Yeah, virtually all of it is from personal experience, although the most negative ones are fortunately rare! I manage a team working on a platform that lets non-technical people build communities through web & mobile apps, so the tech we're dealing with is roughly Rails / PostgreSQL / VueJS / Swift / Kotlin / AWS and you could loosely describe us as a social media startup.

I guess if I could summarise the above, it's that there's an awful lot of very ill-defined and irregular things that need deciding about and acting upon, and it's an engineering manager's job to corral that into some sort of order and make sure it all happens. Lots of spinning plates and dealing with things that don't really fit neatly into a job description, especially at smaller companies.