I'm a 44 year old senior engineer, and the one thing I've noticed is that bad managers are almost universal in technology. I've had about 20 managers in my career and I can count only 2-3 that I would consider great managers, the rest ranged from mediocre to incredibly incompetent.

This, to me, is the #1 reason I gain much more satisfaction from doing consulting work on the side: I'm my own manager, and I can make decisions that are right for the customer, instead of getting told by an incompetent manager that he knows better than I do, which leads to bad outcomes for myself and the client.

I'm much more selective as well, and no longer tolerate bad leadership. This is the biggest challenge with finding the right job. I've discovered that almost 90% of your job satisfaction depends on having a good manager. You can actually enjoy a job that doesn't pay as well, and doesn't have as much meaningful work, if you have a great manager, because they can actually help you to make the work meaningful in the right context.

Why do think is the reason that most managers in technology are bad? I tend to think of management as abstraction. A mid-level manager provides an abstraction of the work for high-level management and at the same time is provided an abstraction of the work by the low-level managers or engineers. Assuming that my understanding is right, are these abstractions leaky? is the lack of technical knowledge the reason why managers are bad?

I think it's because most technology managers are too disconnected from the actual work, and don't understand what their employees actually do. Obviously, there are a few examples of tech leaders that remain hands on, but it seems that when most engineers transition into leadership, after 2-3 years, they've become so disconnected from anything hands on that they are just bad.

I'll give an example: a software development manager meets with the customer directly, without bringing a developer with him, because hey, this is an executive meeting and I'm an important manager, and I want to score points with this customer. He proceeds to commit his team to delivering a solution on an unrealistic timeline, and doesn't realize that the solution he committed to deliver won't work in the customer's environment because of $various_reasons. Now, his team of poor software engineers is faced with two impossible options: attempt to deliver an impossible outcome on an impossible timeline, or give the customer bad news. Of course, the manager doesn't want to take the blame for bad outcomes (only the credit for good ones), so he makes his engineers deliver the bad news to the customer. Ultimately, the customer is unhappy, and the developers are unhappy.

Most of the bad managers I've seen spend more time "managing up" and trying to score points with their managers than helping their employees succeed. The really good managers realize that they work for their employees, not the other way around, and are a heat shield, motivator, and advocate for their team, willing to fall on their sword if necessary to protect their most junior engineers.

I don't necessarily disagree with you but I think there is a second half to the problem. Half the managers are as you describer, but the other half are put in management positions on the basis of only technical ability and actually have no clue how to manage a team and in fact don't really care about doing that at all. Their passion is tech and will always be tech, but they are managing the team for status or career progression or whatever.

Yes, you're right, I think I described the one end of the spectrum where you have someone that chose to move into a management role because they never were that good at the hands on work, and on the other end of the spectrum, you have the brilliant genius hackers that think going into management will help them advance their career, not realizing that the skills that make them 10x engineers are not going to help them even be a 0.5x manager.

I agree with everything you wrote, and have found that by and large companies don’t reward the good managers you described. The lack of recognition gets exhausting and eventually those good managers either leave management or start focusing on managing up for their own sake.

It has made me extraordinarily picky about any future management positions I may pick up.

The thing with managers is that they have to understand the work being done well enough to make decisions about direction and resource allocation, while also having tons of people skills. In tech you either get a manager who doesn't have a technical background and just doesn't understand the thing they're managing, or you get someone with a technical background who stereotypically doesn't have the necessary people skills to manage well (it's a stereotype, but I find it to also be true, including about myself).

Part of it is also that as a programmer you learn to micromanage what the computer is doing, to be very precise with your instructions so the program won't fail. When managing people for the first time the instinct is to do the same: give very precise instructions even an idiot could follow. That's exactly the wrong approach to manage effectively (except for a few rare circumstances). That's why programmers tend to make bad managers who micromanage, they've been trained wrong by their prior work.

AFAIK many hospitals have a "MBA manager" and a "doctor manager" - I don't know exactly how they relate to one another (who's the "boss boss"), but the idea is that they each bring their part of superior skills to the table.

Would the same idea work for IT? Or, another idea would be, to take a look at how traditional (non-IT) engineering companies work (although the main difference between both medicine and engineering, and IT is that the former are both very high-risk industries that move much slower than IT).

