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Comment by yareal | Hacker News Reader

I'm an engineering manager who was formerly an engineer. I have always held that an engineering manager is not above the team, but within the team with a different role. Like, I do the following things:

Prevent other teams from reaching in and randomizing our priorities, work on promotion plans for anyone seeking promotion, manage customer/partner team relationships, ensure everyone has balanced feedback regularly, mediate disputes, collect information to manage upwards so we can still be funded, advise on team process but never mandate it, facilitate accommodations, manage poor performance so the team isn't dragged down, try to consolidate and clear meetings from calendars across the team.

If I'm not around, then all those things either don't get done or fall to the engineers themselves. I personally think it's useful to have someone on the team specialize in those activities for the benefit of the team. But I'll admit my bias.

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I'm going to rip into your examples not because I want to, but because this is the only comment with concrete examples I can use to show the fallacy of needing managers. Apologies.

> Prevent other teams from reaching in and randomizing our priorities, work on promotion plans for anyone seeking promotion, manage customer/partner team relationships, ensure everyone has balanced feedback regularly, mediate disputes, collect information to manage upwards so we can still be funded, advise on team process but never mandate it, facilitate accommodations, manage poor performance so the team isn't dragged down, try to consolidate and clear meetings from calendars across the team.

Now I won't pretend that these are not real problems that companies have, but I would argue (from my own experience) that they are not problems that all companies _must_ have. A company I worked at did not have these problems — _without_ a manager sorting them — and we had literally hundreds of engineers. Granted, this was a single company, and I've not seen it happen since, but if it can happen even once, then it proves the point.

It's a function of scale. Hundreds of engineers is very, very small scale. In an environment like that I totally agree that you can delegate these responsibilities to individual engineers and it's probably fine.

When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working together, those responsibilities become large enough that centralizing them makes sense.

Engineering management is just specialization of a role, based on the need to have a specialist fill that role. Just like a games studio with 5 people doesn't need a dedicated build engineer, but a game studio with 1000 people probably does.

> If I'm not around, then all those things either don't get done

That suggests at least one of:

1. a need to delegate more so that reports can be more autonomous

2. a need to groom replacements internally

If someone has a well-managed team, they should return from vacation with individual people having missed them but the company as a whole being unaffected.

I meant more generally, in the sense that if someone is never in the role. Like if someone says, "we don't need engineering managers". Of course you are correct in the short term where I'm stepping away from my role temporarily.

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