[gamesbrainiac]

> Engineering managers at CircleCI are now dedicated to people management: focused on development of a set of engineers, tech leads, and team leads. They hold regular 1:1s and career growth conversations with the engineers who report to them, and are responsible for goal setting, feedback, coaching, and mentoring for them.

Do you really need this? Developers will have their own set of mentors, coaches as well as people in their network that will help them grow if they are interested in remaining relevant. Why one earth, would you spend so much money on EMs when developers should be given time to think about what they want to do themselves.

The title should be changed to engineering nannies. Furthermore, having non-engineers as engineering managers _can_ work, but it can be a risky move if the person in question does not have enough respect and empathy for the work an engineer does.

It saddens me to see the continued emphasis on hierarchy throughout the industry. Best way to support an engineer is to give him or her a fixed budget for development, and time to actually learn new things and not have their skills stagnate.

I think we need to go back to team leads having hiring and firing power. At the end of the day, they code and are down in the trenches with the rest of the engineers.

[tomnipotent]

> Developers will have their own set of mentors, coaches as well as people in their network that will help them grow

Not true, probably for a majority of people. Alumni networks and family connections are not the norm. A support network and feedback is not something everyone is privileged to, which is probably why so many companies eventually create roles like this.

> Best way to support an engineer is to give him or her a fixed budget for development, and time to actually learn new things and not have their skills stagnate.

Is there any proof of this? Every Fortune 500 company and a vast majority of successfully-executed projects beg to differ.

> It saddens me to see the continued emphasis on hierarchy throughout the industry

Because by-and-large it works? For every Valve there are countless shuttered "unstructured" companies that floundered due to bad management and lack of ownership.

[gamesbrainiac]

> Not true, probably for a majority of people. Alumni networks and family connections are not the norm.

Networks don't magically appear, you need to work on building them.

> Is there any proof of this? Every Fortune 500 company and a vast majority of successfully-executed projects beg to differ.

I don't have any proof other than my own experience. As to your second sentence, what on earth are you talking about?

> Because by-and-large it works? For every Valve there are countless shuttered "unstructured" companies that floundered due to bad management and lack of ownership.

There is no problem with structure. You already have it with architects, leads, principals and others. The problem is too much bureaucracy.

[tomnipotent]

> Networks don't magically appear, you need to work on building them.

It would seem that people in technical fields often have problems with this kind of skill, and need help to improve it. Fortunately we have these things called jobs where we have this great opportunity to be exposed to people like that.

> As to your second sentence, what on earth are you talking about?

On why structured hierarchies are successful.

> You already have it with architects, leads, principals and others

These roles don't make business happen top-down. They'll be kind of useless in a room without someone driving vision and direction and, you know, deciding what's good business and watching cash flow.

> The problem is too much bureaucracy.

Says every engineer that's never been a manager. Like it or not, bureaucracy is the natural friction that occurs from competing priorities and limited resources, and no amount of smart "self-starter" engineers is going to change that. How do we know this? Point out the number of successful companies based on either approach. We like to call this empirical evidence.

[gamesbrainiac]

> Says every engineer that's never been a manager.

I do own my own company though, and have hired 5 people so far. Its not a lot, but I have managed people in the past as well. Do not assume things about people.