[somethoughts]

My observation has been that unless you are amazingly charismatic or a force of nature, as an engineering manager much of your value is in your ability to understand your specific companies unspoken intricacies such as:

* who the different personalities are within the specific organization in order to get things done and who's opinion you need to take into account and who you can safely ignore

* who you can escalate to in order to get more resources (perhaps get a email pushed up to the CEO if needed) and who to apologize to if things go bad

* when to let your team self-manage and when you're going to need to assert your opinion

These are all highly specific to an organization.

The two ways to achieve this are through being in the trenches and observing for many years or have the social skills to hack your way in.

As such I think the interview for an engineering manager would be less than straightforward than a standard fizz buzz test.

More importantly if you do somehow pass the gatekeepers to such a job, your ability to actually hack into the new organization in order to keep your job for more than a year becomes a challenge.

[evandale]

I hate this comment because it describes my workplace to a T. It's scary how accurate it is.

So many fragile egos in high authority positions who can't admit they made a terrible decision 3 years ago and are still in denial and doubling down on it.

shudders

[agos]

very accurate. I would humbly add:

* handling the sheer amount of times that somebody says something is going to happen and then the complete opposite happens, because they lied/they didn't have information/they were projecting their desire/they are out of touch with reality

[higeorge13]

I hate this because it’s true and i have seen this multiple times.