thinner for EM than IC.

But of the people at L6 on either ladder, who are ready to work at the next level, opportunities are definitely easier to find for ICs, than managers. An L7 IC, after all, doesn’t have to come with a team of 30-50.

And for the respective IC of that level the ratio is even worse as in many companies they help out with many projects consisting of 5-10 people. In short there are many more manager positions at a respective level than IC ones.

Going from zero to one has very little to do with engineering management. Being able to hack out code quickly and being comfortable talking to potential customers (preferably not in that order) are the most important things and not at all related to being an EM. It's no guarantee that you'll get to hire anyone to manage.

And yeah, there are mechanically far fewer management roles than engineering roles, and since the boundary between lead engineer/first line manager is pretty porous in both directions, you're not actually competing with an equivalently smaller pool.

This was the pitch from my manager that led to me moving into an EM role. He knew I was interested in doing a startup in the future, but I didn't have experience with people management.

I don't think it's necessarily a great path to entrepreneurship, but if you are solid on the engineering side it's a good skillset to develop.

By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you can do something beside computer beep bop.

I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs, but senior EMs are slightly more common than senior staff. Beyond that, it's small numbers and hard to draw conclusions. The nuance I've felt is that promotions to staff and up on the IC ladder are more in your control, while EM promotions are very much about being in the right place at the right time, in addition to being ready for the role.

I have worked at "normal" companies as well, and I think the EM role there is slightly different? To me it seemed like it's people management + technical, while in the tech bubble, that would be called "TLM". "Pure" EMs are mostly doing people management only, with strategy and XFN alignment. Does that sound correct to you?

I come from Russia, we're not exactly known for great people management, and I'd say management up to department head is expected to handle the tech part as well even in larger companies such as Yandex / VK. This fits your definition of normal companies perfectly.

That’s going to depend a lot on company (and how they define staff vs senior; that varies quite a bit).

Of course, companies on that scale don’t really have senior EMs in the Big Tech sense, either.

I'm glad it's not just me who has noticed this!

If you know the internals, the complexity of a lot of middleware kind of collapses, too. There are a million frameworks for doing threading, for example, but they basically all boil down to clone, a futex and some atomics. Similarly, you can figure out how almost anything works with strace. It demystifies so many things that you otherwise need years of experience to debug.

As a practical matter, you can always find a job as a competent DevOps type who can code and talk to SWEs.

I want to work my way through computer systems a programmers perspective :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspe...

https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

If you prefer physical books “Systems Performance” by Brendan is good as well.

As the sister comment says, Linux Programming Interface is really good for learning linux system programming topics but it is mostly focused on user space.

For more userspace stuff I like Chris Wellons‘ blog at nullprogram.com

I recently had an example of this higher in the stack than anything you listed: A co-worker couldn't install node_modules because yarn appeared to be running an older version no matter what he tried to upgrade it - turned out there was a hidden config file in his home directory none of us knew about that could tell yarn to use a different version of itself.

The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more.

I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management role myself (I was an IC that had recently been promoted to a staff level role and subconsciously I felt like I lacked credibility and hiding behind a title would help me get some). In practice that turned out not to be true -- I didn't need to do that at the time, and now as an IC in a different company, my thoughts and feedback are taken seriously at an organisational level and by my peers.

The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I know it's a sad reality of performance management in a lot of places but it's not a universal truth that you will have to do that as a manager. Statistically, you can't avoid having difficult conversations about real performance problems, but there are companies where managers don't have to have the "everyone else on the team did better than you this half" conversation or the "I had to pick so this half you got the short straw" conversation.

i thjnk this has to do with where you’re testing your word as the power of a statement from anyone in an org from my experience has entirely to do with how much money is missed potentially by listening to someone’s opinion.

im quite far up the management chain in past orgs and while i could make calls like “no we aren’t hotfixing in a new feature the client wants in 2 days since it will never work well and that’s not enough time to properly smoke test this very involved feature.”

the rnd team loved this statement because they understood it and agreed with it and saw i took their concerns seriously.

sales management was pissed understandably as the client abandoned the negotiation because we didn’t meet their demands, no matter how right i thjnk we were to deny this request. but the argument got pretty far in the company despite the fact that everyone agreed it would be a disaster to do this.

it’s not really about power and position i guess, it’s how convincing you can be this is profitable for most companies. ego and power tripping are of course part of it but the ultimate decision is how well you can paint the financial prospects of it.

a similar request in the future was shit down faster as i asked the qa test to show on some mock code how many considerations we needed and the plain time for such a feature to be properly implemented — the financial impact was dire if we raced it out and that stopped the conversations very fast.

I've sworn to myself, that the moment that this idiotic idea get introduced in the "performance management" process at the place I work, will be the day that I'll start to send out resumes. Even if it were handled lottery style ("the short straw") I would not cut slack to either manager or company for such an indignity.

