Since I became an engineering manager myself, I find myself looking back with more sympathy to my past managers. Engineers are difficult people to manage.
- approval of your manager
- approval of your engineers
- approval of your customers on things your team has delivered
- correcting course set by upper-management
- communicating high-level directions to engineers
- communicating and getting action on issues raised by engineers to higher-ups
- levelling up your engineers and team
- likeliness of promotion in title or compensation
- anything else important that I didn't list
Other than putting promotion/compensation as high as it should go, was there any discomfort/doubt in trying to be honest with any of the items?
My experience is different: engineers are quite comfortable to manage. What makes management hard is the whole (office) politics with respect to your management career and the managers above you.
This is absolute bullshit. After being an IC, a tech lead and an engineering manager I can tell you that the one thing is engineers mainly want to be left alone to do their jobs. The job as manager is to stop the pressure from everyone in the company demanding they do everything more quickly to meet some arbitrary bullshit deadline. This attitude infuriates me. Its weak managers who dont know what they are doing that end up blaming their subordinates. So sick of this attitude.
I’ve managed teams where the devs just wanted to be left alone to build things and they were skilled enough to manage their own career growth, which made my job as a manager very easy.
I’ve also managed teams where, before I took over, the devs had consistently been lied to by the organization leadership, hadn’t been given the work that would grow their skills and confidence, and needed constant coaching and a platform to vent. This team didn’t want to “be left alone to do their job”. This was a very hard management job.
Your comment suggests that you’ve only experienced the first case of being a manager, which may be why you strongly disagree with the other comment.
This is an atrocious blanket judgement if i ever saw one. And was quite rightly called out for it. I too have argued elsewhere that most Managers are only too eager to blame the Engineers when they themselves are clueless/incompetent.
All the negative tropes like a) Engineers are socially inept b) Engineers are difficult c) Engineers do not understand Business etc. etc. need to die. For too long has "Management" ascribed to themselves all the virtues/wisdom of Business and treated "Engineering" as "Simple Workers" who need to be "Managed".
Maybe I should have clarified. Engineers are difficult to manage (in my experience) because they're smart and have leverage in their role; it's not a simple manager -> worker-bee relationship. It's nothing negative.
Missing that point that it's not a simple worker-bee relationship and doing it is the job of the manager, not a fact about engineers.
What the manager should be doing is aligning the direction of higher-ups and developers. This takes being able to clearly understand and communicate interests and needs two-ways.
As an IC I've always been vocal about the technical needs of product or platform development as it grows and expands capabilities. There's no chance higher-ups would know these things without being exposed to situations as they develop. At the same time I have to learn about the longer-term product direction and how to sequence development, and in particular research that can uncover the unknown unknowns heading in that direction. I'm lucky to have access to information and background that lets me make good guesses. This is the kind of process that the manager should be creating and refining.
The problem is that too many 'technical' managers behave as middle managers, merely allocating developers to teams by skillset (or worse title Sr/Jr Frontend/Backend) to projects picked by product managers and let project managers try to make it work. Instead of remembering all those times as an engineer that a timely refactor would have saved the company so much money and pain and getting key ones 'in the books', they take the easy route agreeing with the hand that feeds and only aim to satisfy one side's requirements without trying to fully understand the other's.
Right; more akin to "Herding Cats" :-). But that's what allows each of them to display their aptitude and brilliance their own way. A light touch is the magic recipe. If you look at exceptional Engineers, almost always they were not obedient/yes-men but their own masters and their Managers had the good sense to allow them the freedom to do their own thing within very loose bounds.
When the cats are truly technically qualified and naturally self-productive, the only way to herd them is by a leader whom is more so.
Otherwise the team will never come close to benefitting from very much of the whole members' combined abilities.
Outstanding qualifications and productivity will find a way to be successful even with a bozo executive, and it will be OK for shareholders, some may even think it's the best thing they've ever seen.
Little did they know the possibilities that could have been if there was a leader who could have actually herded the valued cats into the happy pastures where they could really spread out.
Well, that does make engineers difficult to manage. But more importantly, engineers don't need that much management. They need managers to take all the organisational stuff out of the way, and make the way clear for engineers to do their thing. Make sure they have access to the requirements, feedback from users, and whatever else the engineers say they need. Do check if things are running smoothly and in the right direction, but if something is broken, give the engineers the tools to fix it, because that's what they do.
> engineers mainly want to be left alone to do their jobs
Sounds like a happy path but what happens when things go wrong?
If all engineers needed to do their jobs was for someone to leave them alone and let them do what they wanted there wouldn't really be a need for managers.
That is precisely the point. Leave them alone to do their job but with an eye on the progress/results and if they seem to be straying, nudge them back onto the path. Do not micromanage; any exceptions have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Delegate responsibility, Clarify deliverables, Request regular progress reports but at the same time give them the Freedom and Autonomy to do their job their own way.