Over time I have learned for myself, at least part of the reason, is that you don't get those moment when the thing works. Those immediate and really apparent moments, where you did the hard thing, and even if there is more to do, you solved the problem.

You don't get those moments as a manager, because people aren't machines and you can't assume anything. A hard won consensus building moment can be flip-flopped on, a coached employee who you thought really felt empowered can still struggle to speak up, etc.

In other words, I think success just tickles things different neurologically between IC and management, and I think recognizing that is probably critical to know.

If you are deciding to manage, you have to be ready 'give up' the high of solving directly or risk turning into a micro-manager or not giving enough autonomy. As a manager learning to be okay with struggling with why motivation or burnout is more of a struggle, and you just don't get those same rejuvenating moments.

At least that is how I have come to feel about it, but I am still learning to find what other moments I can recognize as a manager to allow my brain to get the rewards for the hard effort.

It took a long time to grow out of this feeling. These days I get a lot of joy from management. I try to look at myself like a coach on a sports team. I may not be on the field but I feel good when we win knowing the work I have done to help my team succeed.

I would agree with the author that the feedback loop is different. It is also often slower and more subtle. That doesn't however mean that it's not there. Perhaps the author is new to management, perhaps the author just really likes being an IC. Their journey is their own but I would certainly say there are many paths to endorphins as a manager, even as a manager of managers.

A head coach also has more impact on a team's outcome than many middle managers (but probably not a founder). Managing well is hard and can be a major multiplier, but there is room at many companies to be mediocre or worse (even when trying your best) and still pass. I'm talking mostly functional managers as in Engineering Manager, PMs (most of whom are ICs) are different. Being a functional manager would be more like being the running back coach in football, the big man coach in basketball, or the pitching coach in baseball. These are different than being head coach, they help those players be good at their role, but have much less impact on the team's bigger picture. Winning in this role is seeing a player grow more than it is seeing the team win the championship. These coaches make far less than the head coach and the players.

Ultimately, I think the manager role is diminished by modern org structure. One thing said about a good manager is they block and shield—which implies the report needs protection from the org's process/structure. So a good manager runs counter to the company reasonably often. Is the manager helping or hurting the company? Both I think, but on net I don't know. It feels oddly baked into the role.

Problematic because it leads ICs to think of themselves as the quarterback throwing or wide receiver making the game winning catch with 1 minute left, getting lifted up into the air, renegotiating a contract for millions more, retiring early, getting inducted to the hall of fame etc.

Why is this so problematic? I think it leads engineers to overvalue the short term wins (getting a particularly tricky implementation correct) sometimes at the cost of their health and wellbeing if they work nights and weekends to get it done. And no one is watching it live at the edge of their seats. Even more distressing is that having more junior ICs have to pull heroics to keep the business alive is a tremendous anti-pattern. The point of management is make the right decisions so the organization steers clear of asking their least experienced contributors to damage their health on a regular basis (...really at all!).

A well run org couples decision making and seniority. If an IC is making a lot of org impacting decisions they are probably as senior or more-so than most line managers (or should be promoted to be if this happens regularly) and are comped the same way. Now it would be nice if decision making was as transparent as coaches making the right/wrong play (the offensive coordinator calling a running play no one watching thought was a good idea). In an ideal org failures or inaction would be more transparent. If a manager is basically not making any decisions (adding no value) there are certainly management failures at several levels (maybe up to the top) preventing folks from getting upset about it. Again ideally audibles are a very occasional exception.

Where does money comes from? In sports, teams competing are the product. Players are kinda like features and marketing all built into one. Companies spend a significant portion of all their money on building product and marketing it. I think IC engineers are probably closer to the support staff than the players on the field...the comparison is problematic.

And which hall of fame? - the engineers in our hall of fame are the folks doing things for the first time, trailblazing, largely researchers (Turing awards etc). There is no "got 4 hours of sleep for months delivering a poorly planned product and got an autoimmune disease" hall of fame.

The IT industry is dominated by bad (and overpaid) managers, where the only useful function they provide is to aggregate information and pass it up the report chain.

If ever there was a role suitable for replacing with AI it is this one.

Management is a fundamentally different career from SW development. So are the reward functions. It takes years to master management and years to appreciate that you are in fact mastering it. This is, IMO, why it's so important to have a good coach during this transition, to help encourage growth and development and point out where you're improving. This in turns help you know you're improving and definitely gets you that endorphin rush.