You're not being told to pick someone, you're being told that your org cannot really have 80% of people meeting/exceeding expectations and that because reasons (budget), you should review the cusp cases and adjust them down.

If I may offer my anecdata, I've seen several teams that could be characterized by stability and depth of expertise in their respective areas. You could say they always performed on a very high level, but never over-perform, because the high level is what is expected. Stack ranking those teams equates to killing them.

I also agree that a scenario where all individuals over-perform all the time is also rather unrealistic. But individual evaluation of performance is not stack ranking.

In the well run orgs at Amazon the bell curve is applied at the larger scales where it makes sense.

But sure, the larger the structures the more likely regression toward the mean will kick in.

I didn't realise places still did this. Even Microsoft stopped, and I think acknowledged that it was crippling to them in the 2000s as talent rushed to less silly companies.

In my company, I think it's roughly 2-3% at L7 or more. It takes really special skills to reach that level, not just years of experience. I don't know how it compares to EM though, but it's a tall ladder!

> those of us happy to go back to IC roles have no trouble finding work

My concern as an IC is ageism. I wish that I can say that when I'm 50+. I feel EMs are a little more immune to that (perhaps more so in Europe where SWEs aren't very well respected).

So even though there are more L7 EMs than SWEs, you might still have an easier time getting to L7 SWE, if you're ready to be an L7 SWE.

Your point about ageism is well-taken. I'm not yet old enough to really feel it, but I have heard it's rough.

That sounds like a positive. As an EM, there's a good chance you'll be promoted to L7 via pure luck - with no abnormal amounts of effort, and with no outstanding talent for management. It sucks if you're in the minority which "deserves" the promo (is super hard working and talented), but for everyone else, it's a free lottery ticket to a higher comp.

Imagine as a simplified analogy, applying to get into Harvard. Imagine Harvard has 1000 spots to fill, and that there are 10,000 applicants with roughly equivalent credentials (because they all have: near perfect test scores, high GPAs, strong extracurriculars, etc.).

In that environment, one might conclude that, for people who successfully get into Harvard, it was 30% their own skill, and 70% "luck" that the they happen to be semi-randomly picked by the admissions committee who could've easily gone with a nearly-equivalent alternative.

So sure, in that environment, "luck" is a factor, but this is by no means a "free lottery ticket" because the near-equivalent applicants had to work hard and be smart to reach the point of being near-equivalents of each other... So it is with promotions in competitive tech companies at least, where good talent is the norm.

Are doctors, lawyers, or surgeons viewed the same way? I don't know those industries well enough to say. Some domains of software are very, very deep and require many years of study and practice.

It feels like the root of SWEs not being fully respected simply comes back to the fact that they aren't considered as part of the org as much as management is.

Those are three very different things with different growth paths. But as someone who went from engineer to entrepreneur and is now on the product side, I can say that software people, almost as a rule, focus on stuff that doesn't matter for promotion. It's really frustrating sometimes.

Modulo pathological things like corporate politics, companies care about profit and loss. Grow the business, make the money roll in, and your chances of advancement approach unity. But far too many software people devote their time to "honing their tools", when, to the company, the entire tools budget is just a cost center. Identifying as a "tool person" at all just means that you're climbing a greasy pole. This is true even in "pure" software companies -- the difference between working on a business-critical initiative and, say, code-review tooling, can be everything to your career path.

Just to emphasize this point, consider the growth paths for the other careers you mentioned. Lawyers get paid well overall, but making partner depends on bringing in business. Surgeons and doctors are a bit more complex due to licensing scarcity, but if you know anyone in private practice, it's the same gig: get clients, grow the business. Meet the minimum threshold for technical competency, and nobody really cares if you're the best surgeon in the state, so long as you're bringing in patients.

The world revolves around money. Software is relevant only to the extent that it makes money.

Even there, you kinda feel the org's Eye of Sauron looking at you wondering why you haven't ascended into the clergy of management sometimes.

But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.

- Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This requires sticking around for longer than most people, maybe 10 years or more.

- Have impact across the industry. Maintain a kernel subsystem, run a C++ subcommittee, etc.

- Be a TL for multiple teams, because you have experience and a plan the other TLs can get behind.

- Wear multiple hats, e.g. be a solid manager who is also a really good engineer. Be great at, e.g. Audio and ML, or some other rare combo.

These archetypes are starting to get documented by some companies as part of their careers ladders, even. As a SWE, you have many options to create scope. As an EM, you really only have one.

This is risky advice. :) Context matters. It's going to sound very appealing to a self-motivated, mobile IC, and could work very well in orgs that value individual effort. But in many orgs, solo experts playing non-fungible roles are very big red flags, and can draw negative management attention. Maybe I could build a team around you... but I might not have the resources, or the problem might not warrant it. So I just might end up making your work life harder -- mitigating the risk by devaluing the service you're working on, just moving it to SaaS, or maybe keeping it but making you train up all your colleagues on the risk area (turning you into an unhappy tutor), etc.

