[HN Gopher] Don't become an engineering manager
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Don't become an engineering manager
Author : flail
Score : 269 points
Date : 2026-03-03 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.manager.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.manager.dev)
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| The document is comparing salaries of staff engineers, and EM's.
| In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then EM
| positions.
| makapuf wrote:
| sure, as long as we're talking about 110 to 170k$ non-managing,
| technical roles in EU, I'd like to see a full eclipse soon
| (both exist but I think the latter could be easier to find)
| alephnerd wrote:
| > In my experience staff engineer positions are even rarer then
| EM positions.
|
| Where do you work?!? If you are in Western Europe then the
| blogpost is irrelevant for you. The Western European market is
| weird.
| DDerTyp wrote:
| Can you elaborate more about this? Why is it irrelevant in
| Western Europe?
| ZitchDog wrote:
| Saying that becoming an EM is "moving away from tech" is crazy.
| As an EM you will be steeped in tech, just as you would be as an
| IC. It just may not be the tech you want to be steeped in. Again,
| same as an IC. In either case, unless you are working in AI, you
| will need to "play" with things like OpenClaw in your spare time.
|
| The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI makes
| our jobs 10x harder.
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| > The real reason not to become an EM in 2026 is because AI
| makes our jobs 10x harder.
|
| This is true, but our job was getting kind of boring anyway.
| Time to lead, not manage. We should be having just as much fun
| as the ICs, and the best I know are having the time of their
| lives.
| halper wrote:
| I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in
| particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a
| "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so
| much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself
| have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been
| able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more
| responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff
| engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with
| titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is
| so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have
| worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging
| from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Main distinction I tend to see is just whether you're doing
| line management or not, which tends to be the EM track
|
| Beyond that, agree it seems like it can just be anything in
| virtually any title
| qsort wrote:
| Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly
| all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager
| track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's
| not absurd on its face.
| simonw wrote:
| One thing that's worth remembering is that companies -
| especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare
| salary levels with each other.
|
| If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for
| raises for your team members one of the tools you have
| available is usually an anonymized survey of similar
| compensation levels from other companies.
|
| You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is
| being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other
| companies nearby - we should bump them up".
|
| Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but
| there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map
| them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of
| comparisons useful.
|
| I don't know how this works in other industries or countries,
| but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area
| tech companies.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each
| other.
|
| small companies typically go the other way, using titles to
| make up for concrete remuneration. This is why everyone in a
| startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a
| couple of years.
| jghn wrote:
| This brings back memories of the candidate who demanded
| coming in as a high level engineer. Their argument was they
| were currently a CTO. Of their 2 person company. While they
| were still in college. And they were only borderline
| hireable for our entry level role.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb
| the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
|
| Another thing I've noticed happening is that if these
| companies grow into medium sized companies, these OG
| employees _actually become_ VPs and directors whether they
| are qualified for these roles or not. Just by virtue of
| them being there first. I 've worked at enough medium sized
| companies and have seen this at every one of them: "Why is
| this moron SVP of engineering?" "Well, he was employee
| number 5 back in the day."
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined.
| In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence
| decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't
| visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support,
| evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.
| nixon_why69 wrote:
| Maximally cynical take, tongue somewhat in cheek:
|
| If we measure principal engineers by "cross team force
| multiplier impact and its visibility to management" (second
| part being key), what kind of behaviors do we incentivize?
| Are there, possibly, bunches of mid-level and senior
| engineers dealing with extra hassles to demonstrate this
| impact?
| nyeah wrote:
| Yeah. "You already know what a title is, Neo. A title is a text
| field attached to a pay grade."
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you
| are, professionally. The value is much more between
| organizations than within a single one.
|
| If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much
| less important. You have a chance to figure out how things
| 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior
| architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company,
| but his actual on-paper title is something like "project
| technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going
| to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing
| metis.
|
| I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is
| important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is
| "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym
| notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of
| competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and
| what you probably would get better value for money paying
| someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability
| management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on
| our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of
| thing I can do well. Etc., etc.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| metis?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Titles mean even less across organizations. Any interviewer
| worth their salt is going to hire you and level you based on
| how they ascertain the level of scope , impact and dealing
| with ambiguity you dealt with.
|
| You can be a "CTO" of your little 5 person company - you
| might be leveled as an mid level software engineer at BigTech
| gorbachev wrote:
| My employer has no formal titles for engineers pretty much for
| this reason.
| Muromec wrote:
| >are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior",
| "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much
| overlap that it really depends on the organisation
|
| Titles at least useful to understand the hierarchy, but roles
| truly mean nothing. Sometimes the adult in the room is a PO,
| sometimes it's EM, sometimes they are responsible for the
| timelines and "project stuff", sometimes it's a Senior
| Engineer. In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff.
| jghn wrote:
| Outside of the FAANG style companies where how their levels map
| to each other are well known, titles are only useful to compare
| within the same company. You can't compare a specific title
| between two companies as they may not even have the same
| hierarchy much less requirements & expectations.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| Titles for ICs matter for two reasons: comp, and perf reviews.
| At bigger companies the amount of RSUs for Staff versus Senior
| can be substantial. At a startup where equity is worth nothing
| and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a
| difference.
|
| For perf reviews your title dictates the rubric you get
| evaluated against, but in fact your manager is probably trying
| to fit a curve and then work backwards to the rubric. So
| they'll decide you're a 3/4 and then pick some boxes for your
| weakest areas to mark you down in. The realpolitik of it is
| that you can do the same work or more at a lower level but get
| paid less, depending on what you negotiate coming in, your
| experience, previous roles, etc.
|
| Once you get into VP, Director, and C level they are comparable
| between orgs on their own kind of ladder. There's levels of
| responsibility for outcomes associated with being higher in the
| food chain. Not to say there also isn't a political aspect, but
| they are broadly comparable between bigger orgs.
| cj wrote:
| > At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are
| in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference.
|
| It doesn't make a big difference to the company, but a lot of
| employees want these titles for ego / resume / status /
| recognition. And titles are free for startups to give away,
| so many do.
| jghn wrote:
| They matter within a company for the reasons you cite. They
| mostly don't matter between companies however.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| Why do you think that? Senior, staff, principle levels are
| pretty standard across the industry, even if some companies
| call them different things
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I'm guessing you've only worked at very large companies,
| specifically tech companies then?
|
| I've worked at pretty much every size company
| imaginable.As the top post pointed out, these titles are
| meaningless across smaller companies. I've been at
| startups where nobody had titles at all, I've small
| companies where anyone remotely senior as a principal.
| I've also worked at large non-tech companies with only 3
| levels for IC, after that you were expected to transition
| to management.
|
| Large, tech companies have some degree they can be
| compared but what these titles mean from company to
| company is pretty meaningless.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This is definitely not true. It's all dependent on the
| company size.
|
| I work in cloud consulting (specialize in app dev).
|
| I worked at AWS ProServe (full blue badge RSU earning
| employee) before working for a much smaller company. I've
| seen the leveling guidelines for both.
|
| An L5 (mid level) at AWS had to be a subject matter
| expert in at least one area (development, DevOps,
| security, etc) and be able to lead a "workstream" of a
| larger project including dealing with a customer or a
| smaller project by themselves. That maps to a "Senior
| Architect" at my current company.
|
| A senior (L6) at AWS should be able to handle larger
| projects with multiple workstreams and deal with more
| ambiguity. That maps to a staff at my current company
| (current position)
|
| An L7 is usually over a practice and/or handling multiple
| large implementations and more involved with strategy.
| Imagine someone (who hypothetically - they don't need
| outside consultants) was working with Netflix.
|
| That maps to a "Senior Staff" at our company.
|
| You might ask what about lower levels in consulting? I
| never work with them. The bilingual cloud
| architects/senior cloud architects work with them. We
| don't hire anything lower than that in the US.
| jghn wrote:
| They're somewhat standardized in Big Tech in that people
| have worked out how to map titles across these companies.
| But that accounts for a very small fraction of the total
| industry.
| adamwk wrote:
| You don't think companies look at your past titles when you
| apply for a job?
| jghn wrote:
| They may, but the amount of information they're getting
| is low.
|
| As a hiring manager I'll look at progression of titles
| *within a company*. This shows a track record of upward
| mobility. But if they go from "senior" in one company to
| "principal" in another, I find it meaningless.
| rvz wrote:
| > As a hiring manager I'll look at progression of titles
| _within a company_. This shows a track record of upward
| mobility.
|
| That's quite shallow for those who are 'Member of
| Technical Staff' which does not have this which is why
| titles are meaningless for experienced candidates.
|
| Someone can give themselves that title, all because they
| know the founders; thus it can be exploited.
