It's even better if as you say the success is determined by the team, because then also the failure can be pushed on the team.
Edit: FWIW not that I want to be a bad manager. The environment is what shapes your incentives and behaviours.
In fact, you are more likely to work longer hours, and attend meetings at stupid times because that's the only slot you can get the more senior managers to meet at.
However, you sound disillusioned with your work, and maybe you do need to transition into something else. A new challenge can revitalise you, and it doesn't have to be forever.
I've met plenty of engineers who seem to believe that everyone else's non technical role is easy. Keep an open mind, and don't approach new opportunities with a negative attitude, or you will probably remain discontented.
Not easy. But it's the difference between being the one who is approving and the one who is doing the work.
The one who has some autonomy and the one who doesn't. The one who is valued and the one who isn't.
Having to attend OOH meeting is less stress for me, then having to build something OOH and make it work. One requires communication, politics, the other one actual tangible deliverables.
> you sound disillusioned with your work
yes, you're right.
In my experience it’s like that (I’m talking about engineers vs eng. managers). Another significant difference is the amount of work, I believe: as an engineer I work 4h/day but those 4h are “hard” hours (fully focused) and my brain ends up a bit exhausted after. But that’s all I do in the day for work. On the other hand, eng. managers do more lightweight work, but work longer hours.
I have to say that in my experience, what my eng. managers were doing all day was: 1:1s, meetings with other managers to decide how to shift around people, interviews, being present at some sprint plannings without saying much, being present at some daily meetings without saying much.
Obviously, it depends on the organisation you work at.
For engineers it’s different: we have complete control regarding when to work, and we don’t have as many meetings as eng. managers have. So there’s more freedom in my opinion.
I think it’s not very realistic for a manager to say: I’ll work extra today so tomorrow I’ll work only 1h (because you probably have meetings to attend that you cannot postpone). As engineer, I work whenever I want and rest whenever I need it (as long as I meet deadlines and the like)
Of course I won’t actually know until I am one myself, but it certainly feels doable if I’m willing to sort of trust my team.
If you do become one and find you can control your schedule, please write it up and share!
However, there are so many parameters affecting this result that I wouldn't dare to make a call on which role is more tiring in general at a regular company.
- I'm less experienced as a manager, I have to continuously learn a lot and grow fast.
- This is in a young start-up context.
- This is with a very broad scope of responsibilities.
- I'm me.
- etc.
YMMV
The largest fatigue factor to me seems the amount of context switch I have to do as a manager.
Unless you work with someone internationally and the only time both teams are awake is at ungodly hours for both, so you never get any meetings at normal times.
On the other hand, even though eng. managers mostly do meetings, their calendars are usually packed with them. Even worse, they may have one meeting at 8am, another at 12, and another at 4pm… that kills your day completely since you have to stay available during the whole day. Definitely something I would hate.
But if it a project without intrinsic motivation or large and clearly present business value (like fixing an incident or saving a $10M client contract but not some hopeful!thing that might pay off in two years), then I keep my weekends to maintain myself as a human being (which ironically also happens to benefit the company on that two year time scale).
Neither is 100%, but if you try to push failure 100% onto the team, you’re going to have a really bad time personally and be rightly reviled as a weak leader by your team, your peers, and your senior leaders.
not in my experience tbh.
i worked 16 years as an Engineer across 6 orgs including Fang. What I saw is that the closer you are to management the more valued and rewarded you are.
Simply because you are doing the management's dirty work (your influence is direct) and you have more insight into finances, so it's more difficult for them to underpay you.
Credit very rarely flows down and when it does, in very generalistic way "thanks to X and Y and also the team for their efforts".
The thing being managed is the performance of the team. Bad performance == Bad management.
1. You’re wrong and you’ll find yourself working more 2. You’re right and you are screwing over your team.
There is something supremely disgusting in being forced to work on projects ("hey client X needs this Y thing done asap") that you don't care about, know they have a close to zero chance of working to an acceptable degree and also know you'll be blamed for their failure. Over and over and over.
You must have some very good managers who make their work seem effortless. Perhaps get them to be a mentor when you make the shift so when reality strikes you won't have to deal with it by yourself.