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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

I think it is growth or at least growth opportunity.

Acquiring incremental engineering skills is great and we should all do it. But let's admit that it's just that - incremental. You go from being a good engineer to slightly better engineer- something you already are.

When you pivot to management or something else that's more different to you - you are taking on a bigger challenge and there's no guarantee of success. In order to succeed you need to hone a whole different set of skills - and if you manage to do that, you will certainly have grown in a real way.

I totally get the sentiment that going into management isn't the only way to advance a career and I agree. I am just saying that those who take that path indeed open themselves up to a challenge and evolution.

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You are taking on a different challenge, not a bigger challenge. Almost all of your comment could equally describe going from being an engineer to being a dog walker, or a sous chef, or a roofer. Entirely different, and in your new career your prior skills will rapidly atrophy and become marginal.

In my closing on 30-year career in this industry, "managers" have been the least important part of any team, and had the least impact on success or failure. I'm not anti-manager at all (although I have spent my entire career trying to stop people who think they are rewarding me or giving me a promotion by giving me more "manager" duties. I have zero interest in deciding compensation or going to more meetings), it just truly is a position that is the closest to fungible. Everyone fear mongers about AI replacing engineers, but in the real world it could far more easily replace manager level resources.

I’m with you here.

I spent ten years in my 20s grinding to become great at engineering. I don’t regret it at all. And then when I did get those skills, many people in my life around me didn’t give a fuck, because I was leaving money on the table by not chasing status and management promotions.

It’s allowed me to get to a really good position at an advanced R&D company.

But I still hear the acclaim afforded to those who continue to ascend the ladder, and it stings a bit.

I suppose that is just people needing to believe in those things, and I should let it go.

It’s complicated.

> "managers" have been the least important part of any team, and had the least impact on success or failure

I'd disagree...I think it can be difficult to see what the manager brings in when a team is good and runs well enough. It's a lot more obvious when you get a bad manager: the team stagnates, loses focus, valuable members will quit (there's the saying "employees don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses"), recruiting also becomes harder.

There's too much to discuss in one comment, but managers that don't seem to be doing much while the team members are killing it are a precious breed and worth their weight in gold. An alternative way to look at it: they don't need to brag about being important, and have at least enough grasp of what their team does to not be standing in the way.

Great teams self-manage. Managers and management generally exist to ensure a baseline, but they can’t really do much more. In a strong team, everyone displays leadership properties, and they typically don’t listen to non-technical management.

Those teams seem pretty rare though. It also requires an org that lets the team not listen. Also what exactly is non-technical management? In most tech companies most managers are with a technical background. The problem is that they naturally drift further away from technology when not practicing it.

Great teams manage their productiviry themselves, but don't work in a vacuum. Whether their output is properly evaluated and rewarded entirely depends on their manager.

If they increased their product KPI by 150% but their manager had the goal at 200%, your team's suddenly underperforming. If they need 2 more engineers to fill specific spots, the manager will be the one pitching it to HR and convincing upper management to green light the expense. Same for the team budget in general, same for company-wise deadlines, resource allocations, what growth opportunity the memebers get. And so on, and so on.

There's a myriad of super critical things that members take for granted but go through their mamager and get screwed when the manager is bad at its job.

You could say the same about a manager becoming an engineer

I am the person you are replying to and I totally agree.

Isn't that a growth removal?

No. If I somehow start as someone who can "only" be a manager (say, mba route) and then learn engineering, I've stretched my capacity more than double.

Because I am not then gonna go down to a junior eng role, but I may flex into eng when it makes sense.

Thing is, it's easier to wing your way through as a manager than an engineer.

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