I drive my staff like „coding problems“. I push them to overcome challenges or shield them when I feel something is impacting their performance capacity.

Seeing my team execute a complex challenge or close a complex contract is a huge endorphin boost.

Alas, there’s always going to be more people who are good at playing the game than managing the players. And most players make terrible coaches.

If the language of business is accounting than the operations of a business is software. Why then do so many people only care about one of these?

Everyone wants to talk about the 10,000ft view, yet so much of a business is usually opaque anyway? Worse is when you are transparent and the people on the other side of the house don't even know what they're looking at. I think it's becoming increasingly unacceptable that people want to stay specialized or are prevented from being given more responsibility as they progress in their career. The hierarchies at so many places are often a big fat lie protecting incompetence and avoiding meaningful collaboration.

I have never once in my life felt like a god for completing anything. For the longest time I also never knew why other people were so obsessed with personal goals. It’s only very recently I realized that, A those two things are entirely related and B that’s one of the main reasons why life with ADHD is so fucking impossible.

Because ADHD not only robs you of your ability to pay attention, to interact normally in social situations, to perceive time, to do the things you want to do, when you want to do them, to remember who you are and what you’ve done, or are currently doing, of the the experience of having a clear mind, and the ability to hear yourself think without getting distracted.

It also robs you of the experience, that I now realize is not at all metaphorical and is actually felt by basically everyone else, of feeling good after you achieve something.

It leaves you with no drive or reward mechanism, I will never have the experience the OP had, because my brain will never create that experience for me.

So I drift from one interest to the next, because the only reward I get is from novelty, as long as things are interesting I can stay focused, but as soon as I loose interest my brain stops giving me a reward signal and I move on.

But that reward is not satisfaction, it does not build self confidence in my own ability, nor does it drive me to improve. all it does is satisfy a need.

I think that’s the most debilitating thing about adhd. The lack of that most basic feedback loop is why I have essentially no self confidence, because there is no mechanism for me to feel good about myself, there is only a drive to find new shiny objects, never to polish and improve the ones I have.

I once completed a 3000 mile cycling tour across the US (and didn't take ADHD meds while on the trip) and was I was basically disappointed to reach the west coast.

> So I drift from one interest to the next, because the only reward I get is from novelty, as long as things are interesting I can stay focused, but as soon as I loose interest my brain stops giving me a reward signal and I move on.

That hits so hard as a fellow ADHDer. I read that then turned around to look at my disastrously messy home office filled with hundreds of partly done projects and abandoned hobbies. I often wish I wasn't highly compensated since being broke would meter me. ADHD is a vicious cycle.

Also, being engaged with the company's vision helped me feel more "connected" with what's behind the screen, and feel good for delivering value for our users.

If I go on vacation and I see how people are now able to handle issues without me due to some work I’d put in previously, I feel a great sense of satisfaction.

First, is to still do coding myself. It's extremely satisfying and helps keep me grounded in the code base.

The second is to focus on the financial metrics of the business. Hitting revenue numbers is a pretty intoxicating. But this only works when, like me one is responsible for sales.

Definitely glad that it’s for some though, helps keep the industry moving forward

However, I have found a significant source of endorphins through community activities. I've been part of committees, co-chair of a technical special interest group, and have been invited to speak at major events. Perhaps amplified as someone who used to harbour a lot of social anxiety, I get a very nice rush of endorphins from these extracurricular activities. I definitely encourage other managers to volunteer for groups and events related to their specialty.

It was one of the main driving forces that pushed me out of the military. They expected you to keep ranking up, and once you hit E5 or so the amount of non-management roles dried up. I saw what the remaining higher up programmers did all day and didn’t want any part of it.

Helping other people grow has also been important to me. Mentorship and teaching have always been things I prioritized. When I moved into a management role a couple of years ago it was because I’d done the principal level IC thing before where I was extremely cross-functional and I wanted to try focusing on a specific part of the business and a specific team of people and try to grow them. I wanted to grow vertically rather than horizontally.

