The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
The central drama for many people goes something like this: “I’m a senior engineer, but I’m thinking about being a manager. I have to be a manager to get promoted. I hope it isn’t terrible, once I make the switch. I hear it’s terrible.”
“Your advice is bad and you should feel bad”:
The best frontline eng managers in the world are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches.
- And the best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management. Back and forth. Like a pendulum.
The Pendulum
Being an IC is like reverse-engineering how a company works with very little information.
- A lot of things seem ridiculous, or pointless, or inefficient from the perspective of a leaf node.
- Being a manager teaches you how the business works, and how people work.
- You will learn to have uncomfortable conversations, resolve conflicts, and learn to crave conflict.
Management is NOT a promotion
Becoming a manager is a lateral move onto a parallel track. Management is not a promotion, management is a change of profession.
- You will be bad at it for a long time after you start doing it. If you do not think you are good at it, you are not doing your job.
On being a manager (of technical projects)
Management is highly interruptive, and great engineering – where you’re learning things – requires blocking out interruptions.
- As a manager, it is your job to be available for your team, to be interrupted, and to choose to hand off the challenging assignments, so that your engineers can get better at engineering.
Being a tech lead (of people)
The best tech leads in the world are always the ones who done time in management
- A tech lead is a manager, but their first priority is achieving the task at hand
- They still need the full manager toolset
- Need to know how to rally people and teams and motivate them
- Connect the dots between business objectives and technical objectives
- Break down big objectives into components
