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by gardenhedge
977 days ago
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I think you misunderstand the engineering manager position. They've to do things like present to senior stakeholders, manage expectations and handle deadlines, report on team progress, handle the teams budget, report upwards on how the team is doing, individually and as a team, ensure the team has the correct resources, ensure the team isn't blocked, facilitate planning and changes to plans, handling requests from different departments, focusing on continuous process improvement, interviewing, set vision and direction for the team, track and maintain delivery risks, align with others teams, know what other teams are up to, know high level changes across the company. They do all this while having the technical grasp on what the team is delivering and how they are delivering it. If they're jumping into details around Node+js they are likely ignoring something else important. A software engineer's responsibility is to design, build, test, monitor software while an engineering manager's responsibility is to oversee the team, projects, resources and stakeholders. |
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I think much of the frustration comes when a EM ONLY manages upwards with no regards to their direct reports. It creates a situation where the engineers are responsible for implementing decisions and patterns that they had no power over (often repeatedly warned against, to no avail) because that EM is bottlenecking their feedback and selectively reporting up to make themselves look good, sacrificing their team. In companies without skip-step reporting (where direct reports give feedback on the EM to their boss, once a quarter or whatever) this can lead to a death spiral where all the engineers are unhappy with a EM but there's no mechanism to remove them or complain to the higher ups. It just leads to mass dissatisfaction and group resignations, but even then there's no guarantee the EM will be removed if the higher ups don't know it's because of them.
That sort of strict top-down hierarchy just doesn't really work in software dev when the engineers have more technical savvy than their managers, and yet are constantly overruled and silenced in the pursuit of political points.