Good Engineering Managers Just "Don't Exist"

hype7 writes "Here's a provocative article; the VP of engineering of a Sequoia-backed startup in Silicon Valley makes the case that good engineering managers aren't just hard to find — that they basically don't exist. The crux of his argument? The best engineers get all the benefits of being leaders, but without needing to take on the rather painful duties of management. So they choose not to move up. Compare this to the engineers who aren't as strong, and use the opportunity to move up as a way to get their voice heard."

Comments

they exist but do not have titles?

[Anonymous Coward]

So... the good engineering managers are leading by example and managing through informal means. They are out there but since they do not have titles they do not exist. Only a manager would think like this.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[ackthpt]

Go back about 40 years ago, before CEOs gathered obscene salaries, bonuses, etc for doing sweet fanny adams, and you had generations of managers who rose up through the ranks and knew the work of their associates, as they once had done it themselves. They were gradually replaced by career managers who knew nothing about what the engineer was doing, but how to play the management game and crawl up the ladder. IMHO this is why so many companies are in such trouble all the time, they are run by people who do not understand what is actually going on.

There's a saying: Those who can't do, teach.

My variation on this is: Those who can't do, teach, but those who can't teach manage.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[James-NSC]

I'll second that observation. Ever since "manager" has become a career option in and of itself, it's attracted "those who can't do anything else and who don't produce anything of value". Prior to that being a self serving career path, managers were people who worked their way up the ranks and carried with them both the experience of being "worker bees" and the knowledge of what the pain points of the bees were. Once they became management, upper management benefited from their experience of being a worker, and the workers benefited from their experience of being "one of them" - everybody won. These days, you have managers (we have one where I work) who have never done anything else and as a result, bring absolutely nothing to the table.

Re:they exist but do not have titles?

[CrankyFool]

That probably came across somewhat cranky, but is entirely accurate.

I'm an engineering manager. Until a year ago, I was an engineer. I'm a decent engineer, though prone to quick-and-dirty hacks sometimes to solve problems rather than good long-term design. I got promoted to managing an infrastructure software engineering group (after the engineers in that group gave me the thumbs up) and in my first one-on-one meeting with each of my engineers I asked them "so what would you like me to be doing around here?"

And you know ... yes. It turns out that if meetings need to be attended, and we have a choice between a world-class engineer attending them and a manager attending them and then passing back whatever relevant information engineers want to know, my engineers seem to prefer that I attend those meetings (sometimes. Sometimes they just call their own meetings if they think they need to).

Generally, I consider my job to be "the stuff we need to do the engineers don't want to do" (e.g. recruiting). And I get paid less than about half my engineers (and I think my salary's a little below median for my group). Which is fair -- their impact on the organization is higher than mine.

Re: they exist but do not have titles?

[malloci]

I too work at a place where my management is promoted from the ranks of geeks. The problem? Geeks often don't make good managers. People skills are often lacking; they try to maintain that role of geek (which they were great at) and fail at the additional duties of managing.

I'm not saying it can't be done, and i agree that Having a manager that understands technical details can be great. Having one that understands how to really manage people is 100x more useful.

It's personality

[docwatson223]

The best engineers I've met in 20 years can't deal with people or their problems. The best managers I've met have enough engineering to know what's going on and when to get out of the way.

Re:I know one

[Trepidity]

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.