Mostly agree with this article. When I mentor people about managing, some other bits I also usually mention:
1. 'You’re not “part of the team” anymore.' - You're not part of the software dev team, but if you're doing things right, you're part of a team, just a new one. I encourage manager mentees of mine to read a book "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" which talks about figuring out who your "first team" is. Even in environments where you manage an autonomous team, you likely are working alongside other teams towards some bigger goal. Some of the things that worked being part of a software development team continue to work in the new setting, but you also need a new set of tools.
2. It's a two-way door. I've bounced back and forth between IC and manager roles. Some of it is just how the job market is (you look for a job, there aren't manager jobs, you go back to being an IC). Sometimes, people do it intentionally because they like being an IC. It's ok to try out being a manager, and realizing you don't like it.
A lot of what's here isn't specific to managing, and if you advance in your career as an IC, you'll experience similar.
The limited amount of true people management I've done has felt like a really valuable educational process, even if I never embrace wearing that hat exclusively.
Back in Soviet times there was a trend in Sci-Fi depicting the bright communist future when people changed professions every few years or so, often between manual and intellectual, to stay sharp.
Interesting parallel I was unaware of. On a personal level I have found it very useful to alternate between mental and physical work for the sake of endurance. If I was mentally tired I could usually still do physical work. This was helpful within the scope of a day or week and I imagine that such alternating also aids longterm endurance.
I think this might scare some people off from management unnecessarily.
A lot of what's being described here is important for new managers to understand, but eventually, once you find your footing, you can start to determine where the rules can bend.
For instance, a lot of new managers struggle because they want to keep a foot in the IC world. I think most new managers would benefit from stepping away from the code for an extended period of time. But many experienced managers do eventually return back to writing code while still serving in a management role, although certainly not at the level they did before.
Likewise, it's really important for new managers to understand that friendship dynamics will change. But that doesn't mean that you can't foster very warm relationships with people who report to you. Just like a teacher-student relationship, you can have great fondness for each other while recognizing that there are some lines that absolutely can't be crossed.
If it scares you off, thats a good thing. A manager who doesn't want to do these things might not be an effective manager. I think its better to go in eyes open to what it really means. I think the author did a good job of that.
I was hoping for more upsides, but, I'm not surprised by the short list either.
It's a service-oriented job that attracts people who like to control other people. There are only so many upsides to a situation like that. Here's my favorite take on the subject:
> "Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this."
It confirmed that management would be a bad choice for me. If anything I think that the article is going to give people the ability to say "no" if they are on the fence.
I don't want to sell. I don't want to politic. I don't want to know about re-orgs before the employees whom it actually affects. I don't want to lay off someone because my team's profits are being siphoned by others. I don't want to carry upper management's BS and tell it to my coworkers with a straight face. And if you do, I hope it keeps you up a little bit at night.
Those are definitely the down sides. As a manager who has had to let people go, no matter how deserved, it is a part of the job that I wish I didn't have to do, and it does disturb my sleep and peace.
But there are some very meaningful upsides as well, and the one that rises above all the rest is that I genuinely love working with teams and helping them grow.
Based on your list of things you don't want to do, I would say that if you can enjoy the success and stability you wish to have while avoiding all of those things, then more power to you! But keep in mind that in most businesses, _somebody_ has to do those less desirable things, or the business isn't going to stay afloat.
This is very accurate. For me personally, I found the difficulties, friction, and stress, have started to eclipse the pros and decided to move back into an IC role after 15 years as EM/SrEM.
The work life balance was also terrible. You really do ruminate and worry about a lot, much of it outside of your control.
The reality is that there is no escaping management. A high level IC is pretty much just an unofficial manager. You are responsible for a large technical area - it's your job to meet with stakeholders, design the roadmap, build durable team processes to maintain velocity, mentor and identify the right work for the right people. You may not have back to back meetings but between 1:1s, stakeholders, projects, and ad-hoc fires they're likely still a majority your schedule. You are expected to lead without authority. Leadership will change priorities and reorganize the teams every six months. If you're focused and deliberate, you can maybe get can your project landed before the next reorg.
