I find "engineer to manager" guides are fundamentally not possible to write. I've been a manager of a team 3-4 times now and each experience was entirely different from the previous.
But this post makes the biggest mistake, something I have struggled with in every management role: focusing on managing down.
Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a good teaching professor: absolutely worthless and largely done at your own peril.
Managing up is, in practice, 100% of a manager's job. I've been on teams where this was so easy I didn't even realize it was something I had to do. Leadership liked me, I could do whatever I wanted and they were happy. I've been at places where this was an impossible task (and I saw multiple other managers/leadership hires get let go very fast if they didn't "fit in", despite being hired to "shake things up"). I've been at places where I started on the ground floor, management loved me, loved my work, my team consistently outperformed... but never in a billion years were going to allow me "into the fold" so to speak.
I used to admire strong technical managers that had a great vision for how to solve problems, but I also have admiration for great teaching professors. In practice the best managers care primarily about politics and growing their personal stake in the organization. I've found that the more clueless they are the better (just don't point that out).
Now this is in the US, but I've met and worked with numerous absolutely top quality teaching professors and they had a disproportionately positive impact on their students. Many of them were happy and well adjusted and did not seem in much more of a precarious position than any other person I've met working a job for a similar amount of money in a field they enjoy. Obviously, it depends on the college, how well compensated you are, etc. But as far as I can see, the only thing that's absolutely worthless is sticking a top tier professor in front of a class of undergrads and forcing them to teach a low level class while simultaneously splitting their attention between twenty other responsibilities.
The nature of a 'teaching professor' job can vary a lot, but the positions are often very precarious and unstable, as I can attest from personal experience.
I think you may have misunderstood my point. Being a great teaching professor is an invaluable contribution to students lives and the world, but it is “absolutely worthless” as far as promotion and tenure is concerned.
My point is not “don’t respect teaching profs”, quite the opposite in fact: Recognize that the teachers that had an impact on you in university that had an impact on you not only to no career benefit, but potential to their own professional detriment.
Same goes for truly great technical managers. All the technical work they enable is through their own personal devotion and at best causes no professional growth, at worst takes away energy that should be spent elsewhere.
"Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a good teaching professor: absolutely worthless and largely done at your own peril."
If your reply above is what you meant to say, that was not at all clearly communicated.
> Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a good teaching professor: absolutely worthless and largely done at your own peril.
To your earlier point - even this is contextual. Incredibly high performing teams tend to be really hard to retain. It's not that hard to make your bosses love you if you're posting wildly out of band results - so the struggle is making sure the people who are actually making that happen stay on and stay engaged.
(I'll note that some of the most successful managers I know built their career on creating playgrounds for a small number of high performing ICs)
I am intrigued by your comment but a little confused as well, could you elaborate? What do you mean by ‘best manager’? Is that one who’s valuable and good for the org, or one that’s good at getting raises and promotions for himself and nobody else? If it’s the former, I’d love to hear more about why being clueless is helpful.
And what does one do if caught in the situation you describe of not ever being let into the fold? How do you manage up in that situation? Leave?
I suppose the "best manager" in this sense protects his/her team from the upper echelon politics, and, being clueless, does not bother meddling with technical decisions, letting the team do their work. Their worldview is captured in the famous quotation: «You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.»
Even though I think you are right, I believe your expectations for what a guide should do is wrong. A set of norms and practices are usually encoded in manuals, whereas guides serve for general orientation. In this sense, I believe if the guide is well written, it could well serve as an orientation for what to expect in order to adapt as a manager.
That is also true for ICs, we just pretend it isn't. If you're not good at playing politics and selling yourself, the next layoff will take you out, there's no amount of engineering prowess that will fix it.
> In practice the best managers care primarily about politics and growing their personal stake in the organization.
This is fine, and expected of senior management.
> I've found that the more clueless they are the better (just don't point that out).
This is toxic. Management at the senior level of these organisations has been completely detached from the activities on the ground.
A healthy functional organisation should have senior managers that understand the complete stack of layers, but especially at the level where the value is being generated they need to fully understand.
One thing that's missing from this - your metric of success will change, and you'll have to navigate that.
As an IC you have a tangible representation of what you accomplished that day - the doohickey now spins, the bloop now boops when you tap it, the clicky thing now does the clickity click.