|
| So instead, I get the candidate to exactly explain to me
| what did they _actually_ build / do and how much money
| did they make / save the organization and it _must_ be in
| the millions to qualify or did they build side-projects
| that contributed to this or not.
|
| In this era, "titles" aren't enough and you need
| verifiable proof of work with monetary returns in the
| millions and I favour those who just build things that
| make money without asking permission from a manager.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Personally, I don't give two shits about my title. If I could
| just be "computer programmer", I'd be happy. But the org likes
| titles and as long as I have to play that stupid game, I try to
| get titles.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Same for "programmer", "software developer", "software
| engineer", and so on. People insist that there's a real
| difference even when I have been all those things and there was
| no difference.
| pkaler wrote:
| As others have said, levels and titles are generally for
| compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their
| own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to: -
| L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with
| graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate
| - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff -
| L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow
|
| Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally
| progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up
| the ladder.
|
| L5 or Senior is usually considered a "terminal" role. That
| means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And
| people without the headroom get managed out if they can't get
| to L5.
|
| Staff+ is usually "special". It means that people count on you
| to drive initiatives and you have something special other than
| just writing code. You are able to make product and business
| impact.
|
| Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies
| will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you've
| made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB
| or Kubernetes.
| madhadron wrote:
| You're describing a very small number of companies that all
| copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for
| example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general
| across the industry except where managers from those small
| number of companies came in and shoved them in before they
| were fired.
| digitalPhonix wrote:
| Amazon had the concept of terminal role (SDE2, but I've
| heard it has changed) long before facebook existed.
| sgillen wrote:
| In my experience a _lot_ of tech companies, at least in the
| Bay Area, have all copied this system.
| seangrogg wrote:
| In all fairness, a LOT of this was copied over from the
| military. From ranks to "High Year Tenure" (aka "Up or
| Out") nothing here is particularly innovative.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| I believe L5 was Google's terminal role at one point (over
| a decade ago) - not sure if it's changed since then.
| vkou wrote:
| It became L4 ~5-7 years ago, but who knows these days.
| palata wrote:
| > Each company has their own numbers and names but it
| generally progresses like that.
|
| But the big difference, I believe, is that being at the top
| of a ladder in one company may be completely different from
| being at the top in another one.
|
| It's easy to be the CTO of a company of 2, much harder for
| BigTech. Even if the company of 2 has the same levels.
|
| I have met people being very very proud of their title of
| CTO, and when I asked, their company had a handful of
| developers.
| rcarr wrote:
| This does remind me somewhat of military command structures
| with L1-L5 being enlisted ranks and L6-L10 either being NCO
| or Commissioned depending on your view of how much
| gatekeeping is involved.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Western militaries have a parallel commissioned officer and
| enlisted command structure where an O1 (junior officer) is
| technically senior to an E9 (senior enlisted NCO) and can
| order them around.
|
| The idea is that command requires a separate set of skills
| and that experience needs to start early to have senior
| officers in their 50s.
|
| In practice, junior officers are "advised" by senior
| enlisted on how to order people around and not taking that
| advice is a bad idea.
|
| Kind of like how companies have managers and technical
| tracks where a line manager ignoring a senior technical
| person always blows up in their face.
| locusofself wrote:
| At Microsoft I would map your L6 to Principal, and L7/L8 to
| what we call "Partner". I'm a Principal, but I'm definitely
| not an 8 out of 10 yet.
| Balgair wrote:
| Rant:
|
| I was a systems engineer for a while there.
|
| But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and
| bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was
| the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one
| too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades.
|
| But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer
| too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess.
|
| But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was
| near impossible on any job site.
|
| Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job
| too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems.
| Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests.
|
| And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword
| threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry
| level role through.
|
| Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer,
| or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more
| specific and not bleeding all over my discipline?
|
| Okay, whew, rant over
| convolvatron wrote:
| this is not at all restricted to your case. try 'distributed
| system engineer' or even 'software engineer'. for the latter,
| one is an engineer of software, and the other is one that
| engineers with software. both perfectly valid jobs. it
| doesn't help that the interviews for the latter adopt the
| questions and expectations of the former, even though they
| are different jobs.
|
| its entirely possible to go through the software engineer
| hiring pipeline, and end up in a situation where the
| organization and the new employee have a fundamental
| disagreement about the slate of work.
|
| somehow in the giant waterfall of money, our ability to even
| talk meaningfully about our work to each other got lost
| Aurornis wrote:
| > that it really depends on the organisation.
|
| This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered
| within an organization, but they are not portable from one
| organization to another.
|
| This is a lesson I've had to explain over and over to people at
| the beginning of their careers. I've been asked for advice
| about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving
| 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another
| company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think
| that's important.
|
| When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is
| coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their
| leveling system is publicly known.
|
| I've interviewed so many "Prinicpal Staff Engineers" or even
| "CTO" people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an
| average company. I've also interviewed "Senior Software
| Engineers" who had more experience than knowledge than anyone
| on our teams (and that's saying a lot!)
|
| Hiring managers know this, but it's not obvious if you haven't
| done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| 100%
|
| This is complicated during acquisitions... you have a new
| company coming in and leveling them is hard because it's a
| mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-
| titled.
|
| In the 2 examples I've seen gone wrong:
|
| -the people at the parent company look at the acquisition's
| team and think, "there's no way this idiot should be a
| director."
|
| -the people at the startup think they're geniuses because
| they got acquired but their tech is crap and they're actually
| just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision
|
| -the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed
| out for being lousy
|
| -the tech gets even more unstable because no one left knows
| how the code works
| nradov wrote:
| In pretty much any software startup acquisition by a much
| larger company, even if they do technical due diligence up
| front they have to assume that all the code will need to be
| rewritten within a couple years. It's good to keep a few
| key technical resources around during the transition period
| but otherwise a high attrition level is acceptable.
| democracy wrote:
| >> I've interviewed so many "Prinicpal Staff Engineers" or
| even "CTO" people who would barely qualify as senior
| engineers at an average company
|
| Failed to design Quantum Lattice Bloom Cascade algorithm in 5
| minutes?
| Aurornis wrote:
| More like: Couldn't cite anything they accomplished and had
| no real responsibilities.
|
| For a good interviewer these people are obvious even
| without any coding tests.
| Swizec wrote:
| > When hiring, titles are basically ignored
|
| As a hiring manager, this is completely accurate. I don't
| look at your title, I look at your _scope_. Tell me what you
| did, for whom, and what was the impact. That 's all I care
| about.
|
| We all know that Senior Principal Architect Engineer at
| 3-person startup is somewhere around junior to mid-level at a
| real company. Whereas some poor schmuck at a larger company
| with a title like "Senior Engineer I" probably owns and runs
| more impressive systems and works with more stakeholders than
| that 3-person startup will see in a year.
| democracy wrote:
| Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way
| around.
|
| Maybe. That's why you need to put your scope on the
| resume :)
|
| I had a CTO title 15 years ago. The complexity of what we
| were building was a joke compared to what I own now as a
| lowly "tech lead manager". And in fact back then I
| wouldn't even be able to comprehend how complex things
| can get.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| That may be your anecdote but CTO at a 30-50 person scale
| up would typically have much more
| management/accounting/signature/high-stake
| conversation/... experience than a senior developer at
| google.
| Swizec wrote:
| Yes. Which is why it's important to put scope on your
| resume.
|
| I can't know you ran a 30 person scale up unless you tell
| me. It doesn't have to be in those words exactly, usually
| it's tied to ARR or rounds raised or something you can
| easily talk about that translates across companies.
|
| I've seen resumes with titles like "Lead Engineer" who
| under that title put something like "Hired 45+ people to
| run <huge systems> at <company you've heard of>". That
| person has more scope than the 30-people CTO in your
| example :)
|
| PS: 30 people isn't even that many for a whole company.
| That's a Series A startup with early signs of product-
| market-fit. It's common to see a ratio of 10 employees
| for every 1 engineer in the company.
| Retric wrote:
| When you swap between 9 hats, you don't get meaningful
| experience at any of those roles.
|
| Instead you become a generalist which is only really
| needed at tiny organizations.
| ozim wrote:
| Big organizations need generalists too.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| But that's nothing to do with the comparison he made,
| which was "at 3-person startup"
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Well, what do you even mean by "put your scope on the
| resume"? Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each
| occupation? Or do you mean something more implicit?
| Swizec wrote:
| > Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each
| occupation?
|
| No I mean
|
| > Tell me what you did, for whom, what was the impact.
|
| It's really that simple. Just tell me what you did at
| your job. What was it that you worked on. Why did it
| matter. Did you own a workstream (or 5), code monkey all
| day, own a critical service, play code janitor, ... what
| did you _do_?
