I am a massive sufferer of imposter syndrome, I do my best to help everyone and smooth over things and set direction in a clear way with as much freedom in execution as possible.
but i am always second guessing myself. I know I am almost certainly a middling manager (if not a bad one), but I would like to improve.
Not because I love doing it, but because I don't trust that anyone else in my position (or who would take my position) actually wants to improve.
They believe that supporting and developing their people is their main job. Execution is just a prerequisite to being able to do the rest.
I've never encountered a servant leadership styled EM that is not also a good IC.
The only thing I can think of is MBA disease. But that’s rent seeking not productive management techniques.
1. Psychological security.
2. Crystal Clear targets, planning, goals, written down. To paraphrase this, a top manager will write their ICs an 8-12 week JIRA backlog. Obviously, these goals will iterate. However, the ironclad clarity is essential.
3. Positive, effective, coaching and feedback at the principle skill the IC performs. Aka, coding.
4. Lead by example. Conspicuous, hard, effort, devoting majority of time and energy to managing down and shielding.
The issue is simple. All of the above requires sweat from the manager.
Manager's are lazy, and nobody is watching them manage their IC's.
So for people with an innate need to join in the steering of the ship, there’s only one career path.
I hear senior VPs like Craig Federighi, Jeff Dean, and others, still write code (maybe 1 day a week but still), but also call the big shots
(and Craig doesn't waste his time)
It's not a waste of time if it makes them more effective at making decisions, gives them ideas, or keeps them abreast of what is actually going on.
What I meant what that there’s literal zero way someone can be an SVP and still perform any actual IC work.
Not really. Some managers are perfectly willing to include IC's in this if they don't want to be/are not suitable as people-managers.
There are ways to formalize this, like creating roles for tech-leads, technical project management, enterprise architects (and a lot of others, in non-tech industries).
For managers who have their strongest talents in the social/organizational domain, this can be a win-win, if their ego allows it. In some cases, nearly all the technical and strategic work can be done by the IC, while the manager can focus on ensuring funding and support for these strategies within the organization, as well resource management and HR related work.
Of course, for every IC that has the talents and interests that make them suitable for such influence, there may be 3-4 that want that power, but do not have the abilities, initiative, flexibility or willingness to put enough effort into it to make it worthwhile for the manager.
And from the other perspective. If you're such an employee, it may be that you need to look around a bit to find a team lead by this kind of manager. It may well be that only 10-20% will be into this kind of cooperation with a subordinate.
But if you do find the right manager to support in this way, and actually do contribute to his/her getting promoted more quickly, you may have a powerful ally among the higher-ups (or even in some cases be pulled along, and given some direct-report role directly under him/her).
Only at very small companies do I get to cross these streams.
but, I think the answer depends. If you are a really strong individual contributor, I presume getting an IC promotion is easier. If you are just decent, getting an IC7+ promotion seems incredibly challenging because IC7 requires an very high level of competence. If you are just decent as a manager, you can get luckier.
M1 corresponds to the same pay band as IC6 and M2 corresponds to IC7. D1 corresponds to IC8. (By level 6, I am referring to IC6 / M1.)
I think this could have great benefits. If a manager's job salary is directly capped to the average of their ICs, then it's their benefit to make the best engineers and show that these engineers deserve an increase in salary - ergo the manager's salary is increased. At the same time, no one will be rushing to management just to get a salary bump.
If a company unilaterally cuts manager pay, they presumably won't get great managers, or at least not good managers who also want to be paid fairly.
It also means managers will only want to manage more senior IC's, so as to benefit from the higher salary, while it's the junior IC's who need more capable management.
I don't know how you'd ever make that change to a company structure though. The turkeys would have to vote for christmas.
Is there any reason to believe this? Other than just assuming that whatever companies do is optimal for their profits?
I suppose it’s possible there!s some totally novel idea nobody has tried but which would be hugely successful and revolutionize corporate practices. But I’m very skeptical there is an objectively more successful model just waiting for some company to stumble on it.
