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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

I think this may backfire even more. Sure there are stories about how one can get by as a manager without knowing much or doing much, but that's rare. As a manager you have to answer to your boss and make sure team delivery is met. You will need to do budget and stay current with what's happening at work, so that you don't become clueless in meetings. This can be stressful at work since politics is inevitable.

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Yes, but all these things are "bigger picture" stuff.

It's not trying to comprehend 1000 little things at the same time using deep concentration, as a software developer does.

Not really. If you aren't able to concentrate for a long time, how can you join a meeting and catch the important stuff? If your mind is wandering and you appear to ask questions which have been answered you are going to sound like you didn't pay attention. I have seen people struggle to keep up because they have so many meetings so many emails and so many questions to take care. Sure you donmt code anymore, but you have a lot of little things to take care of. I work in infrastructure/operation so maybe that's different from a manager working on iOS product. Point is you will get frustrated and that's bad. It lowers your confidence, maybe.

My experience is limited to product development teams, however where I've worked managers are basically tasked with people management, technical leadership and cross-team relationship management. You are expected to know enough details about what every single member of your team does as well as what other teams are upto at a broad level, so you can act as the tie breaker when critical decisions need to be made. This is very much like holding 1000 different things in your head at a time except maybe not to a great depth. The biggest challenge I've faced switching from developer to manager is being in the middle of all that flies through your team and seamlessly context switching at a moment's notice. It's not deep concentration on one goal but simultaneously chipping away on multiple goals.

Speaking from my own experience it can still be a challenge because you have to context switch a lot and never go deep enough to truly understand a problem. You are relying on your engineers to be your eyes and ears. If you have all good people in your team you are really lucky. Otherwise it is a balancing game coaching some engineers to learn and get better, quickly figuring out solutions to technical problems that are raised, fighting back the upper management pressure while not trying to frustrate your team.

I didn't really mean, "not doing much", but more like being the type of manager that lets the team get on with the work by removing as much of the day to day business nonsense as possible.

Nothing you've described here requires deeper understanding or extensive concentration and can be done in ad-hoc manner.

Then you fail as a manager. Sorry our view on what's a good manager is different.

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