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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

Alternative: apply for an engineering manager position. The tech part is quite easy (none or very few easy leetcode stuff). After some time (can be e.g. a couple of months) you can transition to software engineering position (same level) without any extra tech interviews.

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No company is hiring an engineering manager who doesn't have 5+ years of management experience. It's not a role you can just apply for as an IC.

I have actually seen several colleagues jumping into EM roles (Engineering Manager) with just a year of experience being a manager, or even from just being a team lead (technical leader, not manager).

In companies that have the first level of management at the same seniority level as the Senior Engineer, it's very doable.

At at least some FAANG companies (Google and Meta), EM1 is parallel to L6/Staff.

At Amazon you could become an EM1 by switching internally from SDE2 (L4 at Google/Meta). Also, in other companies like Datadog, Cloudflare, the first level of EM (used to be called Team Lead) is parallel to Senior Engineers.

I can't imagine how you would accomplish this. I mean, I'm sure there are companies that hire MBAs to directly manager engineers, but not at any of the companies I've worked. Everywhere I've worked the only way to be an engineering manager is to have 5+ years of experience as an engineer.

I've tried that, people don't see me as a manager, for them.

Its a different "culture fit" metric than IC. I prefer IC, I've just also done what you're suggesting.

I've ran companies before too, been technical founder a couple times, have done plenty of side projects with remote agencies as well, which turned into companies. I've been "lead" in IC, or been promoted to Engineering Manager. When I'm on the job market and trying engineer manager, I've had comprehensive answers for everything, people don't see me as the manager. I've tried a more social approach as well and a variety of iterations. Nope. They don't see me.

>people don't see me as a manager, for them

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Do they focus more on your IC experience and reject with the excuse that you don't have a lot of years being a people manager? Or did you mean something else?

I don’t know what they focus on, I’ve had many assumptions to A/B test over many interviews

I have a lot of experience people managing though in successful projects and teams! I guess I never found the Cracking the Engineering Manager Interview book

That's an interesting approach, and indeed I have seen it happen. In some companies though, the interviews are very similar and include coding as well even for managers, so might not be a silver bullet.

I do think though that if you are OK being a manager for at least a year, it's a very viable path!

There are fewer management positions than IC roles so this seems like it’s making things harder.

The number of engineers applying to management positions is low as well.

I really doubt you can do that at AWS.

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