I don't remember the details but do remember there being certain "heavy weights" that didn't have anyone under them.
If you switch to becoming a manager, your salary increases a lot and you have many more opportunities for promotion. So a lot of engineers hit senior and say "screw that, I can just be a manager" which is a much easier path to high salary.
It's very common and we need to incentivize people to stay as ICs.
Feels like this is generally true in the past few years where org sizes have ballooned.
Is this still true today where hiring freeze and layoffs rule most of these companies? Is the reverse happening?
Tried management for a few years, dealing with the prima donnas and the deadweight on the team burned me out. Wasn’t getting paid more than I was as an IC, so it was not worth it for me by a long shot. As an IC I just have my own problems to worry about.
The broad version, that managers just don't contribute as much as the IC's they manage, doesn't hold much water in general - but may in a dysfunctional organization.
I really think we need more “reluctant leaders”: people who are good at leadership but don’t want to lead, and yet can be relied upon to lead because of their sense of duty, especially their duty to the team. People who say, shit, I really don’t want to do this but damnit if I don’t step up, this will be a failure.
And company processes should be engineered so that a bad/ineffectual manager can't break them, with everything that can be devolved to the team itself.
And hiring should be done on the basis that a new employee will likely be a manager at some point.
The best managers I've had were all reluctant, so selecting against people who want to be managers seems like a great idea.
Please, no. A good middle manager is a shit umbrella, a bad one is a shit funnel.
Most of the ICs I've worked with would not make good managers. Not because they are bad people, but because they don't currently have the skillset to manage.
I'd rather not have them spend 6 months developing their skills by managing me, only to be replaced by the next person in line.
The majority of these tasks could be devolved to the team itself, if an organization wanted to.
Without that political pressure, I'd trust even the worst IC on my team to serve in a manager role, because the consequences of them doing a poor job would be small.
Maybe the people producing the shit need to go too.
His manager, the various proxies for the customers, events outside of anyone's control.
> What productive purpose are those people serving if your manager’s job is effectively to work against them?
Everyone with power in a modern corporation is looking out for their agenda, and their interests rarely align with their peers, and even less rarely with the line people. Think of directors pursuing weird-ass pet projects, think of product managers that want to devote 0% effort on stability and 100% on features, think of some other org dumping work that they ought to be doing onto you.
Also, all of these problems exist on a much smaller, less dramatic scale, on a day-to-day in every firm that does anything of note. Everyone wants their asks done today, and its the manager's job to keep all the people asking for stuff playing by the rules, and reasonably happy, and civil.
They aren't bad people, they are just being rewarded for meeting particular goals, and they are working towards them.
> Maybe the people producing the shit need to go too.
Maybe, but whether they will or not is not under the control of anyone in the trenches. The modern corporation is an authoritarian institution, and if you don't have the ear of a decision-maker, you can't exactly get someone else fired for being bad at their job. Especially when their job is telling you what to do.
If you pay them less than the people they are managing, they will not tend to do take the job.
So, paying managers less may weed out people on an ego trip, in theory.
I've been blessed with generally good managers, but they've all worked way more and way harder than me for less pay and it's honestly made me feel pretty awful for them.
I've known a few of these. Power and money, usually. Mainly because they were born with money, and think they deserve as much or more than their parents accumulated.
I wouldn't say they're the most toxic people I know, but they're in about the 85th percentile.
I have been a senior/principal engineer, as well as a director/senior director. The fact is that being a manager or director is just fundamentally a much harder job than being an IC. It's not that it's inherently more difficult, it's just that the day-to-day is much more of a grind than being an IC. For people wondering why engineering interviews can be so obscure/difficult, it's often because the cost of a bad hire can be catastrophic to a manager. I had a great team of about 30 people, except for 1 person who just couldn't get along with others. I spent about 80% of my energy on that person, and it sucked.
So for people wondering why managers get paid more, it's just that it's a shittier job that fewer people want to do than program.
If I can be excused to ramble a bit...
