The manager's unbearable lack of endorphins

Like others, I empathize with this, but it got me wondering more what that difference is, because I have "achieved" a lot more in helping a group than I have as an individual.

Over time I have learned for myself, at least part of the reason, is that you don't get those moment when the thing works. Those immediate and really apparent moments, where you did the hard thing, and even if there is more to do, you solved the problem.

You don't get those moments as a manager, because people aren't machines and you can't assume anything. A hard won consensus building moment can be flip-flopped on, a coached employee who you thought really felt empowered can still struggle to speak up, etc.

In other words, I think success just tickles things different neurologically between IC and management, and I think recognizing that is probably critical to know.

If you are deciding to manage, you have to be ready 'give up' the high of solving directly or risk turning into a micro-manager or not giving enough autonomy. As a manager learning to be okay with struggling with why motivation or burnout is more of a struggle, and you just don't get those same rejuvenating moments.

At least that is how I have come to feel about it, but I am still learning to find what other moments I can recognize as a manager to allow my brain to get the rewards for the hard effort.

There was a time where I felt like this. Especially early as a founder as we began to bring on staff for the first time. I started to feel that if I wasn't building the things then someone would call me out for not being deserving of the founder title any more.

It took a long time to grow out of this feeling. These days I get a lot of joy from management. I try to look at myself like a coach on a sports team. I may not be on the field but I feel good when we win knowing the work I have done to help my team succeed.

I would agree with the author that the feedback loop is different. It is also often slower and more subtle. That doesn't however mean that it's not there. Perhaps the author is new to management, perhaps the author just really likes being an IC. Their journey is their own but I would certainly say there are many paths to endorphins as a manager, even as a manager of managers.

I get it. But I also think it goes to show why some folks shouldn’t be people managers.

I drive my staff like „coding problems“. I push them to overcome challenges or shield them when I feel something is impacting their performance capacity.

Seeing my team execute a complex challenge or close a complex contract is a huge endorphin boost.

Alas, there’s always going to be more people who are good at playing the game than managing the players. And most players make terrible coaches.

I'd argue the lack of feedback comes from the disconnect between the actual product and the business at so many software companies.

If the language of business is accounting than the operations of a business is software. Why then do so many people only care about one of these?

Everyone wants to talk about the 10,000ft view, yet so much of a business is usually opaque anyway? Worse is when you are transparent and the people on the other side of the house don't even know what they're looking at. I think it's becoming increasingly unacceptable that people want to stay specialized or are prevented from being given more responsibility as they progress in their career. The hierarchies at so many places are often a big fat lie protecting incompetence and avoiding meaningful collaboration.

This is only tangentially related but I need to vent because that first paragraph really bothered me, not because of the OPs experience but because it highlighted something I will never feel and I’m bitter about it.

I have never once in my life felt like a god for completing anything. For the longest time I also never knew why other people were so obsessed with personal goals. It’s only very recently I realized that, A those two things are entirely related and B that’s one of the main reasons why life with ADHD is so fucking impossible.

Because ADHD not only robs you of your ability to pay attention, to interact normally in social situations, to perceive time, to do the things you want to do, when you want to do them, to remember who you are and what you’ve done, or are currently doing, of the the experience of having a clear mind, and the ability to hear yourself think without getting distracted.

It also robs you of the experience, that I now realize is not at all metaphorical and is actually felt by basically everyone else, of feeling good after you achieve something.

It leaves you with no drive or reward mechanism, I will never have the experience the OP had, because my brain will never create that experience for me.

So I drift from one interest to the next, because the only reward I get is from novelty, as long as things are interesting I can stay focused, but as soon as I loose interest my brain stops giving me a reward signal and I move on.

But that reward is not satisfaction, it does not build self confidence in my own ability, nor does it drive me to improve. all it does is satisfy a need.

I think that’s the most debilitating thing about adhd. The lack of that most basic feedback loop is why I have essentially no self confidence, because there is no mechanism for me to feel good about myself, there is only a drive to find new shiny objects, never to polish and improve the ones I have.

I have personally found this high by seeing people grow. It amazes me to see what a person can do with the right advice and trust.

Also, being engaged with the company's vision helped me feel more "connected" with what's behind the screen, and feel good for delivering value for our users.

I feel this a lot. There are two ways, that I've found to be useful to counteract the feeling of ennui.

First, is to still do coding myself. It's extremely satisfying and helps keep me grounded in the code base.

The second is to focus on the financial metrics of the business. Hitting revenue numbers is a pretty intoxicating. But this only works when, like me one is responsible for sales.

I empathize with this article, not much about a manager's schedule is energy-giving, and plenty can be energy-taking.