If you could leverage your knowledge in a business-strategic way -- e.g., empower a team to work better by clarifying, simplifying, and standardizing the architecture -- you might draw attention as a future leader. (If you have a selfish boss who will steal credit, a little more political work might be needed alongside this.)

I suppose I have heard that the L6 bar has lowered somewhat from ~2015, mostly in response to people complaining about being stuck at L5. But I wouldn’t have any first hand experience with that, other than my own promotions, which surprised me every time. So maybe the bar has been lowered.

> I suppose I have heard that the L6 bar has lowered somewhat from ~2015

Yes title inflation is real. A lot of "Staffs" today would barely make it Senior 10-15 years ago. IMO this is a result of ZIRP so we might see reversal of that trend soon...

a) the roles are fewer

b) companies are wary of bringing in an EM for a team (prefer to promote within the ranks, in my experience).

c) switching from EM to a senior engineer role is hard both because it feels like a downgrade and because I see companies not that willing to offer it.

Of course, if the company is on the right course, you've hit a jackpot and can become an important leader few years down the line, but I know many EMs who are trapped in a bad org because of this. I believe engineers transitioning to a management role should keep these things in mind. I prefer making less bucks and keep my peace of mind about moving somewhere else.

In Band of Brothers TV series there is a plot line where an NCO is promoted to be an officer. Soon after he is moved to a different unit because the Army has a policy to distance such promotions from their organic units.

Well, as soon as HRBP found out I would become a EM, suddenly there were 2 other areas that needed EMs much more than our team. (As we were very functional).

I made a condition that I would become EM only for our team and did not desire to lead others I didn't know.

Given two EMs, one that came organically from a team and another that came "from the outside" and spent a few months working with a team - what advantages and disadvantages would the first EM have over the second?

I will say that for very dysfunctional teams it could be valuable to get an outside perspective which can do more severe change but hopefully this is less common.

Recently retired engineering manager here. Manager I all the way to VP of Engineering at several successful startups and a few big companies.

I was continually surprised that fresh and new challenges continually appeared, until I got wise enough to know there will always be something you not run into before.

Be wary of anyone who think’s they’ve seen it all.

Senior management often seems like a popularity contest.

The ability to get along with others often seems to be more important than actually being a good manager, being aligned with the business, and delivering value.

In some places it's the opposite: domain-specific codebases far outlive the separate projects they are used for, and the devs are the ones thinking about what their product should be. Kind of like how Linux is a long-lived product made by devs, used in many short(er)-lived C-level projects.

I didn't see any other comments on this part, and want to give a huge +1. I use to wonder how overall cultures got so misaligned with what Sr. Leadership was saying in open sessions. The amount of contradiction in what they say in large groups, and what they *do* in reality, is the smart lower layers of the org seeing right through the BS. It was eye opening to be able to see behind the curtain.

I suspect people view these senior leaders are irreplaceably important and tolerate all sorts of terrible/pathological behaviors from them...

But I’ve done a few of the other roles over the years. Team Lead/manager, Scrum Master, Product Manager (without the title). Here’s my take. A good manager requires a very different skill set to an engineer. The primary skill is to have extremely low neuroticism. The ability to make good decisions and present a calm and rational exterior under prolonged stress. 90% of lower level managers do not possess these attributes, and under stress, damage the team and company. If you want to be a manager, honestly assess how you respond to stress (particularly prolonged). Do you lash out at those around you? Hide or freeze up, unable to make a decision? Blame others and seek to protect yourself or reputation? These things, as boring as they sound, are the real differences between effective managers and everyone else.

This is one of the best summaries I have seen. It is also why it feels so similar to parenting: a good manager needs the ability to be the grown-up. This usually involves unfun things like calling out the elephant in the room, letting people air grievances about your decisions in a group, and staying engaged with people even when they're disengaging and pushing you away.

To me, management always felt like it was something that required all my spoons, and it wanted more, no matter how much I gave. I feel this more a lack of fit than something intrinsic to management, though. FWIW I have moderate neuroticism (according to rando Internet surveys). I suspect I'm not good at simply letting things be good enough, and the broadened responsibilities of management present an emotional scaling issue.

You might be overly hard on yourself here. Everything is a spectrum. My usual failure mode seems to be excessive patience when folks aren’t delivering. It is extremely bad when you let it fester. Lots of stuff doesn’t matter, but when important things aren’t happening, you really need to jump on it fast and insist on the high bar.

I once had a manager (not my direct manager) tell me "maybe some fear is good?" No, it's not. Fear is useful for outrunning predators, but it is a useless emotion for programming computers. Unfortunately that particular phrase had come to that manager from the CEO, so, yeah. That company is a mess of short termism and hasty irrational decision-making and constant thrashing / "why can't we execute on big projects". It's because everyone is so scared that they're just trying to survive, and rule number 1 of surviving is to avoid large unpredictable projects.