I think the job is optimization? If so the hypothetical perfect manager would get it right really fast and have nothing to do but wait for the next dumpster fire that might never happen or some micro optimization that isn't worth much.
Measuring performance (at least in real time) seems hard if not impossible?
With a cashier it is easy, if they handle 100 products per minute, 6000 per hour, they get 12 per hour or 0.2 cents per product handled, on the average product it is a perceptional difference of zero. I, as the customer buying 100 products, don't care if I pay 20 cents or 2 euro.
I've had a hundred such jobs, did the math on many, it was spectacularly hilarious. Best one was 5 factory workers making half a million boxes of cookies in a 5 hour shift for 35 euro/day. They could easily pay 1000 euro/day, the customer wouldn't even notice it.
In stead it is really hard for them now, they cant find employees. They are far behind on schedule. Existing employees are made to work even harder.
Being unable to afford to pay more is actually not how it works. You add up what it costs to deliver a service or a product and then you conclude if its a viable business model.
It is not that the rent is to dmn high, parts or ingredients are to expensive, employees are unwilling to work for peanuts etc. There is no limit on how much a janitor costs. The market sets it, employees and employers are just dragged along - kicking and screaming if need be.
If we continue the story and say the employees want to much money we might end up back at their rent being to dmn high.
But surely no one would continue that story to the point where you cant find employees because the cookies got 1 cent more expensive?
I get 2 letters every year, one says my rent goes up by 5%, the other says my salary goes up by 1%. Both talk similarly about inflation. It's quite comical.
People who are lower down on the empathy scale don't have that problem and the fact that this generally makes them worse at the job doesn't reduce their pay.
I also find it far more plausible that managers are paid more because of the default fiefdom hierarchy.
You’re claiming that 80% of your time, 80% of your substantial pay, was spent managing the fallout of a single employee on a team of 30. It’s astonishingly inefficient and wasteful.
And while you’re emblematic of this behavior, it’s widespread in the tech industry. The vast majority of management is terrified of any sort of real conflict or intervention, so they become ineffectual and useless.
No shortage of kids at Stanford or MIT dreaming of GOOG bucks and name recognition, and willing to work 80 hour weeks. Hell, even with AMZN's terrible reputation I still know people @ UW Seattle chomping at the bit to get in.
Not hard to fire when it's easy to replace with solid talent. Much harder for someone like P&G or Clorox or Amtrak -- they either contract out or else get what they get.
Worse, they make the organization toxic for everybody else.
I've come to believe the most important job of a manager is to quickly identify these people and either fire them or neutralize them (i.e. put them in a closet and assign them a meaningless task).
This requires a culture shift in most organizations to understand that toxic people (e.g. bullies, narcissists, and those with other serious personality disorders) have an outsize negative impact on productivity and profits and can kill the company if you don't get rid of them quickly.
There's definitely folks that take all they can get, scream about unnecessary things, and are just general drama, but overall are basically an underperforming IC. (I've even seen one become "best friends" with a director which caused all sorts of chaos and disorganization in the org below them, with the director blissfully unaware because the toxic person was giving side-channel status update to the director outside of the org hierarchy.)
Neutralizing them by giving them unimportant tasks often enables them to be louder elsewhere.
There's also people who are loud because they're trying to make the company better. They'll make you uncomfortable as a manager, and they'll make you have uncomfortable conversations with your leadership. They're...probably the ones to listen to.
True leadership is knowing who to keep close—even if uncomfortable—and who to rapidly manage out.
A good manager can root cause these issues and then determine if the resolution is workable in a reasonable timeframe. A great manager keeps this in mind while coordinating all activities and requires their direct reports to assist them in doing this.
Finally, great leaders are sometimes not great managers. Another note - even managers can shift from good/great/bad over time.
I’d note shittiness of the job is not a compensation decision factor. Otherwise slaughterhouse employees and social workers would be paid better than any of us.
I beleive managers in a situation like this think that layoffs is a kind of God's grace.
Smart companies have been doing things like this for decades. The first company I worked for 20 years ago had distinct tracks for management and engineering staff once people got to a certain level.