| array_key_first wrote:
| There's a lot of cogs at big companies, but the impact of
| the entire company is huge. Startups usually have small
| impact. Usually at these big companies there's quite a
| few atlases holding the entire world up.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Sure also in big companies there are plenty of places for
| low performers to survive by owning some very small and
| rigid scope that doesn't require any real end-to-end
| thinking.
|
| In my experience distribution of engineer quality is even
| across companies, countries, ages and any other dimension
| we can come up. Certain big scale skills can really only
| be practiced at honed at large tech companies, but it's
| always a small minority that actually make those things
| happen. Resume alone can be an extremely misleading
| signal.
| hbarka wrote:
| You have it backwards. As a hiring manager with so much
| power to affect someone's future, please deliberate beyond
| that.
| stego-tech wrote:
| This is why I align on comp ranges rather than title. I've
| been a "Lead" where all I contributed was a new imaging
| pipeline and introducing NAT to the product line, a "Manager"
| of a failing company where I had no managerial authority or
| direct reports, and a "Senior" at a SV firm where I actually
| behaved a level above a Senior Engineer - owning outcomes,
| doing research, mentoring juniors, building relationships
| across silos, governance councils, etc.
|
| Titles are fungible, but your comp isn't. Don't let a company
| sell you on a better title for less comp, especially when the
| JD or role doesn't align with the title; the next place won't
| give a shit what your title was if all you did was Junior-
| level work because you bought into someone else's narrative
| rather than control your own.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've worked with several "Directors" that all had between 0
| and 3 reports. Vanity titles make people feel good and look
| nice on a resume, but that's about it.
| Zaheer wrote:
| This is exactly why we built https://www.levels.fyi
|
| Too often people were getting down-leveled because they didn't
| know any better. The level comparisons we show on the homepage
| compare scope and responsibilities. People frequently think
| levels are based on compensation but compensation is the
| byproduct of it.
| bigwheels wrote:
| It's an artifact of humans being obsessed with hierarchy and
| pecking order.
|
| Overall rather petty and boring.
| re-thc wrote:
| > titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely
| arbitrary
|
| It wasn't like that some years ago.
|
| Senior back in the days is probably your lead / staff of today.
|
| The problem isn't just the companies but people and their
| expectations. You have people crying about not being made
| "senior" for having 2 years of experience and the world is
| blown apart now.
|
| So is every company evil or broke or the social media culture
| these days expecting instant feedback etc?
|
| You used to work 10+ years as an engineer and just that and it
| was fine.
| jmkozko wrote:
| At my organization you can't get a raise beyond inflation
| percentages unless you go up a title.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if it's a way of gatekeeping salaries
| since years of employment typically outnumber the levels of
| title that are achievable in one's career.
| gdubs wrote:
| There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title
| inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think,
| with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch
| the equity package any further.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Wait until you meet a VP in finance.
| shmerl wrote:
| Titles are arbitrary (as in people with different titles can do
| similar work), but compensation is tied to a title.
| rm30 wrote:
| Titles are really a trap cannot reveal the real work,
| everything it's related to the size of company, type of
| organization and sector.
|
| A "top" position in a small company could be a mid one in a big
| tech but with a narrow field compared to the small one when
| sometimes you need to refill the coffee machine. At same time
| the flexibility of small one helps to solve problems of big
| ones.
| abcde666777 wrote:
| I always think of the Gervais principle when it comes to titles
| - that they really just exist to provide illusory advancement
| and to get some of the minions to lord it over some of the
| other minions while the folks at the top of the organization
| benefit.
| jackblemming wrote:
| It's how good you are at politics, that's it. Big modifier if
| you're tall and attractive.
| siva7 wrote:
| Titles are meaningless. Many tech ICs at top companies have
| more influence and responsibility as well as pay than managers
| at low tier companies.
| Illniyar wrote:
| Engineering titles at least have a few things that are nearly
| universally shared (such as actually needing to code, expecting
| to mentor).
|
| Product manager titles can have completely disjoint scopes of
| work between organizations - in one org they might be what was
| once systems designer role - getting requirements and writing
| specs, in another they might basically be doing UI or UX (even
| creating pages in figma), in others they are basically project
| managers.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I am also not surprised that many P.E. have become Political
| Engineer as opposed to Principal Engineer.
| rvz wrote:
| > I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in
| particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a
| "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has
| so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation.
|
| All the responses here won't admit that it is entirely made up,
| and designed to be built around a structured hierarchy which
| rule followers and obedient servents to the system to get
| closer to the $$$ printer.
|
| It takes a lot of back-stabbing, office politics, credit
| stealing and dishonesty to get to "the top", which is what the
| replies won't tell you.
|
| > I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles
| like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so
| much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked
| at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from
| 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.
|
| Here is a case study, would you interview at Meta today and
| work under someone far younger than you and has a more 'senior"
| role than you? You do understand that the "title" was made up
| and "created" for a particular position?
|
| Heck, you could even build your own startup and give yourself
| that title if you wanted to. But the majority here will not and
| will work for companies like Meta under EMs that have no idea
| what they are doing.
|
| Therefore it is all made up. With some "staff", "leads" and
| "principals" are making it up as they go along and coasting as
| the low rankers hold the fort as the ship sinks.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I agree with that. The way I see the marketing going forward with
| AI, you need to be able to have proven outstanding technical
| skills and deep understanding across several technical domains to
| be able to add value to the chain. This mean staying in the
| trenches along with serious self-education schedule. You should
| be reading books now and doing hard stuff.
| bsza wrote:
| Alternatively, this is all a psy-op by AI companies to make
| engineers willing to work harder for less money so they can
| pretend all that productivity growth is thanks to their stuff.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This article is not very helpful, just like any sort of absolute
| yes/no advice. The ad in the middle that looks exactly like the
| "content" makes it worse.
|
| Using OpenClaw as an example of exploding technology and why it's
| a bad time to move away from this (not sure how EM is a move
| away?) is ridiculous. And stating the career path is too
| competitive shows they don't really know what a true technical
| ladder looks like. Most organizations are going to have about as
| many staff developers as senior EMs and principal developers as
| senior directors. If it's stability you're after neither is
| particularly at risk in my experience, but I'd bet your CTO is
| looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than
| management with the AI hype train.
| piltdownman wrote:
| // but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of
| staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.
|
| Well that's a given, isn't it?
|
| The contemporary CTO is looking for quantitative proof of
| productivity increases via Agentic AI adoption based on things
| like delivery cadence or SLAs. Management is a qualitative
| function, and guaranteed to be skilled in 'mapping' their role
| to the delivery of value and reporting such things upward
| anyway.
|
| Engineering Management are there to make firm commitments and
| reasonable compromises around the ability to deliver features
| generally already committed to hard dates by either Sales or by
| virtue of external market forces. How this is achieved using
| social and political capital alongside Domain Knowledge is the
| distinguishing factor between an IC and a Technical Manager
| imo.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Totally agree, completely different skillset. Every engineer I've
| seen "promoted" as such becomes miserable, and frankly is not
| very good at their new role, effectively making it a double loss.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Honestly, I'm pretty good at it but yes indeed quite miserable,
| particularly now, in this market. With hiring very slow,
| companies know people are trapped.
| coredev_ wrote:
| It's totally different skill sets yes, but some developers can
| become good managers.
| ecshafer wrote:
| There is a major gap in this analysis by not controlling for
| industry or companies. Engineering Manager is a very generic
| title, so this is going to get Start Ups, Big Tech, Little Tech,
| Enterprise, Contract Shops, etc. Staff Engineer is very uncommon
| in Enterprise or Contract shops, there you typically see SWE
| 1/2/3 -> Tech Lead -> Architect. Most Tech companies I think have
| more of a SWE 1/2/3 -> Staff Engineer -> Principal.
|
| The other part is that Engineering Manager is a terminal
| position, I've known a few people who were manager for 20 years
| without ever going to Director / Exec whatever, its just a
| competitive jump and mathematically most will never go up. This
| is ALSO true for Senior -> Staff and Principle though. But
| Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with
| bonuses / incentives than Engineers get.
|
| Finally it is ultimately a career change, and that should be the
| primary factor to consider.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside
| with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get
|
| Not really.
|
| Staff Eng and above will end up making similar to an EM
| including bonuses _and_ has much more job mobility. You have to
| remember that most EM roles only open up once you hit Staff, so
| you are basically taking much more responsibility and longer
| hours for a marginal salary impact.
|
| Engineering Manager jobs are hard to come by and your job
| security is actually less than an individual contributor,
| because even if an initiative was delivered late due to no
| fault of your own, if sales is braying for blood in order to
| protect themselves after failing to meet quota, it's the EM's
| head that is offered on a silver platter.
| willahmad wrote:
| > Staff Eng .... has much more job mobility
|
| Not really.
|
| Above Staff and Staff+ companies are usually looking for
| expertise in domain, in addition to cross org leadership.