I detest this whole line of thought because it's completely at odds with the reality - that people, and especially programmers, are creative and inventive by nature and are the last people who would "do nothing" if not afraid.

So he came to tell us to not worry, for now the company has money problems but soon™ the company will be doing fine and we'll all be fired!

How emotionally incompetent do you have to be to think this is good news?

Turns out I'm pretty temperamental, and I privately worry that I'm just constitutionally ill-suited to management. I also struggle with the sometimes disingenuous nature of management - I'm not manipulating you, I'm motivating you! I wish I could just float around the organisation fixing problems, streamlining processes and re-jigging work systems...

Maybe! I've had good managers who were and weren't parents. I'm a parent, but don't enjoy managing.

> Weirdly I seem to do my best managing when I've become emotionally checked out.

A perspective approximating objectivity is exactly what techniques like CBT try to teach you: seeing things as they really are, without your emotions coloring it.

> I wish I could just float around the organisation fixing problems, streamlining processes and re-jigging work systems

That exists. See the solver staff engineer archetype. I suspect it exists more at larger orgs who can support the role effectively, though. But, I think that is me as well. I enjoy being dropped on stalled projects/difficult technical tasks, unblocking it, and moving to the next thing.

As a senior engineer, my words also often matter, but I don't have the huge amount of responsibility that comes with being a manager, which is nice. I want less stress in my life, not more.

I guess my next 30 years in this career will be the same position I am in currently.

We have a whole new management structure now and they are very top down, have big egos, and aren’t willing to even entertain feedback. Vocal low level managers or engineers have been getting pushed out of the company left and right, so all the autonomy and the voice I had are pretty much gone. Even things that I thought were engineering decisions have been largely removed. I will need X to build what I’m building, so I make it and it worked. Then, months later, I’m told there is a different plan for X, I did it wrong, and I’m told to remove my solution (fully automated and hands off) in favor of a corporate process and manual work by other team, which is often missed, which makes my service less reliable.

I’m glad I’m not a manager who needs to fight with these people, as I’d probably be out of a job by now so they can replace me with one of their friends. That being said, I’ve found the influence of a senior level engineer to be highly variable, even within the same company/team, on a longer timeline.

But even carpentry is hard on the body. Endless sawdust in your lungs, nonstop splinters, and of course spinning blades everywhere. We are very lucky that the biggest physical risk in software development is sitting down too long.

They are higher technical positions that have no or very little management responsibilities (up to senior principal engineer, architect, etc). It depends also on the company and how much they value you.

Best I have seen is engineer with PhD and decades of experience be the research/architecture guru, no team, no direct reports, a lot of Matlab, and be "VP of technology" in a company of several hundreds.

Or not. While I acknowledge that the mindset of chasing eternal growth and riches professionally is very common, is not hard to imagine a subset of people that are happy with staying in one rung of the ladder and get meaning from things outside their career.

Senior is the last IC level where you can pretty much exclusively focus on the technical work, in most cases. You can be very successful doing this! Staff and above roles can vary widely, but most of the time you're expected to have a multiplying effect on the team, which requires a lot more soft skills.

If a company has too many engineers above senior you run into a problem where everyone is looking for impact, but no one is doing the actual work!

Managers don't get told what to do all the time? Since when? Managers just get it from both sides. If you don't know about all the stuff your manager is dealing with from people above them, or from other managers in the organization: good! That means they're doing their job shielding you from that. The manager is telling their reports what to do—okay, I guess so, sometimes. But just as often they're adapting their plans to what their teams tell them can or should or has been done. And they're also being told what to do by people to whom they are direct reports. People who are, in my experience, much more demanding and much less collaborative than most managers themselves are with their teams.

I've been a manager, and I stopped all that because it felt like I had more bosses and less agency than when I was an IC.

Since I do not work for FAANG companies, but rather small-to-medium (regular?) tech companies, they mostly never have principal/architect roles. My current role, in most cases, is actually the highest IC role there is.

When you get to the top of the range your salary will only increase in line with inflation/market forces whatever you do. It's not possible to get 20-30% more every time you change job unless you've stayed a long time in your current job and they were taking advantage of you (in which case those 20-30% represent what you were actually losing).

As for titles, obviously what I meant relates to what the actual role entails. 'Senior software engineer' is usually not very senior, in my experience this often means a dev who can be left alone to deliver the specific feature they were tasked to code. As for "highest IC role there is" again, if the job description is very senior you can also negotiate commensurate title and pay.

Do what you like, and for most normal humans (TM) moving to managerial position is moving to worse job while paid marginally better. More stress, far less interesting creative work and more baby-sitting/micro-managing incompetent folks, chasing other teams, processes, politics etc (if you don't do that you are not really a manager in any bigger company).