1. All people who really want to be managers are good managers
Or even
2. Best managers really want to be managers
To put it another way, a lot of people would rather be IC than managers. Not all of those people would be bad managers. In fact some of those might be the best managers.
Or to put it yet another way. Everybody wants to tinker. Managing is a pain. And the higher up, the fewer of the sane people would want it :-)
But ICs making more than managers is not what should be normalized; building teams with structures that optimize for performance rather than "management by spreadsheet" will get you further than just one dimensional rules about comp, especially in larger orgs where the comp tiers are deep.
Reminds me of baseball. Many of the best managers weren't the best when they were players. Some never even made it to the major leagues. But as a manager/coach they're incredibly well-regarded.
Those well-regarded managers are often so because they create a whole greater than the parts. Average managers break even. Bad managers decrease value.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-managers-are-heade...
Do you think it can be trained into people? I do, but most companies are too lazy. Plus, it is not a one time exercise of X hours of training. It needs to be constantly monitored. In my career, I frequently see two-faced managers who say one thing when in front of the big boss, but do another when they are not around. (TL;DR: I call it: "The mouth moves, but the body doesn't.") It's always about the interpersonal clashes that drives away great ICs. The high performers get tired of the b-s from their manager and get hired away. Terrible loss for the company, but a (political) gain for the manager. (One less fly in the potato salad!)
Example: Below, someone mentioned "servant leadership". It is my first time to learn about term. It sounds brilliant. This idea seems possible to train into managers. Plus, the it is an interesting idea to strictly tie manager's comp to reports' comp. It would much better align the manager's incentives instead of today's world of "empire building".
It's a term from Agile/Scrum.
> Plus, the it is an interesting idea to strictly tie manager's comp to reports' comp.
Then the incentive exclusively becomes raising the reports' comp. That might be detrimental to organizational goals. Many salaries are structured as base + short-term incentive + long-term incentive, but clearly that obviously doesn't seem to work as well as it should, either. For companies, it's well-known that aligning objectives is complicated. After decades of 'Management Science', it doesn't seem to me that we are any closer to managing alignment across orgs ideally than we've been in the past. There may not be a silver bullet to this.
That said, thinking about OP's comments about natural-born managers, and how there are natural-born artists, and how generative AI like Stable Diffusion can deliver good results for those that are not natural artists, we may actually need to turn to generative AI to solve for managerial tasks in an optimal way across large orgs. That might even resolve issues with misaligned incentives. Training such an AI could be done on a curated corpus of HBR-type case studies. And you could actually test performance of different corpuses by measuring real-world performance of the corresponding business units in which these AIs operate.
What did they do that made them so special?
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/what-is-a...
It's not that there's a "set number of great managers", but we fail to train people, and many who could've been simply wash out because they were thrown into the deep end without any support. ("Hey, you're a good IC, you must be a manager")
And before somebody suggests it, no, MBAs are not the answer[2]. And I don't think we're fixing that if we don't manage to move away from a world where the ends justify the means. As a manager, your fundamental job is to care. Not to goose numbers, but to care enough about people that they feel safe enough to take risks and grow. In an environment that lives and dies by "what did you do for the metrics/the quarterly numbers", developing that care without losing the job or becoming a deep cynic is really, really hard.
If you have a good manager, hang on to them. If you're reporting to one, think hard about following them if they leave, because they are rare, and you might not get the experience again. And if you have the opportunity to become a manager, think carefully if the environment will allow you to care enough.
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/02/06/managers-impact-worker-mental...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2962506
That aside, managers are a function of leadership. Got a bad manager? That means some leader is not doing their job.
Yes, there are few great managers, just as their are few great leaders.
My theory is, we could have more great leaders (or at least on average better), but we collectively use that word / title (i.e., leader) so loosely that in too many cases people get the luxury of wearing the crown without out actually doing the work.
If it doesn't walk like a duck...and it doesn't talk like a duck...yet it's still a duck?? That is creating a false sense of accomplishment.
