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Comment by halfmatthalfcat | Hacker News Reader

Most of the "engineering managers" I've had to work under have been utter bullshit. Didn't learn anything from them (technically or in regards to leadership) and were there merely to check a box, play babysitter and/or sit in meetings all day that had zero impact on our work streams.

The few who did have impact (1) were skilled engineers in their own right and were able to translate that into more management, (2) understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively. Those are very few and far in-between imo.

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> sit in meetings all day that had zero impact on our work streams

maybe the manager was busy in meetings all day in order to ensure you had zero impact on your work streams :)

the role of an EM in a large organisation is in large part to be an "enterprise abstraction layer", ensuring the people in the team(s) can work in a way that is as close as possible to what they could do in a startup/solo project

That abstraction layer doesn't add value IMO, it modifies the message like a game of telephone.

it's more like protecting the team from being shut because some asshole somewhere managed to convince an exec that there was overlap with their team, or raising warnings when some product idiot has a new idea that's obviously going to end up having a last-minute dependency on the team, hustling to get licences to use Circle instead of Jenkins or whatever, etc

So middle managers are important because upper managers are fucking awful? That's the idea? We need the middle-management tier because of the upper-management tier? And why is the upper-management tier there? To protect middle-management from the C-tier? I think you're kinda making our point here.

100%. And all of the above are necessary because customers and investors are the fucking worst.

Ok, that’s how the world works, do we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend we can ignore it? Or do we embrace it and accept the rules of the game?

> Ok, that’s how the world works, do we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend we can ignore it? Or do we embrace it and accept the rules of the game?

Imagine having this attitude about literally any other widespread problem.

"Ok, everyone is spewing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Do we close our eyes and ignore it, or do we join them and roll coal? LET'S BURN SOME FUEL BOYS"

"Ok, everyone is dumping toxic waste into the river. Do we just ignore it and keep drinking, or do we embrace it and just chuck our own toxic waste in there?"

"Ok, everyone is eating each other in Satanic canniablistic rituals. Do we just pretend it's not happening and go about our day, waiting to be eaten? Or do we fire up the grill and go on a hunt!?"

Um, how about a third option: we be vocal about how the problem is an actual problem and work together toward fixing it?

I have a kind of motto/heuristic: if everyone is wrong, you're the problem

Buffering, filtering, and mapping information has value. If that consumes a full day, every day, it can no longer be broadcast to every engineer.

It’s a nuanced thing. An EM should share accurate context, filter distractions, and deliver it in the most effective way for that team.

There’s also the shielding aspects in dysfunctional organizations which is a whole other thing.

>> the role of an EM in a large organisation is in large part to be an "enterprise abstraction layer", ensuring the people in the team(s) can work in a way that is as close as possible to what they could do in a startup/solo project

I worked for a guy like that. Sometimes technical decisions would bubble up and I'd get mad that he wouldn't resolve them but push them back down. I started to think he didn't do much of anything. Turns out he spent most of his time in higher level meetings finding out what projects were coming and ensuring we were properly staffed and projects got scheduled reasonably. He'd go into a meeting uninvited because "this project doesn't involve software" only to discover that there would be a software component to the project and make sure that was covered. Turns out once I knew what he was actually doing I'd say he was one of the more effective managers I've worked for. Things usually ran smoothly and random shit never dropped from other parts of the company unexpectedly. He did zero engineering (but he had previously), and most of what he did was unseen to us. Life was good because we lived behind an invisible shield.

Appreciate you sharing this anecdote. There's multiple archetypes of "successful" managers (i.e. meaning different ways of being useful, not success in terms of kudos or promotions or whatever), and the one you highlight is what I think of as the base/foundational value that a manager should provide (i.e. that one is able to create the quality of "smoothness"). Then, a truly exceptional manager, may also be a technical leader, may also contribute architecture or code, may also be a star recruiter/attractor/retainer of talent, etc. But IMO those are add-on's, and a base manager should first keep the ship on course first.