I am software dev for 20 years, my current full time employment net salary is over 20x compared to my first full time employment while doing largely the same job. You don't get good increases by moving up the ladder, you get it by switching companies and negotiating hard. That's it for the money part.

It's not about chasing money for the sake of it but in the real world more money always helps if you can get it. In this case this also goes with better job satisfaction.

A 20x salary increase in 20 years means either fantastic career growth up the ladder or so-called "developing country". No-one gets that kind of increase in a developed country just by moving company, or at all, really.

You started out at non-tech company at $35k in 2004 (right after the dot com bust) then ended up at a big (non FAANG) tech company in 2024 for $350k.

I’m in that ballpark. Granted I’m staff, but I know seniors making just a little less.

I’d have to live somewhere with hyper inflation to do it on paper, but that’s just being dishonest with the numbers.

It started out with salaries much lower than in Western Europe and has been catching up since.

It was right after the dotcom bust and before the FANG world.

30-40k was a fairly common starting salary for a software engineer (mine first job was 44k in 2003).

20x would still mean you're on the high end of engineer pay now, but it's not totally crazy.

but yeah unlikely we see that again.

The salary range is somewhere from $100k to $600k in the US depending on the company. So if you hit the cap at your current company just move to one that pays more. If you've hit that limit at a top tier company then you can start moving to higher IC roles such as Staff.

QED.

I don't understand the nitpicking. It is factually impossible to get 20-30% salary increase forever if you move every 2-3 years while remaining at the same level. You'll get to the top end fairly quickly.

The person I replied to who said this has happened to them has only been in the industry 12 years. So, yes, they started as junior, then eng, now senior engineer, they moved maybe 3-4 times. But now if they stay at "senior software engineer" level then things will taper off.

The high end for L5 is like half that.

Even they aren't hiring someone looking at L5 at one of the other big companies at 600k. They'll be much higher than the other companies though.

While we're at it, does anyone recommend going for PhD in EECS fields for someone who doesn't like at all to be in academia or do "research" (aka read pdfs, write proposal/papers, code up and run simulations)?

Feels like you're answering your own question. No.

I think having management perspective is excellent to understand the contexts behind what is being built and why things are seemingly inefficient and broken. Gives more insight into solutions and what may not be effectively communicated. Memes as usual.

As a people manager these issues I care so much about would be within my sphere of influence and responsibility. For better or worse.

In practise now I find that I am a Team Lead and yet I have far less ability to influence things than I thought. There are a host of people including my boss who want to run everything and expect me to be a rubber stamp.

In fact I get into shit more because I have to speak up for people in the team who are (unfortunately) rightly afraid to. Like "for a story to be ready we need the API defined" - how can QA work in parallel on automated tests when they don't know what to test? Scrum masters, POs, my manager, architects......they just talk whichever shit suits them today as if it was all self evident truth and tomorrow they're moaning about why the tests are late.

Basically you get into the politics of who is to blame for the state of affairs and the people who chose those directions and strategies are well connected and good at shifting blame.

They can write the test cases based on the feature requirements with some boiler plate code in those tests

e.g TestUserSignUpIsSuccesful() {

   User.SignUp(email)
   User.Login(email)

   user_record = GetUserDetailFromDB(email)

   Assert.NotEmpty(user_record)
}

The real question is: why aren't they in the same team?

Many years ago, I was standing in my then-boss’s office while he got off the phone from an apparently successful request to have somebody in another department do something for him. He looked up at me from his desk, grinned slightly, and said in a bemused tone, “Well, I didn’t get any prettier when they changed my title to ‘Manager’ [from ‘Specialist,’ before I was in his team], but it sure helps me get things done.”

Oh sure thing, assign another task to an understaffed inadequetly skilled team with a roadmap due yesterday.

My additional advice here is to meditate. For real. Sit quietly long enough for your brain to switch off before making essential and impactful decisions that could harm your people.

In the beginning, you become a kind of parent-to-child genius. You have to accept them and also understand their ways. The more controls you put in place, the less control you will have, as they will attempt to jump around and oppose the unnecessary bureaucracy (I'll do the same, honestly).

My second advice is to always behave as if you are going to leave tomorrow. This will prepare your team and your peers and even improve your lifestyle.

In a similar vein, my ultimate management technique is to take leave and have my subordinates act in my position (for at least 2 weeks). It really accelerates their development and it's oddly reassuring to discover that I'm not indispensable. At the same time, I do wonder if it indicates that I'm doing something wrong given they seem to develop faster when I'm not there...

This is very good advice.

Ha! I just recently became a parent, and the skills are highly transferable between EM to parent.

Some days I feel like I am employing skills learned on the job to managing my family.

Being a good manager is all about doing the minimum. That’s why you see comments earlier in this thread about leaving your team for a few weeks.

