[thorwawayrus53]

> As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective at doing their work.

Its a lie manager making dev's effective at their job. All a manager needs to do is communicate the requirements properly most preferably in a written document. That is the only useful thing. Everything else like motivating are just BS which has become very clear in the post covid WFH situation.

Now looking back i can feel the needless interference by managers that slowed down the progress of work. The other sad thing is they assume they have power to fire people to some extent which usually junior engineers believe for the first few years.

Before concluding i had a bad manager, let me say i have had over 10 managers in the past 20 years and its not manager's fault its the job that's BS.

[rahimiali]

Let’s say that’s the manager’s only job. But “communicating requirements in a written doc” is serious hard work, the same way “typing code in a text editor” is a lot of work. To do the former requires negotiating with other teams, understanding the limits of the audience, estimating effort, and basically developing a rough sketch of the solution in your head to make sure the request is reasonable.

[thorwawayrus53]

> But “communicating requirements in a written doc” is serious hard work

Precisely. Hence managers delegate this to devs to figure it out themselves and make documentation easy enough for them to understand on a higher level so they can make it look like they understand whats going on. This is what been exposed with WFH.

The important thing that pisses me off is the salary of manager is about 50% higher than IC's. IMO it should not be 70% of IC's salary considering the skills it requires. Manager does not have more responsibility than IC. Manager never takes responsibility for projects failure, its always blamed on IC. Its easy for a manager to get away because usually about 5 IC's will be in a project and one or two failure to deliver features are tolerated. Combine this with attrition its so easy for a manager to not take any responsibility.

[mmcnl]

This is completely the opposite of my expectation. Gathering requirements should not be a manager's task at all, let alone writing them down.