In your first weeks as a manager you're going to look at your little box of accomplishments, find it empty, and you're going to ask yourself, "I didn't ship anything, am I doing the right things?". You will have to change what you qualify as an accomplishment, otherwise you'll long for the simplicity of attributing your success to the number of PRs merged or bugs fixed that week.
Intangible tangibles will become your potent potables, and that's OK.
It is very sad to see that in many companies, great engineers are forced to take on management roles to keep progressing in their careers. It seems to be the only path forward in many big companies.
It's rare that there are actually anywhere near as many roles at the top of the IC pyramid as there are in the people management track, by usually 3x or more.
If you want to get promoted to a higher level as an IC, you can compete for one of the maybe 3-5 staff+ spots available from the, say, 50 engineers around you. It's even rarer once you get above staff engineer, to the degree that it's disingenuous when most companies have a career ladder with those positions on it.
Or, you can shift to management, and have access to positions that might be as many as 10-15 per 50 engineers if you include middle and upper management. There never seems to be a cap on the number of vice presidents at a larger company.
It's unrealistic to just say "Oh continue to be an IC, do good work and take on more responsibility and you'll get a staff position", because there simply aren't the jobs available at most companies for staff, senior staff, or principal engineers. Also, it's often challenging to change companies when you're in those roles - you can't just pop down the street because a significant majority of companies just don't hire those roles externally very often. Contrast with management where being a director of engineering at company A often gives you a solid option on company B or a senior director role at company C.
Let experts at something be fucking experts. The moment good engineers take their hands off the keyboard, their skills start to quickly drift and degrade. Their experience in many things they were previously an expert on starts to go out of date. The number of roles they can apply to in the future is greatly reduced.
> Try simple, genuine questions you are interested in:
> “You mentioned going to the movies last weekend. How was it?”
This does not sound genuine. At all. It sounds like you are robotically adding a fact to your notes in one meeting, then reciting it in the next for points; like there’s a recipe you are mechanically following to ++relationship.
I understand that some people struggle with smalltalk and need literal scripts to follow to get them started. But do the examples have to make this so obvious? If you need to work on your smalltalk, maybe look somewhere else to improve those skills.
One million percent, this is the thing that stuck out most to me.
Maybe this is just so entrenched that it's a lost cause, but I feel like 90% of managers are just cargo-culting weird behaviors from other managers that serve no purpose (e.g. using a certain business slang like 'circle-back', never expressing genuine emotion, being incredibly circumspect, hiding the very existence of all disagreements).
It's a weird cultural thing, and what's especially peculiar is that nobody genuinely believes great leaders should do that. Everybody knows great leaders should be genuinely passionate and sincere and non-robotic. But here we are...
Business slang is no different to technical jargon really. It serves both to communicate some idea and that you are a member of the in-group who know how to use it.
As a related aside, the best practical book on progressing through management ranks as an engineer that I've found is The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier. Highly recommended.
Good suggestions, but you should also have some formal training on how to manage people on that list - every employer should offer it, and if they don't that's an _enormous_ flag.
I agree. Formal training and a manager program should happen before you get promoted. After promotion, 1:1 meetings with upper C-Level executives and/or manager tandems should exist.
When I first started managing, I thought it was all about making decisions and setting direction. But over time, I realized the more important part is learning to listen, to let go, and to give others the space to grow. Building trust and psychological safety is easy to overlook, but it’s the thing most worth practicing again and again.
I've heard management (and a skill I've learned to appreciate from leadership) is "creating alignment" amongst a group of people. Would you say that is different from setting direction?
Second question, if you don't set direction, what's the contrast/alternative?
I think “setting direction” is more about offering a goal or vision, while “creating alignment” means helping the team genuinely buy into that direction. Without alignment, even a clear direction is hard to execute.
If you don’t directly set the direction, you can still guide the team toward one through questions, listening, and open discussions. It may take more time, but people often feel more invested that way.
The best resource there is to not have them. They're fundamentally a waste of time. The best teams will self-organize and come to the right conclusions given vision, dare I say, leadership, from the top.
In theory, you don’t need 1:1s. In practice, if you don’t have them, some people will bottle up minor irritations until they become serious problems. 1:1s are a release valve for that. You can’t rely on everybody to proactively reach out when there’s a problem.