Ive worked at places with a Product Manager and Engineering Manager, at the end of the day after adjusting for company “culture”, product etc what makes a difference is the individual

A good technical manager needs to be able to switch modes - from maker to manager - and back. A person can be a good technical manager even if they don't know the exact technology if they know how to ask good questions of multiple sources and listen (and synthesize) the answers. Nobody teaches this.

Great points, and I see the same thing in myself, which is why I don't want to be a manager - I'm great with technology, but I don't have the people skills to be a successful leader.

I think you may have a point.

Also, judging from own anecdotal experience, there is a strong tendency (at least in Norway, where I’ve spent most of my career) to promote someone from the engineering pool to management; the reasoning being that as you are a decent engineer, you’ll probably become a decent engineering manager.

Well, chances are you aren’t. At least not until you’ve made a lot of management gaffes. (Cough; I made the switch from decent, in some narrow fields excellent engineer to a decidedly mediocre -for the time being- manager this spring...)

Most people leave managers, not companies.

I've gone to work for good managers, then had them leave or get replaced by complete micromanaging incompetent jerks who kiss up and kick down.

There are a lot of things that influence me taking a job, but leaving comes down to 3 things: management, environment, and respect. Bad management, crowded, noisy environment and lack of respect for me and my peers will get my resume on circuit pretty quickly. I've been burned too often.

"Why good employees leave" - I know that myself first hand!

https://imgur.com/gallery/Eh4krvj

A picture of a post. I hope it's been faxed at some point.

I'm sure it has been lol.

Sure, but people also take jobs because they really need the money.

I don't know if you have spent any meaningful amount of time without a job/money - but this world REALLY fucking sucks when you have no income.

A good strategy in this scenario is to take the first job you can when you need money, but keep interviewing. This way you can be more selective since your needs are already being met.

Sorry but that's a very good way to hurt your career. The community is surprisingly small. As in, I swear it's less than 3 hops from me to most people who might cross my desk when recruiting. I can tell you we know who have done this and we shy away from them. They're a waste of time.

I've been criticised because I was only at a job for 12 months. I've also been criticised for staying 3 years.

Apparently I'm a terrible employee who left too early and stayed too long. I'm so glad I'm no longer an employee - hiring is horribly broken.

Yep, I've been in a job for 11 months now that I knew was a bad fit by the end of the first week.

I figure I need to stay at least a year -- at least then I won't have to pay the singing bonus back.

Huh. I can't understand where you would be to have that happen - my job pool is about ten countries in Europe, a few in Africa and Asia, plus Australia. (Countries where you can expect programming jobs to allow for English-only speakers.)

Working on the same city?

Most people don't keep jumping between countries.

Even on a large city like Lisbon it is relatively easy to meet old time university friends or former colleges, because consulting companies have more or less the same costumers.

You really can't?

so you prefer the type of employee who is willingly exploited and doesn't show the same level of loyalty as they can reasonably expect the company to show them?

Agreed. Employers don't necessarily deserve loyalty unless they earn it. They often fire people on a whim to rapidly lower costs for this quarter. Meanwhile someone has missed time with family etc to meet an arbitrary deadline that only really benefited someone in marketing anyway.

Employers afraid of losing employees should be reminded that employees aren't property. Employees are often stuck with employers for multiple hard reasons and employers know this and exploit it. I've encountered many employers who actively select for employees based on their ability to be manipulated for these kinds of reasons, eg student / mortgage debt as handcuffs.

Yeah, I hear this - the problem can be in some cases that the job you get for money may have come from a contact that if you up-and-leave will negatively affect your relationship with them.

An even better strategy is to always have a buffer. Under most circumstances it's not hard at all with a software engineer salary.

I've always noticed this as a weird development. In an ideal capitalist scenario, people will wind up with the job that suits their preferences to the degree that they have enough career capital to be picky. But in reality, people just kind of fall into whatever job they can get and stay longer than seems rational.

As a soon-to-graduate student, I hope I can hold onto the idea that the path of least resistance has a dangerous allure.

As a soon-to-graduate student, you'll find out why.

You need money when you have rent.

Of course - for the better or worse, money fuels life. I'm just afraid of sticking with my first company for the rest of my life because I'm half satisfied where I'm at, when I could do much more interesting things elsewhere.

