[nine_zeros]

You are right. Running a business is nuanced and smart people are required for it.

Imo, the real problem is that engineering work is disproportionately difficult compared to management and yet, management gets recognition, visibility and power to control engineer lives. This happens in every step. Engineering interviews are insanely harder than management, engineering promos are opaque and need grinding for years as opposed to management promos in growing companies and these days, senior engineers have to manage politics as well. Engineering managers are not useful in any way but yet, get higher compensation and recognition. Why?

The only manager that engineers like are those who have previously been strong engineers themselves. It's the earned respect that lets people be ok with bosses. Not titles themselves. Certainly not people management or glorified assistants managing spreadsheets for upper levels.

[edmundsauto]

As someone who has switched between management and IC work, I’ve found management to be much, much more difficult to do well. Management should be managing people, which is much harder than managing code.

Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.

[stackbutterflow]

But in fuzzy disciplines like management you're allowed not to do well. Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code. Thus when bad managers demand that you do x by end of the day/week/month they put an insane amount of pressure on you because there's only one way out. You have to crack the code, you must figure the problem out.

Therefore technical people develop a special sort of humility, reminded everyday of their errors by the law of physics, that bad managers who fail forward never do.

[edmundsauto]

> Engineers are fighting with the law of physics. You can't bullshit your way out of a formula or a bug in your code

I mean, structural engineers are fighting physics. Software engineers, generally, are fighting information theory. FWLIW, I spent 15 years as a (quite successful) programmer with a lot of bullshittery going on about what code works. Have you never shipped buggy code and played it down b/c of time constraints or you were just tired or not motivated or realized this bit doesn't actually need to be perfect?

That's actually why I switched to being a people manager - I was a mediocre programmer that people thought was exceptional because I was good at the b.s. I find people management much more difficult to do well, and much more rewarding when growing junior eng into senior eng compared to shipping a bit of code.

[015a]

I think the critical point is: You've done both. I don't know you, but I will go out on a limb and say: having that history as an IC makes you a better EM; one of the good ones I hope.

Great EMs have that experience; and it makes their/your job way harder because now you understand, at a deep enough level, what the people you manage are going through. When product reqs come across the desk of an IC-turned-EM, they can feel that gut punch immediately: "fuck, this is going to be so hard, that system is so legacy, and Sarah is super overloaded right now because she's the only one with any experience on the message bus transformer converter ingester"

Management track EMs actually do have it easier, because they get to think in the discrete world of tickets and human resources.

At a high enough level in any company: senior leadership needs to think about the world as perfectly discrete like that, because there's so much other bullshit going on that worrying about the specifics of the message bus transformer converter ingester would drive them off a cliff. But EMs aren't that. But many, many EMs think like that, and a big part is the incentive structure of their career path; their boss thinks like that, and their boss's boss thinks like that, so if I want to have my boss's boss role one day I need to think like that.

The strawman side of what I'm arguing is: "Well, you're just describing a bad EM". But the whole point is that that's quickly becoming the average in the industry, and that average is starting to define the role. Career-track management who get promotions, then write the hiring reqs for their replacements, and every other EM below them, combined with a massive shortage of engineering talent meaning companies need to define a different bar for their EM hiring reqs anyway.

[abc_lisper]

I have seen many (extremely smart too) engineers cry at work, but never managers. Make of it what you will.

[adra]

People with emotional issues aren't as likely to be promoted into management. Management is often way more stressful as you're getting dumped on from above, from peer managers, and all the negative feedback from devs all at the same time (plus needing to actually facilitate getting things built). Maybe you work at some poor company that can't promote devs high enough so they're forced into some form of management role to get a promotion. Those companies suck because they steal good IC talent for roles they're less suitable/valuable for, and causes the company to have perverse incentives to over bloat their management pool than necessary.

[abc_lisper]

>> People with emotional issues aren't as likely to be promoted into management.

And engineers who don’t invest in their work emotionally are not usually the best

>> Maybe you work at some poor company that can't promote devs high enough so they're forced into some form of management role to get a promotion.

How does this follow from what I said? Also, I have a bit of experience so it’s not one company

[edmundsauto]

I've worked at several big corps and the managers are the ones who take all the stress. I would never ask one of my team (or one of my colleagues) to work to the point where they cried - this is a negative signal.

[nine_zeros]

> Perhaps this is why there are so many bad examples. The job is nearly impossible to do exceptionally well.

I believe that the job is nearly impossible to do well. Which leads a lot of people to suspect that the role of Engineering managers is badly defined. Which leads to all the complaints above. Nobody is happy with the current org structure.

[abc_lisper]

Spot on. The fact that engineers keep having to learn things continuously for years, decades treading through anywhere from technically difficult issues to bad documentation, mostly on their own time for fear of falling behind, while running to honor daily and hourly deadlines and being imaginative, smart and personable at work is insane. Atleast managers get to rely on their experience that adds up while engineers jump through languages frameworks and libraries while attending leet code interviews is crazy. But peasant, get back to work and no quiet quitting for you, and you are a lower form of life is the prevalent attitude among many managers. There are good managers, most of them technical like you said, a smaller portion among them have empathy

[dasil003]

As someone who's spent 25 years straddling the IC/EM line in companies of all sizes, I can tell you unequivocally that management—especially engineering management—is not easier.

I think it's fair so say that gross incompetence is easier to recognize in a programmer than a manager, especially to the untrained eye. It's also true that a well-functioning team may be easy to run and the manager shouldn't have to do much except not fuck it up.

But at any kind of scale, all problems are people problems, and there are never ending systematic dysfunctions and organizational problems. Everyone can be making a valid claim to doing their job, yet the output is nowhere near what it could be. These types of problems can be difficult to diagnose and extremely difficult to unsolvable at the high end. One must be technical enough to understand the details, able to zoom out and understand how costs of various paths interact with UX, operations, security and other concerns, and then say the right things in the right venues to nudge people in the right direction while also maintaining the morale and agency of all the ICs who do the actual work.

It is brutally difficult, and the reason most EMs are bad is not out of malice or sociopathic tendencies (though I will say the emotional toll is high for non-sociopaths which is probably one reason they are disproportionately represented in management and executive leadership).