Also:
> The best teams will self-organize
Part of being a good manager is being able to manage suboptimal teams. It sure would be nice to hand-wave away problems with “the best teams don’t do that”, but you aren’t always dealing with the happy path.
I agree. My experience is that regularly scheduled 1:1s without an agenda seem to turn into therapy sessions for a surprising amount of people. I like doing ad-hoc 1:1s with specific agendas though, such as pair programming or an architecture session for an issue an Engineer is starting to work on.
I find it funny that management started referring to themselves as leadership in the recent decades. Maybe some are, but most are your run of the mil administrators that carry out whatever upper management says. Hardly leadership.
First a caveat - I’m not a manager. I am at the top of the tech tree in a large org, which carries with it “leadership responsibilities”. I’ve also worn many hats over the years in various employment, so I know a thing or two about management.
I think you are generally wrong. Yes, ‘manager’ carries with it a certain amount of administrative and organisational responsibilities, not to mention the important ‘soft skills’ with conflict resolution and the like. But to deny or minimise the value of providing leadership is to miss the forest for the trees. The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense. They are the cool, rational, respected hands that provide guidance, break ties in debates and help drive the team/s forward. They are required to think strategically at times, and are certainly invaluable tactically.
We are all accountable to someone, all the way up to the CEO (who is accountable to the board). To diminish the role and contribution of managers at the bottom of the management stack is to be wilfully ignorant of the value they are providing.
> The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense.
Good managers are leaders, but this is far from universal.
Most orgs have no shortage of managers who used be good individual contributors, and who were pushed into the management track due to seniority when the previous manager left, or who wanted the pay bump, but have no real leadership ability and have no business being there.
There are a lot of “it depends” here. I’ve worked at orgs where best engineer gets promoted to manager because… best engineer! And the result can be a train wreck. I’ve seen the reverse where managers from a business background are managing engineers (also can be a train wreck). There are also plenty of great managers who don’t “lead”; they go about their work building a great working environment and helping others succeed (often a senior engineer will be providing the leadership portion).
A good organisation will be good at offering opportunity to the right people and giving them the tools they need. I agree that a good org is rarer than it should be, which is probably the source of much cynicism.
>The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense.
It's a fine opinion to have, but on matters like this, I'm more interested in the opinions of those who are being lead. Plenty of leaders love to think of themselves as great leaders.
You are generally wrong, but minimally true. If what you wrote was true, these people would be titled leaders or officers. But they aren't. Because they aren't. It's not that complicated. And yes, rarely some people show leadership, but that's rarely a requirement to be a manager
When I was in high school, there was some quasi-curricular programming around "leadership" which I thought might teach me something about being in charge of a group of people or responsible for a collective outcome. Unfortunately it turned out to be a weird mishmash of personal virtue and volunteerism/activism. What I learned about delivering an outcome with a team, I learned stage-managing musicals.
You don't automatically get to call yourself leadership once you get into "management" (more like manglement) roles. And really, you have to choose. Are you a leader, of people? Or are you a manager... of resources? Your choice there will affect your mindset, and thus how you are seen to your "subordinates". God, I hate that term too.
How about just listening to your "direct reports" (vomit), and having that inform your "leadership"? Stop being a robot which is how this guide makes it sound. Be human. You'll get so much more out of people than by aping some management how-to.
Some of the worst managers I have had have been hired or promoted into the role, whereas the better ones were pushed toward that by the people that they would soon lead. The world is being taken over by bad managers, don't be one of them. Listen first.
Edit: The individual writing this guide appears to have only had barely two years in a hard 'management' role, according to their LinkedIn. How can they possibly be qualified to give advice on a subject that takes years and years and years of developing and refining soft skills, let alone consulting on the particulars of leading people in that time? Might as well run for President. What arrogance thinking they can go into an organization and infect it with the Tech-leadership-style-du-jour and think they've done some good.
> How can they possibly be qualified to give advice on a subject that takes years and years and years of developing and refining soft skills, let alone consulting on the particulars of leading people in that time?
This seems quite excessively harsh. He doesn’t claim to be an expert with all the answers. He literally opens with “I’ll walk through some of the early challenges I faced when transitioning into engineering management.” Surely folks should be allowed to talk about their experiences and what they think they are learning.