| Unless you want to get hired with Sr title.
|
| Management is different though, you have highly transferrable
| skillset, managing people, up and down.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > you have highly transferrable skillset
|
| Of course this also means the pool of people who can do
| your job or quickly learn it includes essentially every
| other EM.
|
| And many of those people are looking for jobs now.
|
| For an IC, no one can become an expert in Rust overnight.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Management is different though, you have highly
| transferrable skillset, managing people, up and down
|
| Most tech companies are not hiring an EM without relevant
| domain experience. "People Management" is a table stakes
| skill in 2026 and Staff/Principal Engineers and Product
| Managers largely offer that as well as technical or product
| insight.
|
| Additionally, it's something that can be cultivated _in-
| house_ and is why internal promotions to EM tend to be
| preferred unless a director, principal engineer, or PM is
| getting their friend a job (which happens fairly often).
| jollyllama wrote:
| > My friend was afraid that as a manager, he'd have less time to
| experiment and adapt. Especailly with a bigger team (he was
| offered to manage 6), you don't have much time to play around.
|
| You guys get time to play around? As lead/staff?
|
| > You can be a great EM for years and find yourself stuck.
|
| Better start now then, right?
| fusslo wrote:
| yeah?
|
| my job is basically self-directed. I'm expected to predict the
| future for what we as a business will need in 6 months to a
| year and become the expert in it now. lay the framework,
| prototype, sell to the larger org, integrate and move onto
| whatever else. This is in addition to the normal jira-driven
| feature/bugfix bullshit. I am looking at the problems we might
| run into then derisk them by figuring out what to build.
|
| But I'm at a large org where timelines are about as flexible as
| jello. I think I'm also overqualified and underpaid so my boss
| just lets me do whatever.
|
| Like I've been porting firmware from C to rust a day or two a
| week while I also am directing some more jr devs for our VP's
| latest product obsession.
| duzer65657 wrote:
| this is peak "the majority of people in this role are garbage
| but I'm a rockstar". 98%+ of people identify as special
| snowflakes.
| general_reveal wrote:
| Might be worth talking about peer respect. Do soldiers respect
| the West Point grad that hasn't or doesn't do soldering? Not
| really right?
|
| Some won't ever take that position out of sheer self respect.
|
| Many EMs are not ready to roll their sleeves up and do the full
| work, they are only ever riled up enough to roll their sleeves up
| and begin hiring like a maniac or going batshit crazy with micro
| management. You see, we all _saw_ you _too_ at work. Just know
| that. This is the LinkedIn comment you won't see to your stupid
| fucking work achievement post - fuck you. Morning rant over.
|
| But for my real EMs, much respect :)
| piltdownman wrote:
| // Do soldiers respect the West Point grad that hasn't or
| doesn't do soldering?
|
| Yes, just like an Office Hierarchy there's an expectation that
| they respect the Rank - based on the caveat that the
| Officer/Manager doesn't confuse Rank with Authority.
|
| Also, to clarify some previous assertions, VP title is often
| needed to empower a given member of staff to sign contracts on
| behalf of the company in certain jurisdictions or
| configurations.
| zkmon wrote:
| Not quite. In most companies managers are seen as 'inner circle'
| people while technologists are just workers. Managers get exposed
| to a lot more comms, giving more visibility and get ability to
| act like a smart person purely because they have more emails and
| get into more calls than the others. They not only get more
| power, but also get more info.
| jollyllama wrote:
| If you already don't know that though, are you really cut out
| to be a manager? You're joining the company "mafia", with all
| that implies, for good or ill.
| tamimio wrote:
| I agree, and they have more power because they have more info
| and are given more visibility, and because they lack the deep
| technical knowledge in xyz, they compensate it with all sort of
| office politics.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Line level managers are the most easily replaceable and in my
| experience powerless people in an organization. When I was
| being hired as an IC in product companies before to lead major
| initiatives. One of my requirements was to report to either the
| director or CTO (startup). Even after the startup grew and they
| hired a EM, the CTO carved out a position for me so I wouldn't
| report to an EM.
| charles_f wrote:
| > he'd been offered a promotion, to an Engineering Manager role
|
| Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a
| promotion.
|
| I've done both for significant amounts of time, and rather than a
| blanket, utilitarian "dont become a manager", I'd go with the
| antithesis to that blog buried at the very end:
|
| > So why am I still an EM [...] the main reason is that I enjoy
| my job
|
| EM positions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it's an
| entirely different function from that of a developer. I had
| tremendous fun being a manager in a couple startups, where left
| with lots of autonomy I could learn about, then experiment with
| better ways to deliver than "let's do 2w sprints" and ship shit.
| The human management was interesting, especially the continuous
| improvement side of things: it's especially exhilarating when you
| find something someone can do better and have a durable impact on
| their career ; it's especially tiring when you have to become
| something at the convergence of a psychiatrist, a referee and a
| nanny.
|
| In large companies, the job isn't the same. You're stripped from
| autonomy and forced into a bureaucratic aspect of things. Dates
| are the main control dial that VPs have, so your main goal is to
| provide random dates, track random dates, make sure it's gonna be
| delivered at random dates, and make up excuses for why that date
| was not met.
|
| After alternating a couple of times between the two functions, I
| figured development is what brings me the most joy, so I staid
| with it. But to each their own, and you might want to be a
| manager:
|
| - if you have a true interest in the function, go fo it. There's
| a lot of learning to be done (the main problem with bad managers,
| I believe, is that they're thrown there because they were good
| devs, and they just make shit up rather than learn) and you'll
| discover things
|
| - at the opposite side of the article's thesis, AI is a chance
| for you to innovate as a manager. The bureaucratic aspect I
| mentioned can be smoothed by it, and new tools mean a new way of
| working, so good times to experiment!
|
| - don't just do it for the utilitarian side of things. Developing
| your career is important, but you also need to do it a
| sustainable way. Something I keep telling: _it sucks to be good
| at something you hate_. So do something you like.
|
| - it is not my experience that pay is lower, Amazon paid SDMs
| more than SDEs, Microsoft pays them the same.
|
| - titles mean very little. VP at MyFavoritePet who employs 12
| people is not the same job as VP at Amazon. Principal (not
| principle - makes my eyes bleed every time) is harder to achieve
| at Amazon than at Facebook. Not because the job is more complex,
| but just because they define things differently.
| piltdownman wrote:
| //Funny how this lateral move to another function is seen as a
| promotion.
|
| Not at all. IC salaries outside of the absolute top-tier
| companies are capped, and were traditionally always capped
| lower than any degree of Senior Management prior to the 2000s.
|
| More to the point, they were capped illegally and in collusion
| with the main players in the game, completely separate from
| market forces.
|
| This was ably demonstrated by the class action taken when five
| former software engineers sued Apple, Google, Adobe Systems,
| and Intel in a Federal District Court in California for
| colluding in an "overarching conspiracy" to keep wages low by
| promising not to poach each other's employees.
|
| https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
|
| 65,000 software engineers eventually claimed they were unable
| to jump companies for higher pay because of a series of non-
| solicitation agreements by the likes of Sergey Brin, Eric
| Schmidt, and Apple's Steve Jobs.
|
| Outside of VC/PE funded American tech hotspots, this depression
| of salaries for IC roles still tends to be the case -
| particularly in Europe - for whatever reason.
|
| Simply put, the promotion is in the remuneration; the lateral
| move in functionality is simply a required re-alignment of role
| and responsibility to meet the expectations of the 'Leadership'
| tier - something always distinct from original job function, be
| it in Sales, HR, or Engineering.
| gozzoo wrote:
| I don't get this argument: don't do it, you have better otptions,
| but it is good for me because i enjoy it.
| temp8830 wrote:
| This article periodically surfaces in some shape or form.
| There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC
| ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the
| management one. This is a lie, and the sooner we stop telling
| it to the young generation - the better.
|
| Human societies have always rewarded and valued those who built
| hierarchies more than those who built things. If you focus on
| building a thing - you will forever be a cog in someone's big
| project. There's a reason that management ladder is more
| competitive.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC
| ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the
| management one
|
| It is not a lie. It is true _IF_ you live and work in the Bay
| Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech
| industry employment.
|
| Companies where the underlying stack is a revenue generator
| and not a cost center are companies where these kinds of dual
| tracks exist, but these are only found in the major tech hubs
| and are not available if you are remote first.
|
| They also require you to be _both_ technically and socially
| adept.
| temp8830 wrote:
| Sorry, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The ladders
| are simply not comparable, even in the Bay Area. Sure, at
| the entry point where one transfers from the IC ladder to
| management compensation can even drop. However, that's the
| bottom rung - and one typically can't get straight into
| management as a new grad. The management ladder goes
| higher.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Best to remember this isn't a ladder but rather a tree.