In addition you need to keep up with the tech as you need to evaluate the skill level of people in your team plus they turn to you for advice.

And it is way more tiring. Keeping up with what many people are doing, at a technical level, plus all the people related stuff, bureaucracy etc. Needing to attend lots of meetings and sync up.

I agree it has a better career path for most, because technical career paths tend to either require a FAANG or maybe a ThoughtWorks or just massive IQ and effort to learn something like C++ HFT to rake it in. Or maybe be a sales engineer or growth engineer. Or founder.

Then of course the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision making processes, going behind your back and contradicting previous agreements, trying to short-circuit or subvert agreed processes etc etc for above childish reasons.

Turns out that a lot of "professionals" are not professional at all and are actually pretty petty, spiteful, grudge-holding argumentative children who go into a strop (or as the article puts it "go lay on the grass thinking about their project") for a day or 5 if they don't get their way.

The rest of being a manager is a breeze though! 10/10 would buy again etc :)

The worst part about this? It's just in some people's nature to do this. I'm a manager in the public service so it's basically impossible for even the CEO of my organisation to go "oh, that undermining backstabber guy is way better than spangry, let's fire spangry and replace him with undermining backstabber guy". And yet one of my reports constantly does this kind of thing anyway. It's utterly inexplicable.

To be fair, some managers over-optimize to protect against people undermining them, not sharing knowledge and responsibility and even actively removing top performers with leadership ambitions

My favorite pattern is what I call "code sheriff" lead, who does all code reviews himself to prevent bad code from reaching trunk. Then proceed to complain how you can't go on a vacation because all processes stop.

Frankly, this makes it look like you are indeed a problem that deserves to be questioned and bypassed whenever possible.

People like this cause problems and headaches for everyone as they are loose canons causing havoc, confusion, and wasted effort.

Congrats - you are very likely your manager's biggest annoyance.

If you think something is wrong or inefficient or whatever, talk about it with your manager or skip-level. Don't just take matters into your own hands and subsequently screw things up for loads more people by doing stupid things like entering into/cancelling agreements/commitments with other teams/customers etc because you think your manager is a bozo.

Well that shouldn't be an issue in a professional workplace and functioning team, is the rationalization. I couldn't agree more! Yet, there's a huge gap between what should and does happen when a bunch of humans (sadly, mostly men) work together.

You can think of yourself as a people manager agnostic to the org goals

Or you can think of yourself as the captain of a team leading them to victory

It’s helpful to know what someone means before trying to understand their thoughts on management

IMO, whether one of these individuals can be used is the distinction of whether a role is line supervisor or management. Line supervisors need the subject knowledge to teach fresh hires and know how to identify and fix problems caused by slackers. Management would rely on the senior employees for mentorship and keep their ear to the rumor mill to identify suspect underperformers.

I’m the opposite - engineer to manager, didn’t like people management side of it, changed to project management and loving it.

I do miss technical work though.

> Frankly, after 4–5 years of working in a particular tech area, you can solve the vast majority of practical problems well enough. If you want some work challenge, you can:

I hate takes like these. "Good technical skills are dime a dozen, but management? that's the hard shit."

There's absolutely no lack of meaningful skills you can expand into if you're plateauing as an engineer. If you're a front-end engineer, go learn some design and product thinking, that'll help you give better input to other teams. Learn some scripting, and automate a bunch of shit. Learn some SQL and learn to query data on your own, instead of relying on others.

The best manager I had had a wide range of technical skills, so was able to make smart decisions since he had a very holistic picture of the codebase. Technical management shouldn't be about following methodologies, doing 1:1s, and being a middleman, it should be about making good practical decisions.

You don't have to be the best programmer, but you need to be able to have thoughtful technical conversations with the in-the-weeds engineers, and represent their work to the wider org. If your mental model diverges with the day-to-day reality, your judgment breaks down along with it, and you're going to wind up being the problem instead of being an asset to your teams.

Big companies tend to be quite prescriptive about role boundaries, so if you're an FE engineer, you can learn design and provide input as much as you want, but you won't likely get to design a new screen from scratch instead of your regular designer.

I mean, over the last few years as an IC I fiddled with CI setups and automated QA, wrote some CLI codegens, but after some time you really notice you start inventing problems to have some fun.

I do let my FE engineers do mockups when they want. It is often objected by other people who wanted to do it (but didn't) or wanted someone else to do it (but didn't have time). But whoever is trying to make me and my team's job hell, will get the same treatment from me.

Is this something common? I'm working as IC at FAANG for 6+ years in different teams, but I've never really experienced something like this. I've always been working on stuff that should have been finished yesterday.

I’m sure it depends on your org, but you can often choose how seriously to take that pressure. I’m also a FAANG IC and work is usually pretty relaxed. It’s a marathon, not trying to burn myself out. You really have to do near-zero work for a long time to get fired and it seems like promotions happen on a pretty similar schedule regardless of how hard people work.