However, I have found a significant source of endorphins through community activities. I've been part of committees, co-chair of a technical special interest group, and have been invited to speak at major events. Perhaps amplified as someone who used to harbour a lot of social anxiety, I get a very nice rush of endorphins from these extracurricular activities. I definitely encourage other managers to volunteer for groups and events related to their specialty.

This definitely makes me more confident in my “manage code, not people” philosophy in my career. I live for the technical problem solving, and I’d take work satisfaction over X% wage increase any day.

It was one of the main driving forces that pushed me out of the military. They expected you to keep ranking up, and once you hit E5 or so the amount of non-management roles dried up. I saw what the remaining higher up programmers did all day and didn’t want any part of it.

This reflects my feelings very accurately. I’ve spent most of my career as a high performing IC, and I absolutely loved the feeling of creating new things and exploring new ideas, getting deep into both the technical side of the problem and the understanding the business domain and seeing the system come together.

Helping other people grow has also been important to me. Mentorship and teaching have always been things I prioritized. When I moved into a management role a couple of years ago it was because I’d done the principal level IC thing before where I was extremely cross-functional and I wanted to try focusing on a specific part of the business and a specific team of people and try to grow them. I wanted to grow vertically rather than horizontally.

I think I’m a pretty good manager, based on feed back from my team and my peers, but the reality is that it’s enormously more draining than I ever imagined and there’s very little to concretely feel satisfied about at the end of a given day. When I became a manager I thought I’d just code in my spare time since I wouldn’t be coding at work, but in reality I’m far far more burned out from any given day of management than I ever was from the most stressful day as an IC. It’s hard to find the motivation after work, and I worry about my skills slipping over time.

In an abstract sense it feels good to see a product grow, and to grow a team, but practically speaking none of the success is mine. Every good thing that gets done is thanks to the people on my team. Their growth and accomplishments are ultimately thanks to them. I facilitate, I give direction, I find alignment and build consensus, hopefully I make things easier- but I personally accomplish nothing. It feels like being stuck running at top speed on a treadmill going nowhere. Being a manager means taking on none of the credit when things go well, and all of the blame when things go poorly.

Unfortunately, part of what got me into management at all was caring about the product and the people and no matter how much it sucks giving up and going back to an IC role seems worse. I don’t want to leave my team unsupported or risk them getting a worse manager, and I don't want to see the product my team owns fail due to a lack of leadership. I’m hopeful that in a few more years with more experience I’ll figure out ways to be happier with the situation, and until then I just try to remember that most people hate their jobs and I’m just lucky to have had almost 20 years of loving mine before moving into management.

I have never gotten an endorphin rush from exercise of any sort. I've never gotten an endorphin rush from solving a programming problem or any problem. Helping people feels good. Making sure people are organized feels good.

Edit: I always find it incredibly strange when people describe exactly like in this article "feeling like a fucking god" after doing something. Like, you ok? Having a manic episode? That seems like an overstatement and maybe you shouldn't be making any life decisions after doing something because feeling that good shouldn't be a reasonable frame of mind for decision making.

I don't agree with this at all, but I can understand how someone would feel this way. Personally, I find writing code and having meetings about equally gratifying.

I'm pretty good at delaying gratification in many aspects of life. I am responsible with finances, with health, and conscientious. If you can get endorphins from long term outcomes, you can probably enjoy management just as much as coding.

I think this is conflating two things:

Proof of exertion (work) and proof of impact.

An engineer making many commits is just proof of exertion. An engineer closing many tickets is proof of impact.

A manager can also do a lot of exertion with no impact - has 1:1s and listens and forgets its all within a year, talks to everybody like they have a shot at promotion even when he knows he has a fixed budget, makes 0 tough decisions around the product and obeys everything their manager says no matter how terrible.

But if you ARE making big swings at work (e.g. preventing whole bad projects from happening, or driving entirely new projects that were your own idea, contradicting your manager and being right, recruiting great connections, etc) then you should be able to find a record of your relevance [and if you can't then that's mentality thing].

"Manager" is a broad category, but in my case I am deeply involved in product design and technical architecture (with lots of input from my team) so I find that being able to plan a feature together, hand if off to one of my developers to implement it, and then see them successfully execute our vision to be just as exciting as if I had written it myself.

This is possible because I have exhaustive knowledge of the product, having worked on it for many years as an IC (and watched several other people struggle to manage it before I took the wheel). I imagine I'm a scenario where a manager and team are more disconnected, and nobody is really passionate about the product, that milestones would feel a lot more muted.

Managing a software engineering team is obviously different than an IC, but both have the same potential for feelings of endorphin rushes and mindless/meaningless work. Manager roles may more often have less defined goals than IC, but in either role I’ve always made up my own goals anyways. I think at the core the difference we are talking about is those that function best with little oversight/direction vs those that function best with a predetermined set of steps.