So how do we replicate this ability in people? For sports, there are academies to surface and nurture sporting talent. As a society, at least to me, it seems we have not been able to do something similar for "management" at societal scale. Maybe because the whole domain requires a broader set of competencies in many fields, including the specific technical domain, the humanities, business skills, and political savvy, amongst others.
Maybe we no longer need to replicate this with people. Instead, repeating what I said elsewhere in the thread, because the idea seems interesting: consider how there are natural-born managers, and how there are natural-born artists, and how generative AI like Stable Diffusion can deliver good results for those that are not natural artists, we may actually need to turn to generative AI to solve for managerial tasks in an optimal way across large orgs. That might even resolve issues with misaligned incentives.
Training such an AI could be done on a curated corpus of HBR-type case studies. And you could actually test performance of different corpuses (reflecting different management styles, for example) by measuring real-world performance of the corresponding business units in which these AIs operate.
When I was younger I thought maybe that's what business schools did, but they produce a completely different kind of manager who's probably worse at managing people than they would've been had they not gone to business school in the first place.
1. Psychological security.
2. Crystal Clear targets, planning, goals, written down. To paraphrase this, a top manager will write their ICs an 8-12 week JIRA backlog. Obviously, these goals will iterate. However, the ironclad clarity is essential.
3. Positive, effective, coaching and feedback at the principle skill the IC performs. Aka, coding.
4. Lead by example. Conspicuous, hard, effort, devoting majority of time and energy to managing down and shielding.
The issue is simple. All of the above requires sweat from the manager.
Managers are lazy, and nobody is watching them manage their ICs.
On the other hand, I've had maybe 2 great managers my entire career. The majority were either bean counters or empire builders. The latter is particularly toxic - they don't manage down at all beyond the minimum required. They focus almost exclusively on external optics and climbing the ladder.
So given that, I can see an appeal to trim down on managers. Of course, choosing the right managers to let go or convert is incredibly challenging.
I've worked in a few environments where managers were replaced. Only then can you really make the distinction between great managers and bad ones. With one you think "wow this is such a tough business, the manager is doing crazy effort to keep things going", and then another manager jumps in and "wow, this is an easy project. Manager is taking a walk through the park. All seems like a piece of cake."
There is no such thing as a natural born manager. Like there isn't a natural born electrician, politician or nurse.
There are combinations of skills that make one person far far better than everybody else, for that job. Some adapt existing skills, some learn new ones. But no one is natural born great at anything useful.
Those skills are acquired, either with willed direction from internal intuition or very rarely forced via external environment. But still acquired, not handed down, not born with it.
Can anyone acquire skills and be great? No! No one knows the winning combination of skills. It takes a great factor of luck.
Evidence of this is found in abundance. Ask someone great "How can I make my son be as great as you" and see how tangential an answer pops out. You'd think its because they want to keep it a secret. Its because they don't know.
The claim is that people are born with different aptitudes for management that allow them to progress faster along the management skill curve per unit of effort.
I do still stand skeptical of natural talent contributing in any large part to managerial success, over acquired skills and serendipity.
that sounds nice (meaning, "I know what you are saying") but it's not really true. As organizations grow, they become less efficient. If a manager can keep a team of N working at N*1 productivity, that's amazing, but it's not a multiple. Now, people can be dragged down by poor communication, poor leadership, changing targets, stepping on each other's feet, bad attitudes, etc. and a good manager can get that 0.1 efficiency multiplier back up to something approaching 1, so it might feel like a multiple.
I used to despise managers, until I met two really good ones. This is after working with hundreds of them as a consultant. Actual, natural-born managers are such an incredibly rare species that you can go a long time without seeing any in the wild. It's basically the equivalent of the legendary 10x programmer — you hear about them, but it's rare to actually meet one, and there are sure a lot more people claiming to be one than who actually are.
My theory is that there are a set number of great managers in the world, and that number doesn't scale with the number of people who take on the role. They're just out there, being awesome, while a bunch of pretty lousy ones share their job title.