>The individual writing this guide appears to have only had barely two years in a hard 'management' role, according to their LinkedIn. How can they possibly be qualified to give advice on a subject that takes years and years and years of developing and refining soft skills, let alone consulting on the particulars of leading people in that time? Might as well run for President. What arrogance thinking they can go into an organization and infect it with the Tech-leadership-style-du-jour and think they've done some good.
The skills in leadership don't start developing when you become a 'manager' at work, it starts developing around the time you lose your baby teeth, maybe even before. From personal experience, there is little correlation between the amount of time spent in 'management' and how much one understands leadership.
But this post makes the biggest mistake, something I have struggled with in every management role: focusing on managing down.
Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a good teaching professor: absolutely worthless and largely done at your own peril.
Managing up is, in practice, 100% of a manager's job. I've been on teams where this was so easy I didn't even realize it was something I had to do. Leadership liked me, I could do whatever I wanted and they were happy. I've been at places where this was an impossible task (and I saw multiple other managers/leadership hires get let go very fast if they didn't "fit in", despite being hired to "shake things up"). I've been at places where I started on the ground floor, management loved me, loved my work, my team consistently outperformed... but never in a billion years were going to allow me "into the fold" so to speak.
I used to admire strong technical managers that had a great vision for how to solve problems, but I also have admiration for great teaching professors. In practice the best managers care primarily about politics and growing their personal stake in the organization. I've found that the more clueless they are the better (just don't point that out).
My point is not “don’t respect teaching profs”, quite the opposite in fact: Recognize that the teachers that had an impact on you in university that had an impact on you not only to no career benefit, but potential to their own professional detriment.
Same goes for truly great technical managers. All the technical work they enable is through their own personal devotion and at best causes no professional growth, at worst takes away energy that should be spent elsewhere.
"Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a good teaching professor: absolutely worthless and largely done at your own peril."
If your reply above is what you meant to say, that was not at all clearly communicated.
To your earlier point - even this is contextual. Incredibly high performing teams tend to be really hard to retain. It's not that hard to make your bosses love you if you're posting wildly out of band results - so the struggle is making sure the people who are actually making that happen stay on and stay engaged.
(I'll note that some of the most successful managers I know built their career on creating playgrounds for a small number of high performing ICs)
And what does one do if caught in the situation you describe of not ever being let into the fold? How do you manage up in that situation? Leave?
So fundamentally gross that this is true.
This is fine, and expected of senior management.
> I've found that the more clueless they are the better (just don't point that out).
This is toxic. Management at the senior level of these organisations has been completely detached from the activities on the ground.
A healthy functional organisation should have senior managers that understand the complete stack of layers, but especially at the level where the value is being generated they need to fully understand.
As an IC you have a tangible representation of what you accomplished that day - the doohickey now spins, the bloop now boops when you tap it, the clicky thing now does the clickity click.
In your first weeks as a manager you're going to look at your little box of accomplishments, find it empty, and you're going to ask yourself, "I didn't ship anything, am I doing the right things?". You will have to change what you qualify as an accomplishment, otherwise you'll long for the simplicity of attributing your success to the number of PRs merged or bugs fixed that week.
Intangible tangibles will become your potent potables, and that's OK.
- Report X made the doohickey spin
- Report Y made the bloop now boop when you tap it
- Report Z made sure the clicky thing now does the clickity click
Somewhat on time, somewhat on budget. Communications seem positive, no issues upon check-ins, maybe let's look into having fewer meetings...
Perfecto!
Ask that org for managerial training immediately.
It will save you so much headaches. IC and manager are totally different.
If you want to get promoted to a higher level as an IC, you can compete for one of the maybe 3-5 staff+ spots available from the, say, 50 engineers around you. It's even rarer once you get above staff engineer, to the degree that it's disingenuous when most companies have a career ladder with those positions on it.
Or, you can shift to management, and have access to positions that might be as many as 10-15 per 50 engineers if you include middle and upper management. There never seems to be a cap on the number of vice presidents at a larger company.
It's unrealistic to just say "Oh continue to be an IC, do good work and take on more responsibility and you'll get a staff position", because there simply aren't the jobs available at most companies for staff, senior staff, or principal engineers. Also, it's often challenging to change companies when you're in those roles - you can't just pop down the street because a significant majority of companies just don't hire those roles externally very often. Contrast with management where being a director of engineering at company A often gives you a solid option on company B or a senior director role at company C.
