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Comment by ike2792 | Hacker News Reader

I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

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In my short-lived stint as the same, I also had the same take.

> But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”

This quote absolutely floored me. The author had a lot of bad management.

Agreed and sadly I'm not surprised. There are a lot of bad managers out there. But there are a good amount of good ones too.

I stayed away from the management track but friends who didn't tell me one of the metrics they are graded on is retention, i.e. if your reports leave at a more than average rate you will have a problem.

Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.

> If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

Collecting paycheck, protecting status quo, creating impression of work?

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