All leadership is like that. Even if you're not a people manager.
I'm an IC in a technical leadership position, all of these hold true with the added constraint that I cannot tell anyone what to do. I hold no carrot or stick.
I have to persuade, convince and influence, I have no reports (nor I want them) so to get anything done I need to get people to align and understand the value on its merits.
If people follow your direction, it is usually because the argument made sense, the trust was already there or you did the unglamorous work of aligning everyone beforehand
It doesn’t cover the reality that nearly all your extra pay in a progressive tax system goes to the government.
UK is hitting 70% marginal rates , or even 1000% for people with children.
That feels tangential to the article and not super relevant. Whenever you're offered something with more pay it'll be your personal decision whether or not the pay justifies the role change or whatever.
Some would argue going from a regular SWE to a Senior, Lead, or Staff is also not worth the pay depending on how it impacts your life.
But by the time you're ready to be promoted to manager, you're usually at least senior-level, if not higher. No one is (or should be) getting promoted from junior to manager.
Similar when you climb up the technical path as well, beyond staff engineer. It gets lonely, not many peers, not part of a team, you have to be careful about what you say and to whom as your words carry a lot of significance.
At staff you are still spending a lot of your time working with people. You are working on technical problems but you should be teaching them how to do it.
If you want to be heads down working on code all day stick to senior engineer.
One of the more counter-intuitive parts of management that I've found is that your focus shifts from delivering a technical outcome to care-taking a team that delivers technical outcomes. It's a meta-function.
A related physics metaphor - in general as you move from IC to SR to management, your focus shifts from changing the position to changing the velocity and acceleration of those around you.
I agree with this, but the social dynamic just sucks. I would much rather the manager be part of the team, not feel lonely, be able to joke around about safe things (so, not politics, religion, or identity), and even complain a bit.
>You will not get the training you need
This is just plain unacceptable. It is likely due to companies thinking everyone is replaceable and not investing in their employees though. I don't know how companies can simultaneously want managers to practice the sanitized humanity detailed here while also not providing training to do what they want.
The author claims the POST is WRITTEN by them. They did not claim the ILLUSTRATIONS were DRAWN by them. Most of us are not artists. Sometimes its hard to find the right illustrations.
My SO is on the spectrum and likes to align cups and things along the edges of tables. I ask her not to be an edgelord in the most egregious cases, but I've also gotten better at not stressing over "it's on the edge".
> You will encounter business decisions you think are terrible but you still have to sell to your team.
This is incorrect. You don't have to. In fact, you shouldn't.
There can be situation in which stuff will need to happen regardless, yes, but that does not require lying and probably works even better when one does not lie.
The post then continues with more such falsehoods and incorrect learnings one could deconstruct, but the spirit of all of them is mostly the same, making that mostly redundant.
Managing is hard and it's easy to fall into these tropes. But they are just that. Easy tropes. They are not the way.
Agree - If you think your team is below your intellectual level, then by all means lie and sell them on terrible decisions you don't believe in.
An honest manager who respects the intellect of their reports has more nuance in delivering requirements that must be met, without clowning themselves as a propaganda mouthpiece.
The list of tasks piled on to a human manager are too much for a manager to do well. The role of management feels like a dumping ground for menial tasks, but oh yeah, you need to pass a coding review too, in some roles. LOL
This is a lot of asshole puckering over nothing. Is this post really about doing your job, or about protecting your ego? Posturing and a defensive attitude will never be respected by anyone. People just want to trust you to deliver results. They don't care about the rest of you.
There are so many meaningless phrases and words used like "part of the team" and "dumb", "lazy", "tough". There are no examples given of these things. An uncritical reader might let their imagination run wild catastrophizing. Nobody in a leadership role should even have a mind for such quick and empty characterizations. Most of the job is continuous assessment after all.
All that really matters is that you understand the business and the work of the people you're managing. Be flexible with your time and assume good faith in discussions. You're not going to know what you're lacking until you're already in the role.