Keep your commitments, but commit to less. If you want to get promoted do one good piece of L+1 work instead of trying to cram in more L work than everyone else. If your manager tries to manufacture stress to make you work harder, find a better manager.

Have to comment that this is just completely wrong and we need to stop telling ourselves this. I’ve experienced a lot of pain with EMs who have no idea what is really going on in a codebase because they have little domain expertise, no idea what tradeoffs are made by developers, and, crucially, do not ever punch the keys and commit anything. Why? Because frankly, they already have the job.

If you don’t ever interface with the codebase and don’t really understand what it does, but you still feel so inclined to steer the ship, you’re a product manager, not an EM. Possibly worse because there is more credence given to you? This is most likely advice for someone who just wants to issue vague edicts to a team that frankly does not need them.

I asked him why we went back. He said "The problem is that they nip at you from the top, and they nip at you from the bottom."

Meaning a programmer usually has one primary boss nagging. A manager has a boss above nagging and people below nagging.

This is such a poor advice. In any company that has a dozens customers, your team is likely to face technical problems. When your team faces a problem and you are unable to solve it, your team will notice that and they will stop looking up to you. In fact, any engineer who solves the problem will be the hero everyone admires. The approach mentioned by the author makes you a good "boss", but not necessarily a good "manager" or "supervisor" or "leader".

> Life of an engineer is relatively relaxed. If you don't have anything urgent, you can go lay on the grass for half a day, thinking about the future of your project or something. You can miss a few meetings on short notice, no questions asked.

In which company does this happen, I wonder!

You don't fix every problem yourself, but have someone who can fix it available. Otherwise, people don't grow, and you can't take a vacation. You totally need a general (middle / senior level) understanding of technology, but having a separate person with strong technical chops is key.

> In which company does this happen, I wonder!

As a staff engineer on a design system for a top 50 website, roughly half my job was detailing a tech roadmap and identifying what can break across the codebase, something you can do perfectly well on grass.

This is quite revealing. Being a hero, or being looked up to, might be some people's goals. But definitely not everyone's.

I moved from engineer to manager some years ago hoping I would get access to new tools to be able to push forward some necessary innovations, but it seems like I was constrained even more. Currently moving back to engineering and thinking that I should probably start my own thing soon.

I misread that last word as peasant. I felt simultaneously insulted and ready to write some tests.

I was a shock absorber and clutch plate between team members and board/executives/senior leadership. On bad days I was the bearer of bad news or executioner. It was strictly a top-down affair; despite endless bloviating about open doors, open minds, and being empowered to lead and make changes, I was expected to do what they told me, keep myself and my team in line, and if I had any ideas they’d “bring it up in their next leadership meeting” (spoiler: they won’t, or if they do, it will be disregarded). Despite given a mandate, I had very little authority.

You also have to deal with idiosyncrasies with other managers. Lazy ones you have to pick up the slack for lest you become blocked. Bad ones who poison their team and create mistrust that spreads to others. Overeager ones that somehow seem to get their way or maybe have an easier department but who nonetheless get the attention of senior leadership where unfair expectations are placed on you.

The day-to-day was miserable. I’m highly technical and I like to get my hands dirty, being a manager vaporized a significant portion of why I enjoyed working at a tech company and mostly left me with the reasons I don’t. Being a Jira or spreadsheet jockey, filling out PIPs, IDPs, KPIs, budget proposals, expense reports, screening interviewees, managing petty squabbles between people, juggling PTO calendars, scrum bullshit, and endless fucking meetings. I’ve never been so busy doing what felt like so little. Sometimes it felt like I was babysitting people that, as a peer, I enjoyed working with.

I was also utterly repulsed by HR. I don’t know if HR has made a bad turn lately, was always like this, or my experience was just organizational, but these people are Stasi-like agents that seem to want you to spy on every little detail and use it against you and the employee. Yet when I actually needed them, e.g. conflict resolution, they were completely incompetent and insensitive, enraging employees rather than empowering them. They always sided with senior leadership, even when that person violated our own handbook.

Unlike the author, there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. Senior leadership doesn’t have a lot of openings. At best, I just get shifted around to other teams and maybe get dropped in one less fucked.

I enjoyed mentoring a lot, but sometimes reports looked to me like I’m a parent or a therapist and it was too much (and HR useless). I enjoyed strategy and design, but senior leadership was frustrating and frequently didn’t listen or involve me at all. I enjoyed delegating and giving reports opportunity for growth, allowing me to stress about the minute details less, but now my ass was on the line for the entire team which is waaaay more stress than just doing the work.

I generally chalk it up to me being a poor fit for the role in a dysfunctional company, but talking to other managers, it seemed my experience was not uncommon.

Then I began getting good at this job. I learned to delegate and was rewarded with empowered direct reports. I earned the trust of my boss and got more autonomy. I could implement some ideas of mine and see the benefits.

