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This is honestly the best barometer of employee happiness. Managers who want to build political empires, don’t have their employees best interests at heart, who communicate poorly, who make questionable moral judgements, or push work down the pipe for the sake of doing work is what makes employees miserable. Companies who empower these types of managers are terrible to work for.

I also found out that there are a few bad "managers" that end up raising because they are popular with people and their bosses. They usually have a very high EQ.

You can see a few people with little technical acumen, shallow knowledge of the latest trends, very bad on processes and no work ethic that still rise in some organizations.

These people spend a lot of time "managing up" on a side and on the other side they are also nice with their employees. They help them move up the ladder and pay higher bonuses demanding less work than other bosses. It is hard to find even good employees give a bad review to somebody that give them extra money and make them work "comfortably".

Here's the part of management that is hard to understand as an IC:

1/3rd of my job is "managing up," that is, getting my boss what they need to get their job done. This can be defining a hiring process, or writing part of a powerpoint deck or getting them the information they need to write it up for their presentation.

1/3rd of my job is "managing across," or working with other managers - the "shit shield" is often from other managers who have their own pain points and are trying to work through issues like whose team has to deal with this ill-defined goal that doesn't really belong in any of the teams but is important. (Or saying that it isn't important after delving into the issue!) Or it's identifying a department-wide problem and working with a small group to have a proposal to solve it.

That leaves 1/3rd of the work on actually "managing down." That is mentoring, performance evaluation, conflict management, 1:1s.

And if your team is hiring, you spend another block on that. Most of us can't work 60 hour weeks consistently.

Are there bad managers? Sure! But some of what makes a good/bad manager is completely hidden. (I'd argue that it's a flaw in our organizational system in general - I'm starting to think we need more people whose job it is to organize the department as a system, and then have the engineering manager as a tech lead++.)

What about separating the career manager role from the tech lead role. That lets you do things like have the person coaching an IC on how to produce estimates be a different person from the one requesting the estimate.

I do not call defining a hiring process managing up. Hiring is part of creating a great team and in my own experience can take more than 1/2 of the manager time especially when you are "building a team from scratch" and you cannot delegate things like screening interviews to other people.

Back to the "managing up" I was talking about in my previous comment. I have seen some people spending more than 1/2 of their time on it. The reason I put it in quotes is because sometimes is time spent on getting visibility, becoming "good friends", and even brown-nosing. For any employee it is vital to have a good relationship with their boss in order to maximize her impact and develop influence. But when building camaraderie with her boss becomes the primary activity, it tells you something about the culture that that person is reinforcing and people that is attracting.

There is a difference between aiming to "create an alliance to get things done" and "develop a relationship to get recognized and promoted" Even if the two do not have to be mutual exclusive, the motivation for bad managers is predominantly in latter more than former.

And what is an order of magnitude better for a company? Someone that looks more for having an impact or a person that looks more to their advancement on the corporate ladder?

These are very astute observations and ones that I've seen as well after many years of work in tech. In a sense it's a case of "you get what you measure" where what we're trying to measure is how effective a manager is at deriving and delivering value from a team. However, a lot have found a way to "hack" how this value is communicated to their superiors.

A lot of poor managers I've worked with have a knack for taking work that is actually quite easy and communicating it as very challenging such that they (or their team) receive a lot of credit for it. As you stated in the other post, they may also be good at making their employees feel that there is great value in work that is also fairly trivial or non important. In a micro scale, this looks like a good thing (people are happy), but in a macro scale, it may not actually move the business forward very much.

At the end of the day, it often sadly boils down to "it's not what you did but what people think you did" that matters.

That is definitely one of the things I observed some manager doing. Slightly related situation is when an engineer does that and can do it because the manager does not understand at all how the system that is under his responsibility work.

Thing is that you are never going to be able to hire good managers 100% of the times if you are scaling. So entire focus of scalable process should be on how to minimize, defend against and eliminate bad apples as fast as possible. The primary mistake that many companies make is to have manager implicitly trusted without validations and give them almost dictatorial powers. The good process would add checks and balances even at CVP levels, for example,

- hiring by committee as opposed to whims of a given manager

- introducing bar raisers in hiring loop

- promotions requests reviewed by independent committee

- demand for metrics driven automated dashboards

- enforcing skip level 1:1s

- anonymous surveys and complaint box

- enforcing culture of proper credit attributions instead of "we did X"

And then you've forgotten about the product and will end up with a culture like Google that focuses on technical complexity as opposed to adding value towards the business and focusing on building products.

Completely in agreement. Hire a bad leader when the company is growing and you risk one year later to have the whole company infested by all sort of people that you would not like to have around (managers included).

Some companies completely screw up themselves because of this. Startups usually do not think about this early enough and when the founders realize what is going on is too late and the company culture is screwed.

My favorite Steve Job's video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKis2Cfpeo

Especially if you witness it as an employee and run it up the chain as far as possible and it gets ignored.

