Source: https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
There is an enormous demand for technical engineering leaders — far more demand than supply. The most common hackaround is to pair a people manager (who can speak the language and knows the concepts, but stopped engineering ages ago) with a tech lead, and make them collaborate to co-lead the team. This unwieldy setup often works pretty well.
But most of those people managers didn’t want or expect to end up sidelined in this way when they were told to stop engineering.
If you want to be a pure people manager and not do engineering work, and don’t want to climb the ladder or can’t find a ladder to climb, more power to you. I don’t know that I’ve met many of these people in my life. I have met a lot of people in this situation by accident, and they are always kinda angsty and unhappy about it. Don’t let yourself become this person by accident. Please.
Which brings me to my next point.
✨ FUCK THAT. ✨
Everybody’s favorite hobby is hassling new managers about whether or not they’ve stopped writing code yet, and not letting up until they say that they have. This is a terrible, horrible, no-good VERY bad idea that seems like it must originally have been a botched repeating of the correct advice, which is:
Can you spot the difference? It’s very subtle. Let’s run a quick test:
- Authoring a feature? ⛔️
- Covering on-call when someone needs a break? ✅
- Diving on the biggest project after a post mortem? ⛔️
- Code reviews? ✅
- Picking up a p2 bug that’s annoying but never seems to become top priority? ✅
- Insisting that all commits be gated on their approval? ⛔️
- Cleaning up the monitoring checks and writing a library to generate coverage? ✅
The more you can keep your hands warm, the more effective you will be as a coach and a leader. You’ll have a richer instinct for what people need and want from you and each other, which will help you keep a light touch. You will write better reviews and resolve technical disputes with more authority. You will also slow the erosion and geriatric creep of your own technical chops.
I firmly believe every line manager should either be in the on call rotation or pinch hit liberally and regularly, but that’s a different post.