Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.
One interesting question that came up repeatedly was: “what are some reasons that someone might not want to be a manager?”
@mipsytipsy “Things would be different if I was in charge”, the all belief that authority is an all powerful magic… Mark Roddy (@digitallogic) September 05, 2019
Fascinatingly, I heard it asked over the full range of tones from extremely positive (“what kind of nutter wouldn’t want to manage a team?!”) to extremely negative (“who would ever want to manage a team?!”). So I said I would write a piece and list some reasons.
Point of order: I am going to focus on intrinsic reasons, not external ones. There are lots of toxic orgs where you wouldn’t want to be a manager for many reasons — but that list is too long and overwhelming, and I would argue you probably don’t want to work there in ANY capacity. Please assume the surroundings of a functional, healthy org (I know, I know — whopping assumption).
@mipsytipsy it’s a huge responsibility. if you are having trouble advocating for yourself and your own needs/career… pie bob (@djpiebob) September 05, 2019
- You love what you do.
Never underestimate this one, and never take it for granted. If you look forward to work and even miss it on vacation; if you occasionally leave work whistling with delight and/or triumph; if your brain has figured out how to wring out regular doses of dopamine and serotonin while delivering ever-increasing value; if you look back with pride at what you have learned and built and achieved, if you regularly tap into your creative happy place … hell, your life is already better than 99.99% of all the humans who have ever labored and lived. Don’t underestimate the magnitude of your achievement, and don’t assume it will always be there waiting for you to just pick it right back up again.
@mipsytipsy @ceejbot I got into tech because I like writing code. As a manager, I didn’t get to do that. Becoming a… Ben Cox (@BenCoxMusic) September 06, 2019
- It is easy to get a new engineering job. Really, really easy.
Getting your first gig as an engineer can be a challenge, but after that? It is possibly easier for an experienced engineer to find a new job than anyone else on the planet. There is so much demand this skill set that we actually complain about how annoying it is being constantly recruited! Amazing.
It is typically harder to find a new job as a manager. If you think interview processes for engineers are terrible (and they are, honey), they are even weirder and less predictable (and more prone to implicit bias) for managers. So much of manager hiring is about intangibles like “culture fit” and “do I like you” — things you can’t practice or study or know if you’ve answered correctly. And soooo much of your skill set is inevitably bound up in navigating the personalities and bureaucracies of particular teams and a particular company. A manager’s effectiveness is grounded in trust and relationships, which makes it much less transferrable than engineering skills.
@mipsytipsy Someone has probably said it, but management will always be an option, but going back from management t… Zack Korman (@ZackKorman) September 06, 2019
- There are fewer management jobs.
I am not claiming it is equally trivial for everyone to get a new job; it can be hard if you live in an out-of-the-way place, or have an unusual skill, etc. But in almost every case, it becomes harder if you’re a manager. Besides — given that the ratio of engineers to line managers is roughly 7 to one — there will be almost an order of magnitude fewer eng manager jobs than engineering jobs.
@mipsytipsy Regardless of org health, there’s a lot of emotional labor involved. Whether that’s good for you pers… Alex Rasmussen (@alexras) September 05, 2019
- Manager jobs are the first to get cut.
Engineers (in theory) add value directly to the bottom line. Management is, to be brutally frank, overhead. Middle management is often the first to be cut during layoffs
Remember how I said that creation is the engineering superpower? That’s a nicer way of saying that managers don’t directly create any value. They may indirectly contribute to increased value over time — the good ones do — but only by working through other people as a force multiplier, mentor etc. When times get tough, you don’t cut the people who build the product, you cut the ones whose value-added is contingent or harder to measure.
Another way this plays out is when companies are getting acquired. As a baseline for acquihires, the acquiring company will estimate a value of $1 million per engineer, then deduct $500k for every other role being acquired. Ouch.
@mipsytipsy @ceejbot I noticed that as soon as I had a competent manager, I never considered going into management ever again 😀— daiyi! ✨ (chris) (@daiyitastic) September 05, 2019
- Managers can’t really job hop.
Where it’s completely normal for an engineer to hop jobs every 1-3 years, a manager who does this will not get points for learning a wide range of skills, they’ll be seen as “probably difficult to work with”. I have no data to support this, but I suspect the job tenure of a successful manager is at least 2-3x as long as that of a successful IC. It takes a year or two just to gain the trust of everyone on your team and the adjacent teams, and to learn the personalities involved in navigating the organization. At a large company, it may take a few times that long. I was a manager at Facebook for 2.5 years and I still learned some critical new detail about managing teams there on a weekly basis. Your value to the org really kicks in after a few years have gone by, once a significant part of the way things get done resides in your cranium.
@mipsytipsy As a PE who deliberately “leads” but has no interest in “management”: I have stomach-churning aversion… Sean Blakey (@pythonista) September 05, 2019
6) Engineers can be little shits.
You know the type. Sneering about how managers don’t do any “real work”, looking down on them for being “less technical”. Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird. Hilariously, we had a great conversation about whether a great manager needs to be technical or not — many people sheepishly admitted that the best managers they had ever had knew absolutely nothing about technology, and yet they gave managers coding interviews and expected them to be technical. Why? Mostly because the engineers wouldn’t respect them otherwise.
@mipsytipsy Maybe this is more abstract: Managers earn their living by having hard conversations. If you aren’t goi… Glenn Brown #closethecamps (@ghbrown60640) September 05, 2019
7. As a manager, you will need to have some hard conversations. Really, really hard ones.
Do you shy away from confrontation? Does it seriously stress you out to give people feedback they don’t want to hear? Manager life may not be for you. There hopefully won’t be too many of these moments, but when they do happen, they are likely to be of outsized importance. Having a manager who avoids giving critical feedback can be really damaging,…
