[nodoodles]

It’s certainly an unpredictable one, never know what new fires the next week brings, or when they set off a chain reaction pushing the whole team to the brink of despair. Being able to have mental boundaries and (this sounds cold) emotional distance helps a lot!

[dasil003]

That's a flippant dismissal of my point. I'm not talking about chaos. I'm talking about truly difficult situations, like the team not having the skills to meet management expectations, or a dysfunctional dynamics where product or finance are making engineering decisions, or Peter-principle cases being promoted into middle management without the maturity and judgement to make good decisions. If you think the biggest challenge to engineering management is compartmentalization, then you haven't faced truly hard problems in an environment with high expectations. These things come on a continuum from easy to impossible, and it's never quite clear where that line is.

[nodoodles]

No dismissal intended! Was agreeing with you on the premise of a barrage of difficult situations (=‘fires’) in the job. The kinds of challenges you list are to be expected and normal business as usual, but imho doesn’t have to make the role more taxing or difficult than any people-facing corporate job with some accountability. It’s luckily not a boring job either (ymmv, boring = unchallenging). Most situations line or middle manager faces have been solved countless times before, and either have reusable playbooks / mental models to start with, or can benefit from applied common sense and creativity. It’s mostly fun.

The point I badly tried to make was around EMs mental state & health - managing emotional coupling creates space, necessary for the EM to find pragmatic solutions, or workarounds for things far beyond control. (Not that occasionally the problems don’t keep me awake at night, but that was also true for technical challenges as an engineer.)