Mike Tyson quote: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"
middle managers only exist because c suite has no idea/dont care what their employees actually need so there has to be someone in the middle to water down their awful plans. its a hard job nobody should have to take on.
the worst part is when someone is forced to be a bad boss from above when they really dont want to do that so they become hated from both sides. nobody sane can work in that environment and not give up after a few years. i guess thats why so many psychopaths end up as managers when all the normal people burn out and quit. they like watching others suffer.
in a perfect world it would all be independent teams with the leader role rotating between members. the problem with that is teams have to agree on things and thats hard when everyone wants the most for themselves. it can only work if everyone wants the company to succeed and that can only happen if they feel like they have real power. basically what im saying is the only type of org that can work without traditional management is a co-op and our economic system is built to make that as hard as possible. respect to everyone stuck in the middle.
It really depends on how large the company is. But small, independent teams are exactly how high-stakes teams work (e.g,. special forces groups). But it demands a level of buy-in and commitment that most people simply won't have towards their job. Even so, there's a level of "middle-management" that has to exist when an organization gets to a certain size. Most generals cannot realistically think at the level of an individual firefight, but a fireteam leader absolutely MUST think about success at the firefight level. However, a single fire team cannot win a war, so the generals must exist to consider the 30,000 foot view of success.
It's a difficult, though IMO noble, thing to try to build a workplace that is actually suited for this style of work. But the vision of the company: what are they trying to build, how world-changing is their vision, etc.—those things impact whether or not it's even feasible to get rid of middle-management.
As a final point, I've met many brilliant engineers who are simply not capable of being put in front of a customer. They either didn't care or weren't capable of communicating in the necessary way to correctly move the needle. That doesn't mean we toss them out, it means we put a layer between them: middle management.
I think you’re being very uncharitable and lacking in empathy. Senior management have much bigger issues to deal with that can sink a whole business. It’s so demanding it’s made into a full time role.
I would rather work for someone who has on their mind where the business is going to be 12 months from now rather than what story points are acceptable to bring into a sprint.
Looks like either you are missing the whole point of being a manager or you are selling it for sympathy. Either way it is not all that bad as you paint it. Otherwise why would lot of people dream of being promoted to a manager?
You need to have the taste to enjoy your role. Managers have the power. They are "inside" people for the company while everyone below that level are just workers.
Managers are in the loop for everything. They knew what's going on, they get to know lots of people, they are more visible. They get more opportunities to have some important internal contacts, and show off their leadership skills. People listen to them.
They have decision making power, which means they can turn things into the way they like. They can put people in roles, reward those you like, punish those you don't like. Who don't enjoy that?
You said you bring work home. That's not how a manager works. You need to delegate work. That's' the whole point of having a team. You need to be good at getting work done, not doing it yourself. Just focus on the results.
You don't need to attend daily stand-ups and give status. You fine-tune the calls to your convenience. If you are good, you can create a system that requires minimal effort from you. Automate everything. Assign someone to do that automation. And so on.
Mostly agree with this article. When I mentor people about managing, some other bits I also usually mention:
1. 'You’re not “part of the team” anymore.' - You're not part of the software dev team, but if you're doing things right, you're part of a team, just a new one. I encourage manager mentees of mine to read a book "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" which talks about figuring out who your "first team" is. Even in environments where you manage an autonomous team, you likely are working alongside other teams towards some bigger goal. Some of the things that worked being part of a software development team continue to work in the new setting, but you also need a new set of tools.
2. It's a two-way door. I've bounced back and forth between IC and manager roles. Some of it is just how the job market is (you look for a job, there aren't manager jobs, you go back to being an IC). Sometimes, people do it intentionally because they like being an IC. It's ok to try out being a manager, and realizing you don't like it.
A lot of what's here isn't specific to managing, and if you advance in your career as an IC, you'll experience similar.
