Re:Developers can't fix bad management (2020)
by cloverich on Thursday June 10, 2021 @01:55PM
(#27463486)
I like how Engineering Manager is defined in "The Managers Path" -- which is what you are describing. They shoud be someone who does an occassional bug fix to maintain a boots on the ground approach, but is spending 95% of their time on the items you listed. I think one issue w/ Managers is that we get manager's who should be at this technical level, but are instead so hands off (or fully non-technical) they can't even reason (or delegate) priorities when architecture or tech debt is involved. To be fair, I have worked with fully non technical managers who had a good understanding of how much time to allot towards architecture, refactoring, etc. But those are rare.
I don’t know how a large company could function without that role. If you have 200 developers working on 100 different projects.... who is deciding what to work on? Who is deciding how many people should work on what? Those people are managers.