Let experts at something be fucking experts. The moment good engineers take their hands off the keyboard, their skills start to quickly drift and degrade. Their experience in many things they were previously an expert on starts to go out of date. The number of roles they can apply to in the future is greatly reduced.
"Up or out" is a goddamn cancer
> “You mentioned going to the movies last weekend. How was it?”
This does not sound genuine. At all. It sounds like you are robotically adding a fact to your notes in one meeting, then reciting it in the next for points; like there’s a recipe you are mechanically following to ++relationship.
I understand that some people struggle with smalltalk and need literal scripts to follow to get them started. But do the examples have to make this so obvious? If you need to work on your smalltalk, maybe look somewhere else to improve those skills.
Maybe this is just so entrenched that it's a lost cause, but I feel like 90% of managers are just cargo-culting weird behaviors from other managers that serve no purpose (e.g. using a certain business slang like 'circle-back', never expressing genuine emotion, being incredibly circumspect, hiding the very existence of all disagreements).
It's a weird cultural thing, and what's especially peculiar is that nobody genuinely believes great leaders should do that. Everybody knows great leaders should be genuinely passionate and sincere and non-robotic. But here we are...
Second question, if you don't set direction, what's the contrast/alternative?
Also:
> The best teams will self-organize
Part of being a good manager is being able to manage suboptimal teams. It sure would be nice to hand-wave away problems with “the best teams don’t do that”, but you aren’t always dealing with the happy path.
I think you are generally wrong. Yes, ‘manager’ carries with it a certain amount of administrative and organisational responsibilities, not to mention the important ‘soft skills’ with conflict resolution and the like. But to deny or minimise the value of providing leadership is to miss the forest for the trees. The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense. They are the cool, rational, respected hands that provide guidance, break ties in debates and help drive the team/s forward. They are required to think strategically at times, and are certainly invaluable tactically.
We are all accountable to someone, all the way up to the CEO (who is accountable to the board). To diminish the role and contribution of managers at the bottom of the management stack is to be wilfully ignorant of the value they are providing.
Good managers are leaders, but this is far from universal.
Most orgs have no shortage of managers who used be good individual contributors, and who were pushed into the management track due to seniority when the previous manager left, or who wanted the pay bump, but have no real leadership ability and have no business being there.
A good organisation will be good at offering opportunity to the right people and giving them the tools they need. I agree that a good org is rarer than it should be, which is probably the source of much cynicism.
It's a fine opinion to have, but on matters like this, I'm more interested in the opinions of those who are being lead. Plenty of leaders love to think of themselves as great leaders.
Leading is having an affect on those around you such that they voluntarily look to your for input.
Any role at a company can do that, so to try to pretend that falls directly on management lines is a white lie managers tell themselves.
You seem to have an axe to grind and that is fine. Someone might have wronged you in some way but you don't really say how or why.
If you need to vent, then feel free - we are all friends here, within reason (but don't say names - it's best that way).
I wouldn’t put too much weight in these terms as form of identity.
How about just listening to your "direct reports" (vomit), and having that inform your "leadership"? Stop being a robot which is how this guide makes it sound. Be human. You'll get so much more out of people than by aping some management how-to.
Some of the worst managers I have had have been hired or promoted into the role, whereas the better ones were pushed toward that by the people that they would soon lead. The world is being taken over by bad managers, don't be one of them. Listen first.
Edit: The individual writing this guide appears to have only had barely two years in a hard 'management' role, according to their LinkedIn. How can they possibly be qualified to give advice on a subject that takes years and years and years of developing and refining soft skills, let alone consulting on the particulars of leading people in that time? Might as well run for President. What arrogance thinking they can go into an organization and infect it with the Tech-leadership-style-du-jour and think they've done some good.
This seems quite excessively harsh. He doesn’t claim to be an expert with all the answers. He literally opens with “I’ll walk through some of the early challenges I faced when transitioning into engineering management.” Surely folks should be allowed to talk about their experiences and what they think they are learning.
The article doesn’t use that term and neither do any of the comments here. If you hate the term, why are you bringing it into the conversation?
The skills in leadership don't start developing when you become a 'manager' at work, it starts developing around the time you lose your baby teeth, maybe even before. From personal experience, there is little correlation between the amount of time spent in 'management' and how much one understands leadership.