In a way management should be treated more like a role change than a one-way promotion
The limited amount of true people management I've done has felt like a really valuable educational process, even if I never embrace wearing that hat exclusively.
Absolutely.
This is the hardest part of the transition to manager: your engineering skills alone won’t make you a manager. It’s a different role.
Back in Soviet times there was a trend in Sci-Fi depicting the bright communist future when people changed professions every few years or so, often between manual and intellectual, to stay sharp.
Interesting parallel I was unaware of. On a personal level I have found it very useful to alternate between mental and physical work for the sake of endurance. If I was mentally tired I could usually still do physical work. This was helpful within the scope of a day or week and I imagine that such alternating also aids longterm endurance.
I think this might scare some people off from management unnecessarily.
A lot of what's being described here is important for new managers to understand, but eventually, once you find your footing, you can start to determine where the rules can bend.
For instance, a lot of new managers struggle because they want to keep a foot in the IC world. I think most new managers would benefit from stepping away from the code for an extended period of time. But many experienced managers do eventually return back to writing code while still serving in a management role, although certainly not at the level they did before.
Likewise, it's really important for new managers to understand that friendship dynamics will change. But that doesn't mean that you can't foster very warm relationships with people who report to you. Just like a teacher-student relationship, you can have great fondness for each other while recognizing that there are some lines that absolutely can't be crossed.
If it scares you off, thats a good thing. A manager who doesn't want to do these things might not be an effective manager. I think its better to go in eyes open to what it really means. I think the author did a good job of that.
I was hoping for more upsides, but, I'm not surprised by the short list either.
It's a service-oriented job that attracts people who like to control other people. There are only so many upsides to a situation like that. Here's my favorite take on the subject:
> "Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this."
- Raymond Chandler The Lady in the Lake
It confirmed that management would be a bad choice for me. If anything I think that the article is going to give people the ability to say "no" if they are on the fence. I don't want to sell. I don't want to politic. I don't want to know about re-orgs before the employees whom it actually affects. I don't want to lay off someone because my team's profits are being siphoned by others. I don't want to carry upper management's BS and tell it to my coworkers with a straight face. And if you do, I hope it keeps you up a little bit at night.
Those are definitely the down sides. As a manager who has had to let people go, no matter how deserved, it is a part of the job that I wish I didn't have to do, and it does disturb my sleep and peace.
But there are some very meaningful upsides as well, and the one that rises above all the rest is that I genuinely love working with teams and helping them grow.
Based on your list of things you don't want to do, I would say that if you can enjoy the success and stability you wish to have while avoiding all of those things, then more power to you! But keep in mind that in most businesses, _somebody_ has to do those less desirable things, or the business isn't going to stay afloat.
Genuine question:
If it was actually deserved, why does it bother you?
I know three really good engineers who have said the same for exactly those reasons. (eg “I don’t want to choose who gets laid off” etc)
I totally respect that, and the people I know who said that to me are typically very strong and experienced engineers.
This is very accurate. For me personally, I found the difficulties, friction, and stress, have started to eclipse the pros and decided to move back into an IC role after 15 years as EM/SrEM.
The work life balance was also terrible. You really do ruminate and worry about a lot, much of it outside of your control.
> You really do ruminate and worry about a lot, much of it outside of your control.
I believe that comes down to temperament, though being on either extreme end of that spectrum leads to problems.
The reality is that there is no escaping management. A high level IC is pretty much just an unofficial manager. You are responsible for a large technical area - it's your job to meet with stakeholders, design the roadmap, build durable team processes to maintain velocity, mentor and identify the right work for the right people. You may not have back to back meetings but between 1:1s, stakeholders, projects, and ad-hoc fires they're likely still a majority your schedule. You are expected to lead without authority. Leadership will change priorities and reorganize the teams every six months. If you're focused and deliberate, you can maybe get can your project landed before the next reorg.
All leadership is like that. Even if you're not a people manager.
I'm an IC in a technical leadership position, all of these hold true with the added constraint that I cannot tell anyone what to do. I hold no carrot or stick.
