[candybar]

For me a major disconnect here - and this is always the case with management - is that what management means differs greatly from one organization to the next. For instance, I would consider all of those: "how one interacts with product managers, prioritizes features, determines architecture, distills architecture to actual tasks, and guarantees that those tasks get completed in a timely fashion." senior engineering tasks, not engineering management tasks. Of course, line managers often are going to be also senior engineers who do senior engineer things part of the time, so these aren't inappropriate per se, but engineering management, to me, is more about people and organization management. Employee evaluation, hiring, empowering, professional growth, organizational growth, that kind of stuff as opposed to making product/project/engineering decisions, which should primarily be steered towards product management, project management, and/or senior engineers. With that said, at a lot of places - and I think this is what every organization drifts towards if you don't try hard to fight it - engineering managers are expected to manage projects and provide technical leadership, with people management responsibilities merely being used to give engineering managers the stick to perform their primary duties.