Maybe I'll just be happy enough with my life that I won't feel a need to take risks. Maybe I'll be courageous enough to pursue greater net happiness.

At the end of the day life happens. Interviewing can take a tremendous amount of effort, and worse, since you generally need to hide it from your current employer, it also can feel gross emotionally. And on top of all that, the best time to interview is actually when you're generally happy with your job, and are working on projects that you like and are good for tou mentally, since you'll come across much happier and more conpetent.

which is to say that you may not end up interviewing as often as you should. And when you do interview, you won't look as good as you could. And life. When you have experience and some seniority at a job it can be really convenient to stay put. Have a physical injury? Lose 6 months. Get married? Lose a year to the craziness that is wedding planning. Have a kid? lose 2 years to sleep deprevation. Buy a house? Lose 3 months to dealing with open houses and closing. Have a parent die? Lose 6 months to deal with their estate. You'll be surprised about the frequency that life throws things at you where interviewing is not only low priority, but also very risky because it'll be hard to put in the time and effort in those important first 90 days.

So yes, take the risks, and be courageous, just don't feel bad if you look up and realize life happened to you, and you maybe stayed at a job a little loger than you should have.

Also, as an employed engineer I only have so many vacation days I can burn on interviewing (esp. since I like to take an actual vacation every so often).

This usually amounts to interviewing at 2-3 companies a year given each one involves multiple rounds, travel (if out of town), etc., only to hear, yet again, that I'm not a "cultural fit." So, I reach a point each year where I'm turning away companies trying to recruit me).

> So, I reach a point each year where I'm turning away companies trying to recruit me).

I know this feeling very well and, it sounds like, for the same reasons. I don't know about you, but my family/friends look at me like I have two heads when I tell them this -- as do the recruiters at Twooglezon. (It also must make me sound like an arrogant ass ...)

I've decided that, based on recent experiences, interviewing with these companies is just not worth the logistical/emotional/psychological toll the exercise demands. I'm also pretty sure I wouldn't be happy if I got any of these jobs, anyways. (Something one of them recently told me in their rejection letter.) I've been running my own consultancy and have built up a modest network of clients, so if I'm really lucky, I'll get to continue to work this way for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, I regularly turn away recruiters from big name companies that brag about their "young" culture and "hip open office" or are a more than 30 mile commute in the SF Bay Area. BTDT, still have the t-shirts and the burnout. They would have to offer me a huge jump in title, pay and interesting work to get me to do it.

Thank you for the last paragraph!! I have started calling life and the unknowns as luck :)

I think it is important to work for as many different companies as you can during your twenties so you can figure out what is important to you. Then spend your thirties trying to find your way back to your favorite environment so that you can spend your forties in it.

Words of wisdom grasshopper.

Yeah that's a solid plan , I found myself doing this without putting words to it.

It took me a LONG time to figure this out (stopping at the first job that's mostly ok is not a great idea). Once I left it (VERY well paid by local standards) I discovered that things can get much better.

> stay longer than seems rational

People wind up _staying longer than seems rational_ because they develop habits (schedule, commute, favorite lunch spot, etc.), develop relationships with their colleagues, feel a sense of loyalty to the company/their superiors/their team/etc. (this is often misplaced, but irrationality rears its head yet again), don't want to go through the hassle of interviewing, don't want to have to change doctors if/when their insurer changes, etc., etc.

Precisely. Rational? It's a multivariate problem. Get married, buy a house, have kids. Now you're juggling daycare and school schedules and dependent benefits. At the same time, you have to balance developing enough technical expertise to increase your value, learning new tech to say current (while likely having less time for learning), and paying close attention to your work projects to be sure you can reduce your accomplishments to a cold, hard ROI so the angel of death passes by when the economy slows and the RIF times come.

And while more junior engineers can be forgiven 3 jobs in 5 years as they ratchet themselves up, seniors need to demonstrate they can stay somewhere for long enough to amortize their hiring, while avoiding getting stuck in a rut.

Good luck!

Again, this doesn't match my experience. True, I am a contractor instead of an employee, but I generally tell everyone beforehand that I'm mainly interested in 3-to-6 months contracts, not long-term. I've never had any problems finding contracts.

I'm not unique: I have a friend (also a contractor) who managed a single 6-month job in the last ten years. Everything else was shorter.

well the initial interview is do I goto the interview or even let my cv go forward