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There is always more stuff to do but a smart person would quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth doing. The managers I’ve seen promoted chase metrics only and don’t sweat the other stuff. The good ones also take care of the people. The terrible ones try to do everything and anything that they think might be good for the company and ultimately piss everyone off and burn themselves out.

> smart person would quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth doing

In other words, only stupid people have a work ethic?

If you want to word it that way… seems a bit crude you can have work ethic and channel it towards metrics instead

No you're simply wrong. Plenty of smart people have a sense of loyalty and want to do what's best for the company and their colleagues, not just what's expedient for themselves.

And it’s NOTORIOUSLY hard to attribute effective metrics to IT.

From a security standpoint (because that’s my wheelhouse), if you’re not under attack, your metrics suck, if you chase tickets, a lot of them get closed without effective resolution.

We’re not manufacturing widgets, and can’t earn that bonus by making 10% more widgets.

"2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait variety."

Big companies tend to hire "specialists" to do all those tasks you mentioned, which I think is a mistake. If the purpose of those tasks is to improve the function of product development, which can be rephrased as "make the coders more effective" then each of those people require a high bandwidth communication channel to the coders. You can only have so many people that you communicate a lot with, and so the effectiveness of those people in improving the effectiveness of product development is limited. Their job is to make sure the devs arent working in silos but they all just end up forming their own silos because its simply not practical to have high bandwidth communication with all these different groups of specialists.

Im talking about designers, product managers, project managers, user researchers, data analysts etc ...

My broader point is that I agree with your vision of what a manager should do but IME it's not how larger companies tend to be structured.

Even then, the manager needs to reaching out to those specialists, coordinating and nurturing those relationships. No one says the eng manager needs to be all of those roles, but as the member of the team without a "real workload" they should absolutely be the liason to the rest of the org.

Is it really that bad for a company to have over-hired? Wouldn't it be better for the employees wellbeing to have a company that over-hires rather than under-hires?