| Yes, it goes much higher, but you chances of ever getting
| there is minimal because it narrows so quickly.
| bumblehean wrote:
| >It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle,
| and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry
| employment.
|
| Is that actually true (the bulk of people in the tech
| industry are working in "big tech" or startups)?
|
| I don't know if there's any hard data around this, but my
| understanding has been that people working for these types
| of companies are maybe a single digit percentage of all
| tech workers (if that).
|
| People working for those companies are certainly the most
| vocal online, though, which maybe skews perception.
| toast0 wrote:
| I think some places pitch the dual ladder a lot morethan they
| actually support it, but it's still there.
|
| EM vs IC are totally different jobs though. The whole thing
| where you're a good IC, so you get "promoted" to being an EM
| is insane. There's some overlap, I guess, every job has
| pieces of managing other people even if it's not in the job
| description, but...
|
| Just because EM offers higher positions in the hierarchy (and
| salaries etc to go with it) doesn't mean that accepting a
| "promotion" to being an EM is going to make your life better.
| Personally, I hated being an EM; I don't like the work, and I
| don't like that when I do a bad job, it directly impacts the
| careers of my reports.
|
| I don't mind being a cog in someone's big project; but even
| if I did, I don't see how being an EM avoids it, unless you
| start your own thing, which I absolutely do not want to do.
|
| I'm pretty sure I did well enough for myself in the IC track.
| I could have gotten bigger compensation as an EM, I suppose,
| but diminishing returns wouldn't have justified the
| additional stress. Obviously, that may depend on individual
| factors, everyone's path is their own and I got a lucky draw.
| padjo wrote:
| Some people seem to genuinely enjoy being people managers and
| excel at it. It's not always obvious in advance who those people
| are so I'd still recommend people try it out early in their
| career if they get the opportunity, particularly if their company
| allows them to back out if it's ultimately not a good fit
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > 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!
| DauntingPear7 wrote:
| > 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
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I suppose what really escapes me is that companies are
| willing to pay people to do a pointless job. I wonder if the
| most senior are just more comfortable listening to a
| meaningless PowerPoint meeting than hearing complicated stuff
| about the work their company does
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > it's the codification of business logic that does.
|
| Isn't that what product/project managers and architects do
| though?
|
| Other comments describe EMs as just HR mangers
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| solatic wrote:
| > 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.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| That is a great description, thanks.
|
| The question really is why does American tech organise itself
| this way, a completely different way to other professions?
|
| > The EM role only exists to hire, evaluate, promote, and
| fire SWEs
|
| I can see why some people would find that unfulfilling. I
| work in one of those other professions and if I did just the
| hr bit I would be bored out of my mind! Do SWEs value the
| input of their EM? Does it really add value, or a bunch of
| busy work?
| mkehrt wrote:
| > The manager at my structural engineers can still calculate a
| beam size, he is better at it than his staff.
|
| That sounds insane to me. I want my manager to be good and
| _managing_. If they are writing code, it 's a misuse of their
| time and skills. If they are good at writing code and bad at
| managing, they shouldn't be a manager.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| And that confuses me. There are so many posts on hn
| complaining about managers and the bs they bring, 1:1s you
| didn't ask for etc.
|
| What does a manager even do in this world where they are non
| technical? I have never managed a large sw team tbf, but in
| smaller teams I did manage I had to do project management
| stuff. In my normal profession I manage a large team, but one
| of my big roles is being there to advise technically and make
| the big decisions. I can see why people find these EM jobs
| boring, you must have to invent things to do!
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| The arguments:
|
| * It's a bad time to move away from tech
|
| As a manager your role isn't to be the "best technical person"
| anyway. You still need to understand fast-changing capabilities
| of course. But you are managing people now, and the required
| skills are different. See below.
|
| * The ladder is very competitive
|
| It's always competitive, and in my experience it was the exact
| opposite - there were far fewer VP-level technical roles than VP
| people managers.
|
| * The pay is lower (for senior managers vs. senior technical
| track)
|
| Again, this is the opposite of my experience (besides at the
| first-line manager level, where pay was comparable.) Where I
| worked managers could quickly get paid more with more
| responsibility. I always thought it was because managing people
| is actually a lot less fun (at least for me it was.)
|
| The biggest reason not to become a manager is because _it is a
| completely different job_. Although managers need to be
| technically competent, management skills are much more about
| people (and politics.) If that isn't your jam, then don't become
| a manager.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I think you underestimate the job mobility that is lost when
| you transition from being an individual contributor into
| someone on the management track.
|
| The reality is, there are very few EM and above jobs, and job
| security is tough - if I have to choose between firing an EM or
| a SWE, I'd fire the EM first because I can always find another
| replacement _or_ split their responsibilities across multiple
| individual contributors and the PM.
|
| If an EM is laid off or fired, it's extremely difficult to find
| another role, and it truly is a terminal position. Why would I
| hire a laid off or fired EM or Director when I can promote
| internally or hire someone from within my network?
|
| Additionally, back when I was an SE, if we had a deal go bad in
| order to protect our ass we'd blame the EM so that we can have
| a head on the platter to hand our CRO, unlike a seasoned SWE
| who can push back and argue PM requirements were unclear and PM
| can argue that sales+product was aligned.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > if I have to choose between firing an EM or a SWE
|
| When does this choice ever come up?
|
| My experience is that most engineers are seen as
| interchangeable while most EMs aren't.
|
| Only time I've seen EMs fired for economic reasons is when a
| larger amount of engineers were also laid off.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > When does this choice ever come up
|
| Fairly often, but we usually manage them out so that line-
| level engineers don't get paranoid and jump ship.
|
| When an EM is suddenly shifted to work on another project,
| or all you ICs are suddenly talking to other managers or
| staffed on other projects, that's us as organizations
| managing out the malcontent and messaging to them that
| their time is up.
| Atreiden wrote:
| Anecdotally, pretty often. Whenever there is an engineering
| org failure, whether it be missed deadlines, unreliable
| software, missed KPIs, etc, there is no such thing as a
| truly blameless org. Somebody will be accountable in the
| eyes of leadership, and that boils down to this very
| choice.
|
| Was it the devs fault for shipping code with a disastrous
| edge case, or the EMs fault for over- allocating work,
| resulting in less-refined code and a minimal review process
| that let the defect slip into production? Just as an
| example.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| I agree at the first-line manager level (which this article
| is about), it's tough to get hired from outside, so getting
| the same position somewhere else after a layoff will be a
| tough job search.
|
| My comment was more on the next levels - there seemed to be
| about as many high-level technical roles as managers (paid
| similarly) where I worked in biotech (that might be a
| different situation for software-only companies.) And there
| were more Directors/VP's than Principals/Fellows for sure. So
| at some point the "ladder width" crosses over.
|
| And if you get laid off as a senior IC, good luck getting
| hired into another IC position. Age discrimination is real.
| The robust network is a must for anyone, manager or IC, in
| this case.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > My comment was more on the next levels - there seemed to
| be about as many high-level technical roles as managers
| (paid similarly) where I worked in biotech (that might be a
| different situation for software-only companies.) And there
| were more Directors/VP's than Principals/Fellows for sure.
| So at some point the "ladder width" crosses over.
|
| Yea. Biotech is different. The equivalent of a VP for a
| specific formulation at a Pfizer would be a Staff or
| Principal Product Manager at a Salesforce.
|
| In software, Engineering Managers have increasingly become
| solely people+program managers with a bit of a technical
| component.
|
| EMs aren't expected to own product - that's PMs.
| Additonally, EMs aren't expected to own architecture -
| that's Principal and Distinguished Engineers. All that
| leaves EMs is program management.
| mystraline wrote:
| Flagging due to being an advert in disguise.
| neogodless wrote:
| > Here are the main arguments from our conversation:
|
| > Thanks Unblocked for supporting today's article!
|
| > AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-
| blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they
| generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past
| decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap
| in rework and tokens.
|
| > Unblocked changes the economics.
|
| Yeah I was reading through this going... huh? This is the same
| font and layout as the article. uBlock let this slip through.
| Maybe there's good content here, and maybe they need
| advertisements to pay the bills (as a well-paid Engineering
| Manager...) but I couldn't finish the article knowing that it
| was deceptively formatted.
| brettgriffin wrote:
| It's curious to see the rational argument against the emotional
| choice the author makes.
|
| The critical piece here is the anecdotal (but true) insight that
| engineering orgs have been flattening over the last few years.
|
| There are a lot of factors, but rarely discussed is the
| realization that senior engineers are completely capable and
| often willing of managing other engineers directly. The
| definitive text on this subject is literally called "Herding
| Cats" :facepalm:
|
| In reality, senior engineers often have strong communication
| skills (albeit different than the styles of other management and
| leadership positions), very good time management, and likely can
| perform many of these 'soft skills' that engineering management
| is doing out-of-band from the teams directly responsible for
| shipping software.
