My own personal experience as a female software developer is that there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent.

Others have mentioned that it might be because of perceived superior communication skills (good?), or perceived lack of "good-enough" technical skills (bad?)... both of these add to the problem, but I've also experienced that diversity-aware companies tend to explicitly want females in management/leadership positions because it sends a stronger message re: caring about diversity than e.g. having a female senior software engineer (As unfortunate as it is, I think most perceive "manager/team lead" as higher up the ladder than "senior software engineer").

A specific example: I worked at a startup where D/I was a huge topic and where we spoke about it during Town Hall all the time. Complaints (mostly from females from within the company, not necessarily from the Engineering department) were always about not having females as team leads, as managers, as directors, on out executive board, etc. So every quarter, each and every competent female engineer would be encouraged to try taking a team lead or management role if there was one open. Of course, a bunch of us (myself included) had 0 interest but the prodding was there.

EDIT: Also, just in case someone is going to take this as proof that "women have it easy" at "woke" companies because the bar is lowered for going into management or something... I feel the need to explicitly state that the bar wasn't lowered. When I say "competent" I actually mean the dictionary definition of "having requisite or adequate ability or qualities". I worked with some badass female engineers, who were certainly skilled enough technically and socially to lead a team.

> there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent

As a guy, I keep fighting this pressure a lot too. I think it comes from organizations who don’t have enough technical challenges and they’re afraid top talent will leave out of boredom.

There’s always managerial challenges.

Said managerial challenges are often self-imposed though; I think a lot of people will know of companies with too many managers, who don't do a lot of work (that we're aware of) and spend a lot of effort looking important and busy (and rich).

Mind you, for my previous employer (consultancy) I felt like there was too little management and hierarchy; every department had a management team consisting of one or two managers and one or two sales, with other non-core-business tasks (admin) handled by the parent company. But said managers had to do everything; sales, account management, hiring, personnel management & reviews, conflict resolution, and oftentimes they came "from the trenches" so there was often an attempt to help out directly in projects as well. I think they should've spread out the roles a bit more.

Mind you, by default both sales + management there would ALWAYS earn more than the developers; what they could have done is hire junior managers that took some of the work without the exorbitant pay check.

> the bar is lowered for going into management

For someone who cares about their work and cares about the impact their work and exercise-of-power has on others... How do you even possibly "lower the bar" of difficulty for being in tech management?

Sure, you can throw someone into it unprepared... but that sounds about as bewildering and miserable as when I was hired as a Senior Engineer a year after graduating from uni.

I would have thought that this was an attempt to balance out males being more likely to ask for such promotions (and thus be granted them).

Just based on what I've seen and the women I've talked to - a lot of women in tech are encouraged to move into management because (for a variety of societal reasons) they've just upskilled more in EQ than many of their male peers.

See also: the pressure to be glue [1]

1: https://noidea.dog/glue

There is also overwhelming pressure on minorities to not only succeed and be perfect but to gain positions of power to make it easier for those that follow. It's incredibly difficult to do that as an IC (for either gender).

>Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it.

I hear this a lot from men, too. We have a general problem in the industry of being bad at making senior engineering a rewarding career track.

Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples.

I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.

Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.

This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though.

A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value.

Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The available options are created by ICs and percolate through management. The point of the CEO is to act as a sort of tie-breaker to ensure that decisions are actually made by choosing some of the options.

At least that's the case in large established companies. Obviously the dynamics are different in a small startup where the CEO is also the founder, but if the startup is successful it'll eventually transition to the "large established company" case, even if the founder stays on as CEO.

Of course it's the role? Your generated value is always your individual contribution multiplied by the task that you chose to apply that effort to.

If you replaced an excellent CEO with a mediocre CEO or with a bad CEO, then you might see, from some baseline, doubling of the company's a value, or erasing it to nothing, based on which direction you decide to set the company and its culture. If you're the CTO for the company, your choice of team structure and how you choose to influence technical architecture could lead to productive happy teams or slow miserable ones. If you're the engineer in charge of writing a service, you could set your team up for tons of technical debt down the road, or a smooth running service that's easily and safely extensible. If you're doing a bugfix, you could spend the time to truly understand and solve the issue, or throw another if loop to the pile that the next person will find and have to understand before they can make their own patch to the code.

So, if you have the ability to spend a day on a single effort, one which will improve the life of one developer, or one that would improve the life of all developers, or one that would improve the life of all employees, there's obviously a preference from the company's perspective. And then you can consider things like, improving the life of people who don't even work at your company, but that's generally done on your own time, unless the company thinks that the reputation that they gain is worth giving you the time.

