[mancerayder]

I'm an engineering manager (EDIT - not at Amazon or at a very large firm), and I do 10,000 bazillion things a day, usually involving fixing lousy project management, setting processes so random people on the team don't get slammed by random external demands, guiding people's careers, talking people off the ledge / therapy, matching people's skills and interests to the projects and work, creating other teams to run ops so engineers can engineer, talk to senior management in a way they need to hear to protect the people below from nonsense, proving to the people above that I need headcount (and then creating a hiring process), helping people below being new managers, helping junior people learn, and interacting with clients and business people so the engineers are protected from it.

Whenever I try to funnel some of these tasks to the senior engineers, almost all push back because it's not engineering.

But after reading this thread, I'm actually completely useless, and engineers should do better without me.

To that I laugh, and cry in frustration at the same time. Go at it.

As an engineer your new boss is a project manager from another org, senior group leaders from other groups, and generally the loudest yeller who's waiting on you. Have fun managing that.

[apple4ever]

You really nailed it. Most don't realize all the work that goes into being a manager.

Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.

[kirso]

Don't take it too harshly, most of HN would build facebook in a weekend and exit for billions. And usually they only see their circle of influence without actually trying to be a manager in a first place to understand what does it take.

Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...