|
| The engineering manager role feels like it was borne out of a
| very west-coast ideology from another era responsible for
| removing agency from people based on dated stereotypes. There was
| a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein we said engineers aren't
| capable or willing to have agency to work across teams, manage
| resources, or communicate about career goals or blockers, and
| then plugged someone in the middle to take these activities away
| from engineers.
|
| I'm exposed to a lot of teams with high-aptitude/techincal people
| that are not software engineers and almost never do you do see
| the equivalent of a traditional software engineering manager.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to see a continued and dramatic
| compression of these roles going forward.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| My experience is that the 'separate but equal' dual engineering
| track is largely a myth and that if you want advancement, the
| manager track is a much more viable track. Even with some of the
| recent flattening, there are still far more higher level roles
| for management than ICs. They are also given far more visibility
| and access inside the company which is extremely valuable in a
| large org. It also seems a good choice if you're not very good -
| I've seen bad managers hang around far longer than bad engineers.
| jedberg wrote:
| Not sure I agree (and I made the jump from IC to management).
|
| Look at the parallel tracks. A VP is the same level as a
| distinguished engineer, roughly. To be a VP, you have to be a
| great manager and got lucky with a few big projects.
|
| To be a DE, you basically have to be famous within the industry.
| And when I look at a large tech company, while there aren't a lot
| of VPs, usually the number of DEs is countable on one hand (or
| maybe two).
|
| They are very different skill sets. You shouldn't choose your
| role based on money or career progression, you should choose
| based on what you love to do, because especially in this world of
| AI replacing all the "boring" work, the only people who will be
| left will be the ones passionate about what they are doing.
| tewr wrote:
| There is so much going on in the industry right now that it is
| not fun to be an EM with rusty tech skills. However, the claim
| that staff engineers are more in demand is unsubstantiated.
| Hiring will slow to a crawl as everyone is watching to see where
| this is going. The EM role is not being replaced as fast by
| agents as much as the IC role, simply because EMs don't have as
| much to gain from agents yet.
| jf22 wrote:
| I'm a former EM who would never go back in an AI age.
|
| EMs deal with friction and from my experience more output is more
| friction.
|
| You have org leaders and businessy people putting their foot on
| the gas because AI is so productive and then programmers shipping
| 2-3x more code.
|
| These two forces collide and you're stuck dealing with the
| friction so 10x the amount of initiatives you did before.
|
| The friction is like sandpaper on sandpaper.
| coredev_ wrote:
| As an EM I don't get this. You are the sole responsible for
| quality. You are the sole responsible for what tools use. AI is
| voluntary to use. If AI produces code that no one knows and is
| hard to maintain, don't use AI in that way. If you can't make
| that decision, are you really the EM?
| jf22 wrote:
| I don't understand he comment.
|
| AI produces code that people can understand and is easy to
| maintain if you ask it for that.
| coredev_ wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstood your initial comment
| rapfaria wrote:
| > You are the sole responsible for what tools use.
|
| Sure, but now competitors are shipping like crazy (at their
| EM's sanity expense?). What to do?
|
| > AI is voluntary
|
| Until the company mandate. And also there 10 other EMs that I
| am competing with on my org tree alone, and their teams are
| all AI-heavy. Is that really a matter of choice?
| aranelsurion wrote:
| > AI is voluntary to use.
|
| > If you can't make that decision, are you really the EM?
|
| You'd be served well as an EM by this part of the Serenity
| Prayer:
|
| "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
| change, the courage to change the things I can, and the
| wisdom to know the difference."
|
| Depending on your organization, odds are high that AI use is
| one of the things you cannot change. Perhaps not even
| something you're ought to change. If your team is delivering
| x% more, "it makes my job x% more difficult so don't do that"
| won't fly neither upwards nor downwards.
|
| > If AI produces code that no one knows and is hard to
| maintain
|
| I think you're making an assumption here that the main
| problem with AI use is necessarily quality.
|
| OP wasn't even talking about AI producing bad code, just that
| it creating more code, and enabling more things to happen.
| More things going on at the same time, means you'd have more
| friction points and more things that can go wrong. Whenever
| those happen, the EM is pulled in.
| rixed wrote:
| The author forgot one very important reason to go for engineering
| manager: the hiring process does not include X slow rounds of
| leet code.
| ark4n wrote:
| There will always be a place for EMs and ICs. This goes back
| generations, there have always been labourers and managers of
| labourers.
|
| Perhaps the balance may tip one way or the others due to AI but
| something else will come along and tip it back again.
|
| Do what you enjoy and are the most effective at.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| I took an EM role. About a year later they eliminated all EMs in
| the US and replaced them with people in Poland. So I guess take
| the EM role if you're in Poland.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| People should know that you can't "just" turn down a promotion.
| You might be leaving management in a tough position where they
| were hoping to rely on you to fill a gap, and by turning it down,
| you're making it hard for them to be objective. They might
| default to seeing you as unreliable, and cut off future
| advancement opportunities (the ones you actually want). It's not
| fair, but that's how people think. This isn't a big problem when
| the money is free and everyone is trying to poach employees. You
| can just jump ship. But in this hellish economy, everyone is
| stuck. So take that damn promotion.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: either you manage people or you manage
| work/processes, you shouldn't do both. if you're an engineering
| manager, either you manage your people and let them be engineers,
| or you don't manage any people and you focus on engineering
| solutions and managing the solutions themselves.
| coredev_ wrote:
| Why unpopular? Sounds about right to me.
|
| I understand that some people take the manager path for the
| title/pay and never understands that the role is about handle
| people - not the tech. But they will not be very appreciated or
| it's a very small shop.
| Eridrus wrote:
| One thing I will say is: I wish I had had some EM/hiring
| experience before starting a startup.
|
| My technical skills served me very well in year 1/2, but once we
| started hiring enough people I could definitely feel my lack of
| experience.
|
| Maybe big tech EM experience wouldn't have helped me a lot, the
| context is definitely very different, but at least it would have
| been some sort of baseline to draw from.
| xannabxlle wrote:
| If you're reason to not become an engineering manager is because
| you live so much under a rock you're unaware of a glorified MCP
| ensemble tool blowing up as number one, then you're not really
| fit to be an engineering manager in the first place, and
| obviously not a very enthusiastic engineer at that.
| 80sdave wrote:
| There is also another aspect of title that needs to be
| considered. A part of a company I used to work for did work with
| the banking industry. There is the meme of everyone is a VP at a
| bank, but for those of us who interacted with customers, we did
| have VP in our title, which caused internal angst, otherwise at
| some institutions it was seen as a snub to be dealing with anyone
| below a VP in title and did actually cause customer relationship
| problems. So sometimes there are business justification for
| titles outside of employee relations.
| ceramati wrote:
| After years of being asked to be a manager I finally said yes and
| started on Monday this week. This article could've come out a
| little sooner! j/k
|
| What tipped it for me is I spend most of my time managing agents
| now, why not manage some human agents too.
| arttaboi wrote:
| He makes good arguments, but so did all my managers throughout. I
| think EMs telling ICs to stay in the IC role is an age-old talk.
| To me, it sounds a bit like "the grass is greener on the other
| side."
|
| Although, I'm not disregarding his points. I'm just saying that
| this article feels less about the challenges of becoming an EM
| and more about the challenges of stepping down from EM to IC.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _For my friend specifically, staying on the IC track, becoming a
| Staff engineer and switching companies would have given him
| ~20-30% more than the EM promotion he was offered._
|
| This is missing something... the friend wouldn't immediately
| become a staff engineer - that could take just as long, or
| longer, than a promotion to middle management.
|
| At least where I am, the staff engineer equivalent (called
| Technical Fellow here) is considered Director or VP equivalent.
| In an engineering org of thousands, we have tens of these
| positions.
|
| Or, if I've misjudged what "staff engineer" means, our next lower
| position would be principal engineer (typically 1 in 10-15
| engineering ICs, roughly). And their salaries are in the ballpark
| of our engineering managers.
|
| Anyway, all this sort of misses the point - it's two completely
| different jobs. I know plenty of people who don't want to manage
| people. Or tried and hated it. And plenty of people who are bored
| with coding and want a chance to put their management skills to
| work.
|
| EDIT - grabbed this from another comment... - L1: Intern with
| undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior -
| L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff -
| L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow
|
| We have fewer levels than that... - Engineering Intern - Engineer
| 1 - Engineer 2 - Senior Engineer - Lead Engineer - Principal -
| Senior Principal - Tech Fellow
|
| So, staff is somewhere close to our Lead or Principal, who earn
| similar money as line managers. And only Principal+ are on a
| bonus plan (where all people managers are). For any of the lower
| ICs, a bonus is a rare thing (where for higher positions and
| managers, it's part of the comp package).