I have to persuade, convince and influence, I have no reports (nor I want them) so to get anything done I need to get people to align and understand the value on its merits.
The good news is those skills of getting people to believe in you and your thing are critical to leadership as an EM too.
I’m sure we all can think of managers who don’t have those skills but rely on the stick, and those managers are lousy at their job.
Good leadership skills have a lot of overlap between IC and EM.
If people follow your direction, it is usually because the argument made sense, the trust was already there or you did the unglamorous work of aligning everyone beforehand
Missed the part about 100x the stress and politics for 1.2x the pay.
That's pretty much the first bullet point
It doesn’t cover the reality that nearly all your extra pay in a progressive tax system goes to the government. UK is hitting 70% marginal rates , or even 1000% for people with children.
That feels tangential to the article and not super relevant. Whenever you're offered something with more pay it'll be your personal decision whether or not the pay justifies the role change or whatever.
Some would argue going from a regular SWE to a Senior, Lead, or Staff is also not worth the pay depending on how it impacts your life.
Dang, where do they pay 2x?
I edited, but in big mega corps could easily be 5x your junior staff.
But by the time you're ready to be promoted to manager, you're usually at least senior-level, if not higher. No one is (or should be) getting promoted from junior to manager.
Similar when you climb up the technical path as well, beyond staff engineer. It gets lonely, not many peers, not part of a team, you have to be careful about what you say and to whom as your words carry a lot of significance.
At staff you are still spending a lot of your time working with people. You are working on technical problems but you should be teaching them how to do it.
If you want to be heads down working on code all day stick to senior engineer.
One of the more counter-intuitive parts of management that I've found is that your focus shifts from delivering a technical outcome to care-taking a team that delivers technical outcomes. It's a meta-function.
A related physics metaphor - in general as you move from IC to SR to management, your focus shifts from changing the position to changing the velocity and acceleration of those around you.
I agree with this, but the social dynamic just sucks. I would much rather the manager be part of the team, not feel lonely, be able to joke around about safe things (so, not politics, religion, or identity), and even complain a bit.
>You will not get the training you need
This is just plain unacceptable. It is likely due to companies thinking everyone is replaceable and not investing in their employees though. I don't know how companies can simultaneously want managers to practice the sanitized humanity detailed here while also not providing training to do what they want.
There's a note at the end:
> As always, this blog post is written by me, without any AI, so all errors are my own.
However, the illustrations in the post are clearly made by generative AI, are they not?
The author claims the POST is WRITTEN by them. They did not claim the ILLUSTRATIONS were DRAWN by them. Most of us are not artists. Sometimes its hard to find the right illustrations.
But what did you think of the article itself?
Why does AI want to stress me with that cup about to fall off the desk
My SO is on the spectrum and likes to align cups and things along the edges of tables. I ask her not to be an edgelord in the most egregious cases, but I've also gotten better at not stressing over "it's on the edge".
That cup is still not ok lol.
Yes, but I don’t read blog posts for the art. As placeholders they’re not terrible.
I will never forget my dad's response to me telling him that I was becoming a people manager: "Everyone else's problems are now your problems."
> You will encounter business decisions you think are terrible but you still have to sell to your team.
This is incorrect. You don't have to. In fact, you shouldn't.
There can be situation in which stuff will need to happen regardless, yes, but that does not require lying and probably works even better when one does not lie.
The post then continues with more such falsehoods and incorrect learnings one could deconstruct, but the spirit of all of them is mostly the same, making that mostly redundant.
Managing is hard and it's easy to fall into these tropes. But they are just that. Easy tropes. They are not the way.
Agree - If you think your team is below your intellectual level, then by all means lie and sell them on terrible decisions you don't believe in.
An honest manager who respects the intellect of their reports has more nuance in delivering requirements that must be met, without clowning themselves as a propaganda mouthpiece.
It also has perks. You can bring your friendly pitbull to work, and no hater will dare to say anything!
That's why I rather want to have LLM as my manager and not the other way around. Having a middleman is worse than having none.
