[thomasmeeks]

I’ve seen that engineering manager / pm split work like magic before. Usually there’s also an amazing tech lead in there making it work. It’s rocket fuel for the product (assuming market fit, big assumption) and the career growth for the team.

It doesn’t happen often because most companies don’t want to grow their people that much. Consider the frequent HN comment about finding it easier to get a promotion/raise by finding a new job.

That outcome usually comes from some carefully crafted policies at the company level. Stack ranking is an example, though it is more popular recently to talk about in terms of bell curves (of 4-7 people, hah). Caps on raises, onerous documentation processes, and explicit and implicit limits on the number of promotions a manager can request at a time are all popular. There’s a lot of creativity going into crafting policies that limit career growth without saying they are limiting career growth.

Managers that care about people eventually figure this game out, realize how career limiting it is to push too hard on it, and either leave management or switch to caring about org/product stuff more. This has been consistent in my unscientific study of a dozen friends.

That said, I agree with you. I’d like to see that experiment done with a lot of intentionality and care.