alt Hacker News> It’s a bad time to move away from tech
It continues to amaze me that becoming a manager of anything should mean moving away from it. The manager has to move away from the detail, but why should they move from the substance of the role. A legal partner has to stay up to date as much their staff, in fact a legal partner is often the only one who can answer complex questions. When I need complex advice on my statutory accounts I get referred to the Audit Partner, the most senior manager.
The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff.
So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech? Isn't this just a sign of disfunction in those organisations rather than anything about the role. Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?
And what do these managers even do if they have moved away from tech? Approve holidays and expenses? My personal theory is that in these kind of organisations a manager is the person who is better with PowerPoint than the other people!
Replies
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession
I don't think that you can take somebody with a finance background, take them straight out of their MBA, and drop them in an EM position. That's a bad fit. Good EMs need to come from software engineering backgrounds, mostly for the reasons you cite.
But management truly is a different profession with a different set of skills and a different set of challenges.
Even on the IC track, there's languages and frameworks that I touched early in my career (e.g. Java/Spring) and haven't touched in, I don't know, a decade, and I have not been keeping up with whatever is most recent best practice there. If I were to go into an IC role for one of those frameworks, I might as well be going into an IC role for a language I haven't learned before, ever. I expect someone who has been working with that language on a daily basis to really, really know it - having the standard library practically memorized, knowing common pitfalls, doing a lot of stuff from muscle memory, someone who you give them a PR that "looks OK" and they start reading and immediately can say "well that's just not even remotely idiomatic".
EMs are almost guaranteed to lose that touch because their day job is talking to people, not writing code. That's not to say that they couldn't go back to the IC track and start to sharpen those skills again, but EMs with FOMO who try to stay in the code are spending that time not talking to people. The lack of focus makes them bad EMs.
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'?
Yes I believe so. At uni i see soooo many people who are in software to make a startup (before even knowing how to code) and make a quick buck instead of being good programmers
The best managers can still do the work part, that much is obvious. Not necessarily being the best in the team but offering the best project-level advice because the manager has enough skill combined with being the only one in the team dedicating thinking cycles "to the whole picture". But that only works well if you have the buy-in skill level that needs to be kept sharp.
> The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a beam size, he is better at it than his staff. So why in software should an engineering manager move away from tech...
Because a manager at a structural engineering company is essentially acting as the equivalent of what a Product Manager or Forward Deployed Engineer is in the tech industry, because they are expected to be a technical domain expert and own delivery.
Meanwhile, for most software companies the underlying codebase isn't want generates revenue - it's the codification of business logic that does. Additionally, companies tend to have a separate Princiapl Eng to Distinguished Engineer/Architect track that outranks EMs and is in direct contact with leadership.
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession, rather than being 'a higher level thinker than the others'
Most Engineering Managers and Beancounters aren't MBAs - no company wants to sponsor an employee at a PTMBA which can cost upwards of $250K now.
It's because the software EM function in tech companies doesn't have parallels to managers in other professions.
The technical decisions are made by the high-level SWEs. The product decision and customer-facing work is done by the PMs. The EM role only exists to hire, evaluate, promote, and fire SWEs. It's very light on the "engineering" and very heavy on the "manager". It's almost an HR-type role.
In my career, all my EMs who weren't recently internally promoted couldn't read the programming language that their team writes in. Some of them have good system design skills but they eventually atrophy from disuse. It's very much a role where you hang up the cleats.
The root cause is that other professions didn't bifurcate technical leadership and people management into separate streams. The partner lawyer or civil EM is the seniormost technical person on the team. Often the software EM is the least technical person on the team.
BTW there are countries (like China) that don't follow this model. Meaning, the only way to get promoted above a mid-level SWE is to become an EM. There is no parallel IC track, i.e. no "senior staff", "principal" or "distinguished" engineers. Just young ICs and older EMs.