The list of tasks piled on to a human manager are too much for a manager to do well. The role of management feels like a dumping ground for menial tasks, but oh yeah, you need to pass a coding review too, in some roles. LOL
This is a lot of asshole puckering over nothing. Is this post really about doing your job, or about protecting your ego? Posturing and a defensive attitude will never be respected by anyone. People just want to trust you to deliver results. They don't care about the rest of you.
There are so many meaningless phrases and words used like "part of the team" and "dumb", "lazy", "tough". There are no examples given of these things. An uncritical reader might let their imagination run wild catastrophizing. Nobody in a leadership role should even have a mind for such quick and empty characterizations. Most of the job is continuous assessment after all.
All that really matters is that you understand the business and the work of the people you're managing. Be flexible with your time and assume good faith in discussions. You're not going to know what you're lacking until you're already in the role.
Mike Tyson quote: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth"
Pretty spot on. Nice summary.
middle managers only exist because c suite has no idea/dont care what their employees actually need so there has to be someone in the middle to water down their awful plans. its a hard job nobody should have to take on.
the worst part is when someone is forced to be a bad boss from above when they really dont want to do that so they become hated from both sides. nobody sane can work in that environment and not give up after a few years. i guess thats why so many psychopaths end up as managers when all the normal people burn out and quit. they like watching others suffer.
in a perfect world it would all be independent teams with the leader role rotating between members. the problem with that is teams have to agree on things and thats hard when everyone wants the most for themselves. it can only work if everyone wants the company to succeed and that can only happen if they feel like they have real power. basically what im saying is the only type of org that can work without traditional management is a co-op and our economic system is built to make that as hard as possible. respect to everyone stuck in the middle.
It really depends on how large the company is. But small, independent teams are exactly how high-stakes teams work (e.g,. special forces groups). But it demands a level of buy-in and commitment that most people simply won't have towards their job. Even so, there's a level of "middle-management" that has to exist when an organization gets to a certain size. Most generals cannot realistically think at the level of an individual firefight, but a fireteam leader absolutely MUST think about success at the firefight level. However, a single fire team cannot win a war, so the generals must exist to consider the 30,000 foot view of success.
It's a difficult, though IMO noble, thing to try to build a workplace that is actually suited for this style of work. But the vision of the company: what are they trying to build, how world-changing is their vision, etc.—those things impact whether or not it's even feasible to get rid of middle-management.
As a final point, I've met many brilliant engineers who are simply not capable of being put in front of a customer. They either didn't care or weren't capable of communicating in the necessary way to correctly move the needle. That doesn't mean we toss them out, it means we put a layer between them: middle management.
I think you’re being very uncharitable and lacking in empathy. Senior management have much bigger issues to deal with that can sink a whole business. It’s so demanding it’s made into a full time role.
I would rather work for someone who has on their mind where the business is going to be 12 months from now rather than what story points are acceptable to bring into a sprint.
Looks like either you are missing the whole point of being a manager or you are selling it for sympathy. Either way it is not all that bad as you paint it. Otherwise why would lot of people dream of being promoted to a manager?
You need to have the taste to enjoy your role. Managers have the power. They are "inside" people for the company while everyone below that level are just workers.
Managers are in the loop for everything. They knew what's going on, they get to know lots of people, they are more visible. They get more opportunities to have some important internal contacts, and show off their leadership skills. People listen to them.
They have decision making power, which means they can turn things into the way they like. They can put people in roles, reward those you like, punish those you don't like. Who don't enjoy that?
You said you bring work home. That's not how a manager works. You need to delegate work. That's' the whole point of having a team. You need to be good at getting work done, not doing it yourself. Just focus on the results.
You don't need to attend daily stand-ups and give status. You fine-tune the calls to your convenience. If you are good, you can create a system that requires minimal effort from you. Automate everything. Assign someone to do that automation. And so on.
When the author said “bringing work home” they didn’t mean literally working at home.
They meant that they spend a huge amount of time feeling stressed about work situations at home.