I think I’m a pretty good manager, based on feed back from my team and my peers, but the reality is that it’s enormously more draining than I ever imagined and there’s very little to concretely feel satisfied about at the end of a given day. When I became a manager I thought I’d just code in my spare time since I wouldn’t be coding at work, but in reality I’m far far more burned out from any given day of management than I ever was from the most stressful day as an IC. It’s hard to find the motivation after work, and I worry about my skills slipping over time.

In an abstract sense it feels good to see a product grow, and to grow a team, but practically speaking none of the success is mine. Every good thing that gets done is thanks to the people on my team. Their growth and accomplishments are ultimately thanks to them. I facilitate, I give direction, I find alignment and build consensus, hopefully I make things easier- but I personally accomplish nothing. It feels like being stuck running at top speed on a treadmill going nowhere. Being a manager means taking on none of the credit when things go well, and all of the blame when things go poorly.

Unfortunately, part of what got me into management at all was caring about the product and the people and no matter how much it sucks giving up and going back to an IC role seems worse. I don’t want to leave my team unsupported or risk them getting a worse manager, and I don't want to see the product my team owns fail due to a lack of leadership. I’m hopeful that in a few more years with more experience I’ll figure out ways to be happier with the situation, and until then I just try to remember that most people hate their jobs and I’m just lucky to have had almost 20 years of loving mine before moving into management.

I fully expect myself to do the same when managing people. But most answers here are different. They take pride and claim part of the success as theirs and looking at this from the IC's perspective, I don't disagree.

Sure, there are people who go at this from a "you'd be nothing without me"-approach and that's not good either. But as manager of a team you can do a good and a bad job and good managers are so important for the team.

You should learn to see your part in the team's success and your role in helping someone grow. I'm not sure how you change your mindset on this, but I think if you want to stick to management, that's your only way to make it work.

And again - as an IC I believe it is justified. I've worked under good and bad managers and bad managers can ruin the job for the entire team while good managers don't just help you be more productive. They help you grow as a person and as a contributor and they enable the team to work on things that make an impact instead of burning up their energy with the thing that looks most fancy to leadership.

I'm not sure if this is something everyone can get accustomed to see, but it is something that I see in some managers and I hope they can get their endorphins from it.

Edit: I always find it incredibly strange when people describe exactly like in this article "feeling like a fucking god" after doing something. Like, you ok? Having a manic episode? That seems like an overstatement and maybe you shouldn't be making any life decisions after doing something because feeling that good shouldn't be a reasonable frame of mind for decision making.

I'm pretty good at delaying gratification in many aspects of life. I am responsible with finances, with health, and conscientious. If you can get endorphins from long term outcomes, you can probably enjoy management just as much as coding.

I found that at a certain point in my career I was sick and tired of arguing over design patterns and wanted to make a real world impact.

Quality meetings (where understanding is shared or where decisions are made) are quite exciting.

There are many meetings, unfortunately, that are not quality.

Proof of exertion (work) and proof of impact.

An engineer making many commits is just proof of exertion. An engineer closing many tickets is proof of impact.

A manager can also do a lot of exertion with no impact - has 1:1s and listens and forgets its all within a year, talks to everybody like they have a shot at promotion even when he knows he has a fixed budget, makes 0 tough decisions around the product and obeys everything their manager says no matter how terrible.

But if you ARE making big swings at work (e.g. preventing whole bad projects from happening, or driving entirely new projects that were your own idea, contradicting your manager and being right, recruiting great connections, etc) then you should be able to find a record of your relevance [and if you can't then that's mentality thing].

This is possible because I have exhaustive knowledge of the product, having worked on it for many years as an IC (and watched several other people struggle to manage it before I took the wheel). I imagine I'm a scenario where a manager and team are more disconnected, and nobody is really passionate about the product, that milestones would feel a lot more muted.

As an IC I was told “go make a thing that does this”, and as a manager I was told “lead a team that makes a thing that does this”, and that’s about it. I thrive in this environment.

I got the same endorphin rush as an IC when I demoed my MVP as I did as a manager when I pushed to get a high performer on my team a raise[0].

As a manager you make your own goals more often than not, but if you do it right it’s similar to how the blog post talks about beating a PR in swimming. My manager PRs are focused on 1) people’s growth, 2) team building, 3) performance improvements, 4) people’s fulfillment in work[1].

Outside of that I also have the metrics I send up the chain, which sometimes hit over longer periods as mentioned, but those aren’t where I get my enjoyment from work.