The quiet enterprise professional, preventing fires and course-correcting to avoid "random shit" or missed requirements, just very non-sexy/non-glorious work, and a pretty literal example of, "if you do your job right, then no one will notice you did anything at all."

You did a great job describing quality management

It's like good infrastructure, if you don't notice it and you can proceed through your life with minimum distractions, that means it's working as intended.

This is an excellent comment that really does distill down what an EM is supposed to be.

As someone who's been on all sides of this (currently an EM, been a tech lead and an individual contributor in the past), I really think there is a lack of understanding among large parts of the tech community about what engineering managers do. A good manager's first and primary responsibility is to reduce chaos for their team. In an ideal world you won't even know I'm here, because I am shielding you from all the stuff that is going on further up in the company and clearing out obstacles so that you can work without interference.

Good managers reduce chaos, bad managers create chaos. In my experience, engineering managers are a lot like all other employees: you have a few outstanding performers, a significant number of average/acceptable/mediocre managers, and some number of pretty bad ones. The difficulty comes in knowing which type you have, and often that only becomes clear when a manager leaves. Either a new EM makes things better, or things get dramatically worse because a good EM is no longer helping the team.

It's like that Futurama episode where Bender meets God: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

Playing gatekeeper is an extremely common symptom of someone with imposter syndrome on a power trip.

IME, The managers who believe this tend to hide too much information from their team. The team doesn't have enough context as a result, and is in the dark re. what's really expected of them by higher-ups.

If you have to have people sitting in meetings all day just to avoid corporate crap to clutter you devs' work than you have a bit problem in the upper layer of the organization. Best solution is to leave.

I think you're right, but I think you're stopping short of recognizing that maybe this is a reason why so many ICs have issues with the EM role. If the role of an EM is to be a Shield Against Complexity for the team, then two things are induced to happen more frequently:

1) The EM looks up far more often than down.

2) The ICs miss out on collaboration which could be critically valuable to their projects, careers, and broader understanding of the business.

But that's the average! Some EMs pat themselves on the back and say "look at all these meetings y'all didn't have to attend, so you could focus and get the good work done all day" when in reality they didn't do anything remotely near the title of their role: Engineering Management. Managing the Engineers; not managing project dependencies, not managing leadership, not managing politics, but leading the people who report to them.

Great engineers swim in that complexity; and great EMs expose their team to (the relevant parts of) it.

Your last paragraph is basically the gist of it. Managers who make an impact are recognized as such by their team. They manage the team to do their best work possible.

The model of manager as a babysitter is, I think, what happens when an organization gets to a certain size. Once the organization gets big enough, management becomes a vehicle for bureaucratic surveillance. At that size, an organization uses managers to give a human face to bureaucratic machinations.

> understood that managing down is much more important than managing up and (3) knew how to say "no" to upper management effectively.

Wait, saying "no" to upper management _is_ managing upwards. If you have a high performing team you can damned near ignore them as long as you're paying attention to what matters to them so that you can manage up effectively and keep bullshit off their place. If you have a team that needs a lot of help then yes, you have to focus on managing "down" -- but that's the less common scenario in my experience.

I suspect you're defining "managing up" as "brown-nosing" -- which is just managing up ineffectively. Being good at managing up and out is honestly the bulk of the job at most organizations; engineers can usually just do their thing.

I didn't say that there is no managing up, only that managers should be focused on managing down while simultaneously pushing back against top-down bullshit. I've usually seen managers just focusing on the later (whether it's ass kissing, career gunning or from bullshit) while neglecting their team.

The big secret is most engineers would be better off moving into management ASAP. It pays better, less intellectually demanding, and is far easier than claimed. Management failures are often pinned to their direct reports.

If they needed to play the babysitter, then you know why they were there...

Same, I've had exactly one EM who wasn't bullshit and he matched your criteria perfectly.

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