Having had good and bad in my career has saved me from realizing that this was happening and that I shouldn't sit idle but if I'm not idle and do something it becomes extremely disheartening to watch this happen (and then I leave when it becomes apparent that nothing will be done and I'm miserable under my manager)

In a company with these kind of problems, if you try to run it up the chain, it usually gets "captured" very early on from allied powers of the bad guy. In a healthy company with the right "antibodies" in places, a bad apple has more chances of being caught before it spoils the whole bunch.

Great point - the reason why no one is talking about this is because they have NO IDEA if the manager is good or not.

Many assume the people that they hire are flawless. That's why you see all the posts on hiring. It's easy for people to think they know everything at this point. It's like celebrating after you acquire a customer...what really matters is if they stay (and how long).

Currently, there's no feedback loop in place to surface this information. Some companies will do a culture or 360 survey that highlights a few issues here and there, but it's a poor process for determining competence and it's administered by HR (or some function of HR). It needs to be owned by the team leader (and hopefully their boss).

I've been working on an app (https://www.fridayfeedback.com) for the last three years to try to help this. Eng teams love it because it's asynchronous and surfaces new insights to help teams improve.

(context: I'm an engineering manager at stripe)

Stripe uses the same process for scaling our management corps as we do our ICs. All the steps are tailored to the role the person would be filling at the company.

That being said, I think this is a great point. All the considerations others have brought up in this thread can be multiplied for manager roles. It's very important to get this right when you're scaling up a team!

I agree with this. I have already worked as an individual contributor for 10 years.

I have improved a lot technically because there are a lot of programs that allowed me to learn.

But not once have I been taught to manage people.

After realizing that I am getting nowhere career wise as an individual contributor, I am currently seeking out opportunities to learn management.

The difference between the few companies I've been at has been made to seem like a laying down in a valley versus standing atop a mountain now that I have a good manager.

What does a “good manager” look like?

Exactly. If I could find good managers couldn't I just find good employees?

This seems like the answer to the first line question of "how do I scale an engineering organization?" but you are not at an addressable solution yet. It's valuable but not sufficient.

Not sure I understand the point you are making with your question?

I would focus on somebody that is able to lead, first. You manage things, you lead people. Management is about handling complexity. Leadership is about creating simplicity.

I think the full answer to your question would deserve at least blog post ;-)

You grasp that you're not the talent. The job is to facilitate and enable those that are. You are Brian Epstein, not John Lennon.

Someone who brings their team achievable goals, and the resources they need, and then gets the hell out of their way.

Someone who encourages leadership (in all its many forms) to come from within the team, and doesn't see it as a challenge to their authority.

Someone who understands that respect is not magically granted by position.

Someone willing to make decisions - sometimes tough ones - on behalf of the team, to communicate both with and on behalf of the team, and defend the team's integrity and autonomy.

Someone who understands that communication starts with listening.

Managers are often senior technical leaders and in those cases are 'the talent' in some capacity.

There are several common things to look at, just off the top of my head. These all take practice.

1. Organization skills/project management skills: ability to pull together internal/external resources, ability to create clear plans, ability to build relationships with other teams to make cross-team collaboration easier

2. Communication skills: ability to deescalate and mediate conflicts fairly, ability to give both positive and negative feedback regularly, ability to create psychological safety, ability to deliver bad news while maintaining psychological safety, ability to run efficient meetings, ability to make unpopular decisions while still commanding the team's respect, ability to engage with different personality types and communication styles

3. Delegation skills: ability to translate ambiguous directives from above into actionable tasks for the team, ability to arrange tasks so that individuals have the creative freedom to figure out how to do it, predictability in decision-making, ability to shield team from external pressure, ability to give negative feedback immediately, ability to fire low performers before they fester into team morale and culture problems

4. Coaching skills: ability to give targeted advice, ability to match employee's own aspirations and growth objectives to projects, enough technical expertise to point people in the right direction, ability to evaluate skills and hire for them

a pratical manager

> these all take practice

They also often take theory. If you’re reading this and trying to learn more about management, don’t shy away from taking some time to read good books which teach about the theory of, say, how to be good at feedback.

1. Have clear goals. 2. Communicate your goals clearly. 3. Ask what people need to achieve the goal, and actually LISTEN deeply. Negotiate deadlines/resource allocation until the crew can honestly commit. 4. Dedicate your efforts to getting the crew what they need. 5. Reiterate your clear goals often and clearly.

Do Repeat Yourself

Praise in public, criticise in private. Give the team credit for success and take blame yourself for failure.

Get those right and everything else will follow. So simple but only a fraction of managers get it.

Most of the books/articles you read will give general advice, which varies depending on the individual/team. Here's what I typically recommend:

1. Create a continuous feedback loop with every single person on your team. This is why 1-1 meetings are extremely helpful.

2. Understand where each person on your team wants to go (career goals). Do they want to become X in 2 years? Do they even want to work in tech at all? Find ways to help them get there.

3. Document all the important conversations you have. Share it with the person. Most miscommunication happens when you talk about something and it's interpreted in various ways. Documenting these conversations and sharing them helps cut down on this.

4. Act like you care about them as a person.