Anecdotal evidence tells otherwise :) Not kidding, in all the companies I worked for, the best engineers were way better contributors than average managers. Just consider that in many companies management is badly hit by diversity targets, they forcibly promote people to meet these targets and competency suffers.

Yes, I would definitely agree that good managers are much rarer than good engineers. Maybe it's because there's an order of magnitude less managers than engineers at a company, so you have less people to emulate and learn from? Maybe it's because engineers are able to use their off-time to improve their own skills, while for management you really only have books and no easy way for applied practice?

And then if we're talking about technical managers and not just CEOs, the literature there is even more limited, since most middle-management in the past has been of known repetitive tasks, rather than more variable more creative work. And it's not like there are schools that can spend four years teaching you how to be a good manager. MBA programs tend to care more about the details of running a business and let the people aspect figure itself out.

So maybe an analogy might be, if all the engineers you hired were self-taught, and if you only had one engineer assigned to each team. Then maybe your average quality of engineer would match your quality of manager.

One factor is that for engineers it is relatively simple to measure performance, while measuring manager performance is usually a very obscure and subjective process, allowing entry and promotions for weak managers.

For example, 30 minutes ago a senior director told her entire organization that the primary differentiation in the performance review for the managers will be "quality of communication". Not only this is subjective, but it is not a core performance indicator.

Yeah, interviewing is definitely harder. Again, we can draw the analogy to engineers. Is there a large pool of managers that have gone through interview training for managers and have dialed-in questions that give them good signal on how successful the managers will be? And then you run your candidate through multiple rounds of these interviewers? Are you running your candidates through different simulated encounters with different people and different setups? Or would you say it's closer to interviewing an engineer without asking them to code? So let's say you're trying to interview engineers without asking them to code, then you probably need to at least see all code they produced at their last job and ask their past coworkers about them. So then the analogous requirement for a manager would be to then interview a representative sample of their past reports?

Measuring how "good" your managers is always a hard topic. That's why I found Google's research on it so interesting, since they had both the means and the incentive to run a large-scale study using themselves as the dataset.

I'm not entirely convinced either that evaluating engineers works out that much better. What is the core performance indicator there? Lines of code? Tickets closed? Bugs created? Reputation amongst other engineers? All of those metrics are wrought with perverse incentives. I'd probably end up preferring evaluating managers on "quality of communication" compared to evaluating engineers on any of those.

I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.

This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.

>> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech

I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press...

Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.

Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).

No, managers don't contribute multiples; managers are responsible for the contributions of multiple people (teams) versus individual contributions of each person in the team.

> Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.

I secretly (well not in this moment but ordinarily secret) consider women in software development smarter than men, on average, due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.

[EDIT] this is in general bigcos and "startupy" places, anyway—I dunno if that trend holds in e.g. FAANG or finance or the other places where devs actually do make really, really good money rather than just good-for-not-a-manager like everywhere else.

Seems more likely that you have two groups here: one that needed to be very politically aware to get there, and one that didn't.

So yeah, the one that had to fight political fights to even end up in the industry are going to be better, on average, than the ones who got welcomed in.

If there was a concerted effort to keep men out of software you would notice that the men still in software were very aware of the political/power dynamics around them real quick. Because the rest would be somewhere else.

> due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.

Women are not identifying the most socially/financially rewarding positions in tech and aiming for them ASAP. Women in tech are getting told "gosh you are so good at communicating and being literate have you considered being a PM or a manager or any other non-technical role?"

Possible for a bunch of reasons that women in the field tend to be more assertive and have better communications skills. Those are primary management skills.

Yeah, I dunno why it is, but that could well be. I suspect it has something to do with whatever's resulting in women attending and completing college at a higher rate than men, but that's just a hunch.

[EDIT] jesus it's so hard to write anything about this without walking on eggshells—to be clear I'm not complaining about any of this, including the college thing.

I agree on the eggshell thing. I rewrote what I said three times to try and block off any interpretation other than the one I meant. I have some friends that are female engineers and you a get drink in them and listen to all the bullshit they've had to deal with, you have to imagine how thick their skin is.

Yeah agreed, IME women, in average, have better communication and social skills than men, in average, and as you say those are what middle management is mostly made of.

As a male I've also noticed a pressure to move upwards from a 'regular' dev to e.g. tech lead or architect, but that said, I've been fortunate to have spent a lot of time working for a company where that was mainly people's own ambitions; they got rid of or raised the wage ceiling for 'regular' developers at some point.