As an IC I was told “go make a thing that does this”, and as a manager I was told “lead a team that makes a thing that does this”, and that’s about it. I thrive in this environment.

I got the same endorphin rush as an IC when I demoed my MVP as I did as a manager when I pushed to get a high performer on my team a raise[0].

As a manager you make your own goals more often than not, but if you do it right it’s similar to how the blog post talks about beating a PR in swimming. My manager PRs are focused on 1) people’s growth, 2) team building, 3) performance improvements, 4) people’s fulfillment in work[1].

Outside of that I also have the metrics I send up the chain, which sometimes hit over longer periods as mentioned, but those aren’t where I get my enjoyment from work.

I think good manager should be focusing a good amount of their time on growing every individual in their team, as well as the overall team with it. Maybe the problem is that this isn’t ever actual taught to new managers in any impactful way. Maybe the problem is that management takes a completely different skill set, but both can be equally as enjoyable.

[0] the best part was after I told her and as she was walking back to her desk she said “I can’t wait to tell my husband I make more than him now”.

[1] as a manager, team member fulfillment sometimes means hyping up something that wasn’t actually that important, or having them brief things to leadership they wouldn’t normally because it would mean something to them, or giving everyone a chance to succeed, etc.. knowing what makes someone happy and making a point to reward them for hard work is the point.

What worries me about those kind of job roles is the missing or very slow feedback loop.

As a programmer I can learn quickly and get better, because I have very quick feedback loops when I do something wrong (compiler, CI/CD, continous deployments).

As a manager, architect etc. the feedback loop is month, years - if you ever really get something back. That makes it really hard to find out if you're really doing a good job or if you're trading short-term gains for long-time losses.

I personally think, this is why we often are so unhappy about managers or architects in our field and developers often look down on them. But it's just really difficult (and often unrewarding, see article) to get good at these roles.

> I do not get any sort of high from managing people.

> I don’t think anyone gets that same high from this role so this is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it’s one of the hardest adaptions to make when transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager.

The usual way to denounce managers as evil is to say they're all about wielding power over others. Wouldn't that be a counterexample? And the usual response to that is that managers are supposed to enjoy clearing roadblocks and getting everyone coordinated and able to be the best they can be; wouldn't that also be a counterexample?

The hardest part I found about being a manager was the lack of a feedback loop. I could never tell if I was doing a good job, or just coming up with bandaid solutions that were going to make things worse in the long run. I took a lot of satisfaction from supporting my team and seeing them grow, but not having those clearly identifiable wins which you can attribute to a specific action can be hard, especially when the losses are so much clearer (It certainly wasn't great for my self-esteem!)

I propose line managers be on-call 3-4 days a week so they continue to get that high and actually be useful :-)

Managers get endorphins on some special occasions: Closing a star candidate, getting a high-level promotion approved for an engineer, smoothly managing someone out, observing a brand new team make their first significant delivery.. what other circumstances?

Welcome to the wonderful world of system architecture! This is what it feels like to design complex sociotechnical systems. You know, how it should be done by theory and practice. You tell good people and they understand and agree. But then life happens and someone decides to prioritize their epolets and the funding source turns finicky and there you go.

But I disagree with the lack of accomplishment. Effectively, when moving up in the abstraction levels from code, reaction times get longer and risks higher. Let me tell you, the feeling when you see a team click together and finally raise to the occasion, is no less satisfying, than seeing code work. Even more so. But it takes frickin _years_ and happens much more rarely. I’m currently at a stage where a project I started on almost four years ago, is starting to deliver. And we are talking about a significant improvement on a national level. It feels good, man. It really does.

Oh, and with a manager, there’s the occasional pat on the back when goals are met on the timely basis. But nobody remembers the architect, if they have done their job properly. Thus is the nature of the beast.

Another thing that can work: peer work, showing someone who's blocked your strategies for understanding a system and imagining tests to check your hypotheses. If they come back to you with evidence that moves the team forward towards a win, that's a high five moment.

But the struggle is real.

Fundamentally, the role of management is to bamboozled and gaslight the individual contributors in order to squeeze from them the most labor for the lowest cost. Why should this continuous betrayal be rewarding?

Literally your only job is to soak up dissatisfaction with lies and misdirection.

> Where’s the high? Where’s that immediate endorphin rush? Where’s the event that makes you realise “hey, maybe I’m really fucking good at this”?

As a person who's had only bad managers (with one exception), this is a signal that I wouldn't want this person to be my manager.

Being a manager shouldn't be about yourself, your focus should be outwards.

I get it, not everyone can be the kind-hearted Samaritan who always thinks of others. But even if you're one of the self-centred majority who thinks the universe revolves around them, keeping your subjects happy is still a requirement if you want them to be productive and motivated over a long period of time. Don't they teach that in Management 101?