[ebiester]

Here's the part of management that is hard to understand as an IC:

1/3rd of my job is "managing up," that is, getting my boss what they need to get their job done. This can be defining a hiring process, or writing part of a powerpoint deck or getting them the information they need to write it up for their presentation.

1/3rd of my job is "managing across," or working with other managers - the "shit shield" is often from other managers who have their own pain points and are trying to work through issues like whose team has to deal with this ill-defined goal that doesn't really belong in any of the teams but is important. (Or saying that it isn't important after delving into the issue!) Or it's identifying a department-wide problem and working with a small group to have a proposal to solve it.

That leaves 1/3rd of the work on actually "managing down." That is mentoring, performance evaluation, conflict management, 1:1s.

And if your team is hiring, you spend another block on that. Most of us can't work 60 hour weeks consistently.

Are there bad managers? Sure! But some of what makes a good/bad manager is completely hidden. (I'd argue that it's a flaw in our organizational system in general - I'm starting to think we need more people whose job it is to organize the department as a system, and then have the engineering manager as a tech lead++.)

[ChrisCinelli]

I do not call defining a hiring process managing up. Hiring is part of creating a great team and in my own experience can take more than 1/2 of the manager time especially when you are "building a team from scratch" and you cannot delegate things like screening interviews to other people.

Back to the "managing up" I was talking about in my previous comment. I have seen some people spending more than 1/2 of their time on it. The reason I put it in quotes is because sometimes is time spent on getting visibility, becoming "good friends", and even brown-nosing. For any employee it is vital to have a good relationship with their boss in order to maximize her impact and develop influence. But when building camaraderie with her boss becomes the primary activity, it tells you something about the culture that that person is reinforcing and people that is attracting.

There is a difference between aiming to "create an alliance to get things done" and "develop a relationship to get recognized and promoted" Even if the two do not have to be mutual exclusive, the motivation for bad managers is predominantly in latter more than former.

And what is an order of magnitude better for a company? Someone that looks more for having an impact or a person that looks more to their advancement on the corporate ladder?

[allenu]

These are very astute observations and ones that I've seen as well after many years of work in tech. In a sense it's a case of "you get what you measure" where what we're trying to measure is how effective a manager is at deriving and delivering value from a team. However, a lot have found a way to "hack" how this value is communicated to their superiors.

A lot of poor managers I've worked with have a knack for taking work that is actually quite easy and communicating it as very challenging such that they (or their team) receive a lot of credit for it. As you stated in the other post, they may also be good at making their employees feel that there is great value in work that is also fairly trivial or non important. In a micro scale, this looks like a good thing (people are happy), but in a macro scale, it may not actually move the business forward very much.

At the end of the day, it often sadly boils down to "it's not what you did but what people think you did" that matters.

[ChrisCinelli]

That is definitely one of the things I observed some manager doing. Slightly related situation is when an engineer does that and can do it because the manager does not understand at all how the system that is under his responsibility work.

[afarrell]

What about separating the career manager role from the tech lead role. That lets you do things like have the person coaching an IC on how to produce estimates be a different person from the one requesting the estimate.