I think good manager should be focusing a good amount of their time on growing every individual in their team, as well as the overall team with it. Maybe the problem is that this isn’t ever actual taught to new managers in any impactful way. Maybe the problem is that management takes a completely different skill set, but both can be equally as enjoyable.

[0] the best part was after I told her and as she was walking back to her desk she said “I can’t wait to tell my husband I make more than him now”.

[1] as a manager, team member fulfillment sometimes means hyping up something that wasn’t actually that important, or having them brief things to leadership they wouldn’t normally because it would mean something to them, or giving everyone a chance to succeed, etc.. knowing what makes someone happy and making a point to reward them for hard work is the point.

As a programmer I can learn quickly and get better, because I have very quick feedback loops when I do something wrong (compiler, CI/CD, continous deployments).

As a manager, architect etc. the feedback loop is month, years - if you ever really get something back. That makes it really hard to find out if you're really doing a good job or if you're trading short-term gains for long-time losses.

I personally think, this is why we often are so unhappy about managers or architects in our field and developers often look down on them. But it's just really difficult (and often unrewarding, see article) to get good at these roles.

A teacher might be the greatest gift to children, or they could be below average. A school district has no way of knowing. Standardized testing can bring some level of comparison, but to isolate the teacher's contribution would involve testing students every year and tracking their test scores across all teachers they've had. A challenge most school districts don't want to volunteer for.

> I don’t think anyone gets that same high from this role so this is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it’s one of the hardest adaptions to make when transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager.

The usual way to denounce managers as evil is to say they're all about wielding power over others. Wouldn't that be a counterexample? And the usual response to that is that managers are supposed to enjoy clearing roadblocks and getting everyone coordinated and able to be the best they can be; wouldn't that also be a counterexample?

With that context, I think a manager can appreciate the good work they are doing (clearing roadblocks, being a shit umbrella) without getting the same kind of high as you get when you are delivering code.

Another way to think about it is that not every job has to be full of endorphin rushes; coders are just lucky.

And that's one of the best highs I've gotten in technical work: watching people around me grow and excel.

This is a tragically defeatist perspective. I don't want to live on a planet in which the working class are trapped in depressing exploitation.

But I disagree with the lack of accomplishment. Effectively, when moving up in the abstraction levels from code, reaction times get longer and risks higher. Let me tell you, the feeling when you see a team click together and finally raise to the occasion, is no less satisfying, than seeing code work. Even more so. But it takes frickin _years_ and happens much more rarely. I’m currently at a stage where a project I started on almost four years ago, is starting to deliver. And we are talking about a significant improvement on a national level. It feels good, man. It really does.

Oh, and with a manager, there’s the occasional pat on the back when goals are met on the timely basis. But nobody remembers the architect, if they have done their job properly. Thus is the nature of the beast.

But the struggle is real.

Literally your only job is to soak up dissatisfaction with lies and misdirection.

As a person who's had only bad managers (with one exception), this is a signal that I wouldn't want this person to be my manager.

Being a manager shouldn't be about yourself, your focus should be outwards.

I get it, not everyone can be the kind-hearted Samaritan who always thinks of others. But even if you're one of the self-centred majority who thinks the universe revolves around them, keeping your subjects happy is still a requirement if you want them to be productive and motivated over a long period of time. Don't they teach that in Management 101?

Sure. I feel good about being kind to other people, whereas the author's specifically chasing some sort of highs. I don't know where this expectation could have come from, considering managers are almost universally considered to have "more responsibility". More responsibility means more stress and less fun. You'd expect an adult to understand this before moving into management, but alas.

> Second, this requirement doesn't preclude you from thinking of others. Just like a parent doesn't have to hate themselves to love their kids.

To continue your comparison, a parent is expected to think of their kids first. We call that responsibility.

> third, if you expect your managers to never take care of their emotional needs you are only pushing them to burn out.

Nobody said that. But if your emotional need is to get constant highs and you didn't have enough foresight to realise you won't get that in management, I simply don't want you as my manager.

Like I said in my original comment, this blog post is a signal. I could be wrong, but I've seen so many bad managers that my intuition tells me something's off.

Yeah, poor poor lonely managers. They hold a lot of power over other people ("responsibility") and yet we're supposed to be sorry for them. Their burden is so great that they cry on the internet that they're not getting their endorphins.