A World Without Engineering Managers?
There is a recurring complaint about the uselessness of software development (or engineering) managers in tech. At best, they’re considered a necessary evil. At worst, they’re incompetent programmers (or non-programmers1) who, through political means, weaseled into positions of power, became micromanagers, and actively impede the mission of getting software to customers. For some, they shouldn’t even exist.
While bad managers certainly exist, I believe that most of management’s work is largely invisible to developers. This is largely because managers, in many cases, are generalists who have worked themselves out of coding. People management is what our title would suggest we do the most of, but it is a relatively small part of our actual job. Managers, more often, accumulate four or five part time job duties and responsibilities.
Stephen Vance has put a post like this talking about the Different things we may mean when we talk about management, and this builds on the idea from another perspective. We were at the same company where he spearheaded an experiment to distribute the mentorship parts of people management, because this place had 30-40:1 IC to manager ratios. Ultimately, that project didn’t fully work and they did a combination of hiring managers from outside and promoting managers from within, often from those who were in this pilot coaching program. While the program helped increase mentorship, it ultimately failed because the other roles of management were being unofficially distributed to people untrained in the scenario, and important work was dropped on the ground because it wasn’t technical work.