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| In addition, I think the roles of manager and engineer will blend
| and management layers will flatten - companies are mostly looking
| for managers who code some of the time. It helps them run lean
| and avoid layers of management which slow down execution.
|
| As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we'll be
| demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and
| that means they'll need to be doing more than just pushing paper
| and cheerleading.
|
| So if you do go into management, keep in mind you can't let your
| engineering skills atrophy... you now have to be good at both.
| There aren't many people who can do both well, but companies will
| expect this moving forward.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > that means they'll need to be doing more than just pushing
| paper and cheerleading
|
| That never lasts. No one can do do both and do them
| effectively.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I happen to agree with you entirely... but I just have this
| feeling things will go this way as companies put more and
| more cost pressure on middle management layers.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Or, because coding is now not a bottleneck, it'll become
| increasingly important to ensure all your developers know what
| to do/achieve, and you'll need to put more effort into setting
| up structures, processes etc to do that. More collaboration
| (instead of lone wolf coder) may actually increase the need for
| good managers.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| That could be - I hadn't thought about it that way, actually
| Crowberry wrote:
| I'm going to be giving off: "Grandpa screams at clouds"-vibe with
| this comment. But I'm so sick and tired of ads and popups online.
|
| I've barely gotten far enough to be drawn in by the article and
| then I get a giant popup (on mobile) to subscribe to read more
| posts like this.
|
| Put it at the very end and I might. I've made it a habit to just
| exit the article whenever this happens. Nobody respects each
| other's time in today's internet, more intrusiveness = numbers go
| up.
|
| Rant done
| saghm wrote:
| > The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy,
| and it's not stopping.
|
| > But even if you don't give in to the constant FOMO - it's
| impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn't changed. Almost
| every part of our work looks different, and will continue to
| evolve.
|
| My experience is anecdotal, but this seems to be overblown. I'd
| say that almost every part of my work looks pretty identical to
| how it did a few years ago, and that the changes are relatively
| small in scope so far. Most of the arguments I've heard from
| those who advocate adopting AI tools are that the rate at which
| the tools are improving is exponential (or super-exponential, or
| whatever), which is a _prediction_ about how it will change
| rather a claim that it has already reached a point that it 's
| necessary. I don't pretend to have any expertise that lets me
| evaluate those predictions better than anyone else, but unless I
| happen to be a severe outlier, it seems like gross hyperbole to
| claim that every part of our work has already changed.
| dirkc wrote:
| That comment made me wonder how long the person advised have
| spent working in tech, I'd wager that it's < 5 years.
|
| I'm not saying that to be snide. When you come from a academic
| CS setting like university, there are so many new things to
| learn in industry that after 5 years you could still be
| completely unfamiliar with a lot of things.
| tomgp wrote:
| Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are
| simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and
| everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create
| awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do
| so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or
| you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're
| going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time?
| seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising
| version will be wasted.
| generic92034 wrote:
| It is just so that the CEO can claim they are an "AI first"
| company and the shareholders might believe that the company
| is not being eaten by AI but profits from it. Check the
| claims of the software vendors whose stocks have fallen by
| some 30% in the last few months, without any reason in the
| fundamentals.
| pflenker wrote:
| I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one
| important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.
|
| Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support
| my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However,
| since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that
| this experience is less and less applicable.
|
| A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is
| that I've ,,been there, done that" and that's going away right
| now.
|
| I don't mind - it's exciting! But if I was an IC right now I
| would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much
| more to learn directly in the trenches.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Manager or not I think the real risk is overly adapting your
| skills to one company. Managers becoming experts at one companies
| politics and cannot instead of general organizational dynamics.
| The devs who seem to only get by in this one team / codebase, and
| neglect general skills, looming down on outside info as
| buzzwords.
|
| It seems smart at the time, and makes you more effective in the
| near term. But it might cause many of your skills to lose
| portability.
| etothet wrote:
| If you are reading this and you are thinking you want to become
| an engineering manager, I urge you to think long term what you
| want that to look like. I've seen too often that developers who
| want to become managers because they think it's the next
| inventible step aren't prepared for the _people management_ and
| HR part of that role.
|
| And, as you move up to Director and beyond, those higher often
| have much less to do with actual engineering than tasks that sort
| of surround the world of engineering - lots of organizing
| information and attending meetings.
|
| I've seen too many developers who though they wanted to manage
| become victim to the Peter Principle [1].
|
| There is nothing wrong with staying a developer, even if you're
| not "moving up" to some idealized title. If you like the work and
| you can tolerate the place you work, you're probably ahead of
| most people in our field.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
| alephnerd wrote:
| This.
|
| EM is a terminal position that does not own the product roadmap
| (Product Management) nor the underlying implementation
| (Staff/Principal Engineers).
|
| They primarily own delivery and execution because orgs can't be
| bothered to hire program managers anymore.
|
| If you are great at managing upwards and ensuring delivery by
| hook or by crook, you will make a great EM. But the next jump
| after EM is extremely difficult because you are competing with
| Principal Engineers and technical-minded PMs making a lateral
| move and cofounders who are being managed out by the board; and
| dealing with micromanaging CTOs or CPTOs.
| Illniyar wrote:
| Are you saying principal engineers and tech minded PMs make
| lateral moves into director level manager without going
| through being entry level EMs first?
|
| I've never heard of something like that. Usually the
| requirement for being director level manager of engineers is
| to at least have managed people as an EM for several years
| before.
| crims0n wrote:
| Everybody wants a manager that has engineering experience, but
| nobody wants to be that manager.
| _blk wrote:
| I'm a freelance interim EM and I do it for the same reason
| the article explains: I genuinely enjoy it.
|
| I love engineers and I love tech. I still code daily but I'm
| not the guy that delivers at the pace of some of the amazing
| engineers that I had the privilege to work with. I love
| putting others ahead of myself wherever I can and it's never
| cost me anything, so I'm not afraid to do it again. I love
| telling the engineers how what they do actually matters
| because they're too focused on the work to sometimes see why
| changing goals doesn't mean their work and efforts were
| wasted and I also love shielding them from the corporate mess
| upstairs (that I somewhat masochistically don't even dread
| being part of)...
|
| So, yeah, I really love my job and if one of my guys (or
| gals) wants that too, the more of a joy it is to me to mentor
| them into that process.
| kubb wrote:
| On the contrary, my manager doesn't do much outside of the perf
| evaluation season, and takes home a higher salary than me. He
| also gets to take credit for pretty much everything that his
| team does, despite not contributing to it much. Sounds like a
| fairly easy job most of the time.
| drdec wrote:
| Until you are dealing with a difficult employee or struggling
| with whether to put someone on a PIP or being asked to
| deliver things you don't have direct control over or dealing
| with penny-pinching edicts from above etc. etc.
| ljm wrote:
| On the front of it he's not a very good manager for the team
| then.
|
| Once you get to leadership you're giving credit where it's
| due and soaking up the loss.
| etothet wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. From that description this person does
| not sound like a good manager.
| kubb wrote:
| I've had worse!
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I've jumped back and forth between IC and Management. The
| roles are measured on completely different things. Most of IC
| is about through put. Most of management is about
| building/doing the right thing (aka making money).
|
| Sometimes, it can look like management is doing very little
| because you only see the tail end of their outputs to the
| team.
| kubb wrote:
| He doesn't get much say about what thing gets done. He's
| just kind of there.
| JaumeGreen wrote:
| Engineering Manager can be a social role with some tech
| aspects.
|
| You attend meetings, negotiate deadlines, evaluate people,
| navigate project minefields, take decisions or force people
| to take them,... and the technical aspects are quite
| minimised.
|
| Depending on the company this is not an upgrade, it's a
| lateral move. I have people under me who earn more than me,
| and I agree with that.
|
| The job it's not easy, it's different. Spending 5 hours on
| meetings it's easy, but exhausting. Giving credit to your
| people but taking the blame (which is what should be done)
| it's easy, but demoralising. Not having a peer group of
| people with whom easily socialise makes the job feels lonely,
| when you talk with other managers it's 99% work related, and
| you can't make your people like you as a person.
|
| Most days I'd love to have a clear objective.
|
| One of the worst is the strange feeling that you have because
| you've studied for a long time some skills, and worked using
| them, and now those are hardly used. You need to use a set of
| skills that you haven't trained for, and haven't used as much
| (depending on your personality/skillset, of course).
|
| Being a manager is not for everyone.
| keeda wrote:
| Here's how I see it: Ideally a manager / reportee
| relationship is a symbiotic relationship. A manager becomes
| more successful by making their reportees more successful,
| and both roles grow together. And repeating this across
| teams, the whole company grows as well.
