[RandomUser4567]

I’m a technical EM, hopefully a good one, and I think having the skills and experience helps me a lot. That said, I’ve never tried to actually code something that went into production. That feels like a line I should only cross if it’s something arbitrary and random.

This felt uncomfortable at first, but having a strong dependency on the engineers (by not having a working development environment, really digging into the coding-specific things, or giving actual PR reviews, etc.) has actually really helped me not venture too close to what the engineers are doing. So even as a technical manager, I stay the fuck away. I get signal through other engineers. Most engineers won’t tolerate shitty code, so this works fine.

It forces me to rely and trust them for all of those things, which I think creates the symbiotic relationship between EM and IC. Any EM who does not embrace the idea of their engineers being better than them and does not think their success is directly tied to their engineers’ success is a shit EM. I read so many stories about shitty EMs on this site and it makes me sad for my craft.