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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

No, in the before times, we called this a project manager.

The project manager worked closely with the architect, but the architect focused exclusively on the high-level code/engineering part, not the end-to-end understanding of the whole thing that involved management, partners, corporate processes, approvals, etc.

(And note the distinction between project manager and product manager, two entirely different jobs. Project managers stereotypically use Gantt charts to focus on timelines and contingencies and processes; product managers focus more on user needs and product-market fit.)

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Now, that responsibility has been dumped on Tech Leads, who have neither the power of the Project Manager, nor the responsibility of the Product Manager.

And depending on how your company selects Tech Leads, they might not have the technical ability of an Architect, or hell, even a senior engineer.

That's because they're an engineering manager in tech lead clothing.

It's so the company can say they have more engineers and less management, but still fill all of the roles that they need managers to do.

(I've written elsewhere how you can run without engineering managers - see https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2024/03/31/a-world-without-en... - but the roles that need to be filled don't stop.)

I'm the living example of this. I'm an engineer who thought he's signing up to be the TL to design the architecture and implement the hard parts, and at some point I realized I'm doing a terrible job because in reality I'm just EM-ing this project 90% of the time, while my manager is busy with something else.

I've learned the lesson the hard way.

I submitted that article over here [1], would be interesting to see a discussion on that in itself.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144389

As a Staff Eng, I strongly related to this. At big tech in Silicon Valley, the Tech Lead archetype does tend to do all the Project Management and, depending on whether your team can afford a Product Manager (eg. Infra team), some or all of the Product Management.

IMO, it's a little unfortunate from a productivity perspective that you have a high performing Engineer also running daily/weekly syncs, doing stakeholder management, and doing upwards management for resourcing. From a personal learning perspective, it's great though. You, as Tech Lead, learn and hone a broader set of skills and not only the Architect or Senior Engineer skillset.

I thought this was only happening in academia

>And note the distinction between project manager and product manager

And then there's the product owner.

Agree on the role distinctions, but the best people in any of those roles will be able to see/do some of the important factors in the other domains and ask questions like "so what does success for this project look like?"

> Project managers stereotypically use Gantt charts to focus on timelines and contingencies and processes

...and dependencies between teams/stakeholders. :)

Ok, the before-before times then.

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