|
| There's a lot of nuance but here's a simplistic overview: a
| manager tries to land a big project for their team, which
| lets the team stretch their abilities and grow, which over
| multiple successful deliveries results in promotions / raises
| for everyone involved AND the cachet to ask for bigger
| projects (and more headcount!)
|
| The manager's role is the hustling and jockeying in landing
| the project, ensuring their team is executing and getting any
| mentorship needed (directly or indirectly) and protecting
| them from disruptions ("shit umbrella") -- which includes
| managing everything around the team including stakeholders
| and dependencies and escalations -- and then making the case
| for promotions / raises / PIPs based on their performance.
|
| I've never been a manager, but having been involved in all
| these aspects, I can tell you none of this is easy. All of
| these can get very contentious, even in the best-run of
| companies; in the rest, a lot of pathologies spring up (like
| politics and empire-building) that cause even more nastiness.
|
| So it may seem like they're taking credit for your work, but
| that's literally part of the arrangement, and it's only
| unfair if you're not seeing any upside. If you feel that way,
| this is 100% something you should bring up (very tactfully!)
| in a 1:1 or (even more tactfully!!!) a skip-level.
| madrox wrote:
| Every job in engineering is changing right now. Managers aren't
| immune. I've been an EM for almost 20 years in some flavor or
| another, and I've been thinking a lot about how I want to adapt
| to this era.
|
| This is the first time I've seriously considered swapping out of
| management. Not for any of the reasons the author says, but
| because:
|
| - I don't feel as confident mentoring others through this period
| given how much the work is changing
|
| - I find myself enjoying the work more
|
| - EMs tend to have more difficulty justifying their existence at
| the best of times let alone a period of change like this
|
| The AI world will still need EMs. It's just unclear what those
| EMs will be doing every day and how it will work.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| In all honesty, I don't think I have met one dev that could be a
| manager.
|
| Also from my perspective, the article doesn't make any sense.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| I will stay as an individual contributor as long as possible. My
| one step into team management at 23~ was very enlightening.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The part about pay is wrong, it's not comparing apples to apples.
|
| I've been a staff engineer at Google and other companies, I have
| been an EM and a very senior IC at big and small companies.
|
| If you're a very good IC, you can make a lot at a small number of
| good companies
|
| If you're a relatively worse manager you can make a similar
| amount at many other companies
|
| So the decision tree I would use is (focusing exclusively on
| compensation), if you're a very good IC, go somewhere willing to
| pay you >1M/year. If you can't get that you should be a manager
| arnvald wrote:
| > It's a bad time to move away from tech
|
| Working at big tech these days I see EMs and directors playing
| with AI, building tools, contributing to codebase through AI
| agents. Today when there's less hiring and building the org,
| becoming EM doesn't mean moving away from tech
|
| > The ladder is very competitive
|
| Just like on IC path. You think that being a great builder will
| move you from staff to principal role? Nope. It's about setting
| direction, aligning people, finding opportunities. A set of
| skills that's very close to what managers do.
|
| > The pay is lower
|
| When you compare EM against staff engineers. Is EM and staff the
| same level? In some companies, yes. In some companies, EM is at
| senior or between senior and staff. So yes, on average it will be
| lower than staff, but EM is not a promotion, it's a change of
| career path.
|
| In any case, if someone's wondering whether they should try EM
| role given a chance, I still say: go for it. Going back has never
| been easier, a lot of companies now cuts manager roles and allows
| people to move back to IC, so if you have a chance to become EM
| and are curious about it, give it a try.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I have a few different reasons why you might think twice about
| this role.
|
| - if you transition from a technical role into this, beware your
| technical skills need regular usage to stay relevant. Not a show
| stopper for this role and I've had good non technical managers.
|
| - Be ready for a lot of relatively short lived jobs as a CTO or
| VP Engineering. Many startups create engineering manager type
| roles around the time they start scaling struggling a bit. Maybe
| the founder CTO wasn't so good at management or whatever. You'll
| inherit a mess. And they might not like you after all. I've had a
| few friends facing a lot of churn in this role. Just one company
| after another, do ungrateful work, and then move on to the next.
| It can pay well but it's not stable work. And quite stressful.
| Some people get lucky of course.
|
| - Make sure that this is really what you want to do the rest of
| your career and see the above two points.
|
| If you find the right employer, then this can be a great role of
| course. I've had a few excellent engineering managers (some of
| them retired now) in my career. But I have heard of people
| burning out or getting a rough deal, repeatedly trying to do VP
| Engineering roles in messy startups/scaleups as well. I know a
| few more of those.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| What exactly is an engineering manager?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I genuinely think everything would work far better without
| management, from what I've seen most managers make organisations
| need more managers...
| fogzen wrote:
| Yeah. There's always such a lack of realpolitik in these
| discussions. They turn into endless bike shedding about what a
| manager is supposed to do according to some ideology of
| management, rather than the reality of the decisions managers
| are actually in control of and their actual tangible outputs.
| greenchair wrote:
| The manager role is inevitable once scale reaches certain
| thresholds.
| corndoge wrote:
| > You've probably seen this tweet - the creator of Claude Code
| asking why Anthropic still needs software engineers:
|
| In fact that is the creator of claude code _answering_ , not
| asking.
| ashutoshstark wrote:
| True 100 %
|
| A lot of strong engineers move into EM roles expecting deeper
| technical impact, but end up spending most of their time on
| coordination, hiring, performance reviews, and cross-team
| alignment. That's valuable work -- just very different from
| building systems. More orgs should invest in strong IC tracks
| (Staff/Principal) so people can lead technically without managing
| people. Not everyone who's good at engineering wants to optimize
| calendars and org charts.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| It's a bad idea to phrase advice as "Don't Do X", for most values
| of X that are often undertaken:
|
| - Don't move to Detroit
|
| - Don't go into academia
|
| - Don't use dating apps
|
| - Don't buy Google stock
|
| It's most obvious for the last one: you should buy Google (or any
| other) stock if you think it's underpriced and sell it if you
| think it's overpriced. But even for the other advice, a kind of
| Efficient Market Hypothesis holds. If there were a massive exodus
| of people from academia, causing universities to increase
| salaries and reduce administrative burdens, going into academia
| might be great for the right people. For many people Detroit is a
| terrible city, but I know a guy who worked for the Tigers, and
| bought a large house for a small amount of money, and did a
| lovely job renovating it, so Detroit worked well for him.
|
| Life is all about finding underpriced value: options that you
| will appreciate more than others, for whatever reason.
| hintymad wrote:
| Isn't being an engineering manager about leverage? Someone needs
| to organize people, allocate resources, or even decide the
| direction of products. We may say that ICs can make equally good
| such decisions, but every company has a hierarchy and someone
| does call the shots. And for better or for worse, some people are
| indeed good at navigating company dynamics and driving an
| organization forward, even though they may suck at building. An
| example would be IBM's Watson Jr. He was known for being awkward
| at mastering IBM tech as a salesperson. Even in a holacratic
| company like Zappos or Valve, some people still manage, right?
| shubhamintech wrote:
| The IC vs EM debate always skips the third option: neither. Start
| something. You end up writing code, managing people, doing sales,
| and shipping product in the same week. Way harder, but you never
| have to wonder if the ladder is worth climbing because there is
| no ladder
| deet wrote:
| It is a precarious time to look backwards on the definition of
| the roles of an IC or an engineering manager and make any
| extrapolations to what those will look like in the future.
|
| In my own team, I have seen ICs increasingly function like
| engineering managers, and even suffer some of the pitfalls of the
| role switch, as they change from reasoning about creating code to
| delegating to teams of software agents.
|
| Increasingly, ICs are needing to understand the product roadmap
| more deeply, figure out how to spec a problem and constraints on
| a solution in the right way to get their subordinates to produce
| reasonable output, and be the communication bridge between other
| jobs functions and the entities actually producing the code.
|
| I've also heard concerns of skill atrophy, as these team members
| spend less brain energy on language syntax, low level logic, etc,
| and more on interpreting abstract strategies to solving a problem
| and pattern matching those strategies against their software
| engineering wisdom.
|
| If anything, ICs should consider that the skills that will make
| them successful managing agents might be the ones that have made
| first-level engineering managers successful: the ability to
| coordinate with other job functions, map implementation
| strategies to product and organization needs, and deliberately
| and carefully delegate and coordinate work of others writing the
| actual code.
| dangus wrote:
| Bad advice. You want to have at least one managerial role on your
| resume before you turn 40/45/50 so you can get hired as you age,
| and being offered one is something that doesn't happen often.
| It's far easier to go back to IC than to hope someone offers you
| an EM role later. I say take it while the offer is there.
|
| There's far less age discrimination when you're looking for
| management and strategy oriented roles. Those roles want
| experience, not the raw energy, output, and fresh skills of a
| younger IC.
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