Archive link: https://archive.md/HqCSb

> Your words have weight. If you, an IC, say "guys, we really should write tests", everybody goes "oh, crazy old Vladimir, all grumpy again, haha, where do you see tests fit here?". If you, an EM, casually say "guys, we really should write tests", you might be surprised to find the tests unexpectedly growing in different places.

I can't generalize, but in my company engineers trust Staff engineers way more than managers. Everyone has informal authority, and from my experience engineers tend to respect other engineers more. As a manager you can ask people to do things, but there is no guarantee they'll do it. And if you need to resort to your formal authority to resolve something, things probably went wrong somewhere.

> Frankly, after 4–5 years of working in a particular tech area, you can solve the vast majority of practical problems well enough.

If this is the case, then you are certainly not pushing yourself hard enough. Maybe it's company specific, but right now in my team there is a neverending list of ever increasingly bigger and more complex problems. The idea that you can master everything in 5 years sounds extremely naive to me.

> Life of an engineer is relatively relaxed. If you don't have anything urgent, you can go lay on the grass for half a day

Please OP tell me where you work. I'd like to lay in the grass half a day, rather than being constantly pulled into 10 different directions and having to push back on new requests.

I think it's also not easy to do in a static situation where people have a fixed image of you and your talents in their minds. So basically I think you need to move around - if it's not happening for you in one place you need to find another.

As a manager of several years now, you missed one of the absolutely worst parts: "performance management" a.k.a. when one of your reports is repeatedly/consistently unable or unwilling to meet expectations and you have to put them on a Performance Improvement Plan.

Not only are PIPs a slog for you, they're absolutely torturous for your report. If you have a shred of empathy, it's tough. If you have a lot, it's agonizing. Add H1B status to that mix and you're possibly the person responsible for sending this person out of the country.

I had two years across two jobs where I inherited teams where many PIPs were called for. It led to me quitting the second job outright and nearly a year of sabbatical recovering.

Harming others is not why I became a manager—really the opposite.

On a good day, I get to help people grow and be a part of their victories. On a bad day, I'm at least indirectly responsible for their suffering and feeling miserable about it for at least days.

It can be a tough gig.

Good to have someone acknowledge that individual performance reviews are ineffective nonsense. I have seen little evidence to contradict this in organizations that I am familiar with.

The result seems to be that promotion is largely based on seniority, personal influence, random chance, or changing jobs.

I agree with a lot, but like others - disagree with some.

My background: I've worked in tech for ~14 in all kinds of roles - from pure junior IC, through a "team lead" (something between an expert IC, a tech lead, and a manager), "tech lead," company's "technical architect" (highest level tech lead, peer to the technical director, but without any direct reports), and something akin to a tech director. Now I'm back to IC. Companies from small gamedev ones (80 people total, 15 engineers), medium gamedev (30 engineers and coding technical artists), huge gamedev (Ubisoft where you can have 100+ engineers and 1500 people total on a project), and for the last 7y "big tech".

The idea I would like to push back the most is that "your words have more weight". I have never had trouble getting my opinions heard, even if I didn't push them. Being the expert IC and "problem solver" sometimes I'd have even CEO asking me directly for advice and how to solve some issues (both technical and non-technical!). Not always following them, but I didn't expect that. Having an official title, in theory, you can use some "authority" to formally push those ideas. But... in practice, it does not work better. People will still go directly to the most technical experts. And if you abuse the position/authority/title (I hope I never did that, but that's not for me to judge...), it can cause resentment, pushback, and more disagreements. You will also hear less of gossip and honest feedback, to some engineers you becomes "not one of us anymore".

It can also destroy friendships. I had a great friend (meeting socially with our wives once a week, sharing interests) who was my peer and was then promoted to my lead. I still really liked them and wanted to stay friends. We always had technical disagreements (which were fine for peer ICs). Later, some of those technical disagreements and my bringing up issues publicly caused him to get bitter with me (as the upper management saw those and took my side on some occasions), and eventually stopped the friendship completely; after I left the company, they started ghosting me. :(

Similarly, on a few occasions, I agreed to lead/manage formally (in one case, it came from me - in other cases, I was asked to). I agreed because I thought, "Things are f-d up; I can solve them by being closer to the upper leadership and helping the team succeed." Man, I was so naive. :( I didn't have any more authority or power with the higher-ups, and there were more disagreements. They expected me to enforce policies I disagreed with. As you can imagine, this didn't last long, and I always ended up leaving the team/company and being super burnt out.

So now I'm happy to be a staff-level IC, an expert, and a "hacker," playing with problems hands-on and building my expertise further. The field grows so quickly that there is always something exciting and new to learn and do. I would happily be a tech lead of some project close to me (luckily, at Google and similar, it's flexible, per-project, and not formal), but I probably do not want to manage again. Maybe it will change, depends.