Bottom tier manager is the worst role in tech.
* You are responsible for sticking to commitments that depend almost completely on other people sticking to theirs.
* You're still on the hook for delivery, so if someone you assigned a subtask can't get that job done, you either have to pass it on to someone else (which often ends up harming the social dynamic of the team) or just do it yourself. Throwing an employee under the bus is not a good look.
* You get to be the "executioner" when a RIF rolls through, even if you get RIFed yourself, and even if you had no input into who is getting RIFed. Those Sunday evening "let's have a chat tomorrow morning" emails, and the following chat, are the most gut-wrenching things I've ever had to do as a manager.
* By the time you become a manager, you're probably one of the most experienced members of the team, so you are still always the "go-to" person when someone needs a gnarly bug fix, or if there's a lore question, or if a sticky situation with a customer comes up. If your reports are too green, it's hard to delegate these things, and this just adds to your own cognitive load.
* You don't have enough clout to make organizational-level changes. So process things that you see that are really inefficient, and you have some ideas how to address them? Now you've got to convince your manager and probably theirs, too, and they usually don't want to rock the boat.
Your best path as a ground-level manager is to not spend too much time here: become a second-tier manager (ie, director) or find a nice landing place as an individual contributor again.
Nothing here is wrong; some of it good, but it's missing the foundational piece that - if you get it right - helps with everything you need to do and mitigates the countless mistakes you are going to make: you need to genuinely care. How you show your team you care is going to be different, but once (ed: if!) you do you get a pass on the little mistakes, they won't jump to the least charitable interpretation when you don't communicate clearly or fully, they will want to help you because you want to help them, and you will win together.
So how do you demonstrate caring? For me (YMMV) I prioritize relationships over everything else at the very start; you will be dropping the ball somewhere but can recover from technical gaps, product knowledge, etc. I get in the trenches with the team, not to do their work but to try and make it easier; the important but non-core stuff that nobody wants to tackle. For each direct I continually ask "where is this person heading and how am I help them get there?".
One tactical tip: too many managers - especially new ones - focus on mentorship, and then maybe coaching but neglect sponsoring. This is so important, very passive but probably takes the most energy because you need to keep your receiver power at 11 and then connect the indirect dots. The act of recognizing and connecting an individual with an opportunity is deceptively hard, but the returns for everybody dwarf any advice you can give.
"Be Clear. Painfully Clear.
You think youâre being obvious. Youâre not. Spell out expectations. Over-communicate. Set goals in plain language."
Lots of managers i had the pleasure of working with, missed this memo entirely...
The real mindfuck is that everything that made you successful as an IC - being the person with answers, moving fast, shipping stuff - can actually make you a worse manager if you're not careful.
Your new job is to make other people successful, which sometimes means slowing down, asking questions instead of giving answers, and being okay with solutions that aren't exactly what you would have built.
One thing I struggled with when I was a "manager" before going back to individual contributor is that at every job I've had this far - I have never worked directly for my manager nor when was I a manager did I directly oversee my reports.
This seems to be fairly common in tech and consulting. How am I supposed to succeed at a manager if I have no fucking clue what my reports are going to be working on?
I feel like this is a failure in either companies not knowing how to setup management for technical roles, or I was given 0 training on this and it resulted in me not knowing what the hell to do all the time with my reports.
The claim in this article is that my job was no longer to do work, but in every role where I reached manager I absolutely was still expected to do my own work. I just also had to vaguely guide some other person and give them reviews and feedback while never having worked with them in my life.
Maybe I was unlucky but these stints at management left a sour taste. I'm not even sure I would call my experience "management" except companies kept naming it that.
This was a great read! Saving this to re-read in the future.
One question I have though is what are you supposed to do if as a new manager you aren't allowed to... well, do your job? I haven't been able to find a lot of resources on what to do in such a situation.
I'm a new engineering manager (~8 months in) and my boss isn't letting me hire full-time devs to replace consultants whenever they leave or their contracts are up and I am not allowed to replace any developers who leave either due to a company-wide hiring freeze. I have lost 4 of my most senior engineers in the last 6 months since I can't replace the consultants or hire anyone new. I'm down to 2 senior devs on my team when we used to have 6, with the same amount of work. They have also implemented mandatory return to office clearly frustrating my team. In addition, I am not allowed to promote any of my team members to try and encourage them to stay.
The heck am I even supposed to do? What is the point of being an EM if you quite literally are not allowed to do your job? I can't hire, I can't promote people, and I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team. My boss just tells me to try my best to encourage the team through this tough time.
I haven't found any resources on how to handle this kind of situation as a new EM. If I knew this is what was in store for me I would have never taken the job.
In my experience, managers are like politicians: those who want to become one are not qualified/worth of becoming one, and those who could be good managers are not interested in the job.
One-sided text that don't nearly speak the whole truth.
It fails to take into account that as a manager you may very will end up with employees that are toxic, disrespectful, cheating, lazy, incompetent, intolerant, unmanageable...
And contrary to popular belief, that it is not always the managers fault.
I had a close relative become a manager, tried their utmost for a year but gave up. It was not worth the sleepless nights, stress, therapy and sitting in the parking lot crying their eyes out after work.
> You were probably really good at your job. Now your job is to make sure other people can be good at theirs.
Anyone else see the exact opposite, that out of N people that _could_ become managers, itâs the worst individual contributors that do? Mostly because they want it most. People who love being individual contributors are going to become good at it, and theyâll resist management tasks.
I think this is great and very natural. But thereâs a kind of zombie myth that engineering managers are the best former engineers that refuses to die. Itâs decent engineers with some aptitude and/or desire to manage.
I agree with most of this except the overcommunicating part. If you're setting the right expectations, overcommunicating may be mistaken for micromanaging.
Managers are judged by outcomes, not by contribution. Good leaders know how to shield their team from the chaos above while shielding the managers above from the challenges of managing many different personalities. They are a conduit for collaboration and inspiration.
Bad leaders are chaos agents and are the main drivers of attrition and should be rooted out quickly. They are a poison pill.
"Your Job Isnât to Do the Work Anymore."
Unless you work somewhere under-staffed with an org chart that's mostly an aspiration.
Just an important note, and a thing that is often confused by new managers - leadership and management are not the same thing. More often than not the skills you want to hone are actually leadership skills not management skills.
The lack of communication one doesn't seem like it needs saying, but I've had managers who literally hid information from me, or would keep me out of meetings, on stuff I would eventually have to work on anyway. Don't be that guy. Spread information throughout the team and invite people to meetings even if they don't need to be there (clarifying that they're optional).
Also keep in mind that as a manager, you are a custodian of culture. What you do and don't do will shape your team's culture which will (in part) shape the whole company's culture. So think about how you can develop positive culture (and also, ask!).
>> At my day job we use a platform called Bonusly for people to give little shout-outs (shouts-out?) to their peers for doing something awesome. I rarely get any awards here, but people on my teams get them all the damn time and to me that speaks incredible volumes.
I view this as you won't see a good manager's fingerprints on the thing that receives the recognition, but you will find them all over the people who are being recognized. It's harder to get a dopamine hit from this but like protein over sugar, it lasts longer & helps build you as a manager.
Nah, this lays out what everyone knows going in and leaves out what you really need to know as a newby.
Budget. Getting some for your team or at least for your priorities. Protecting what you get. Capex vs Opex.
Upward management. Translating messages upwards. Interpreting C suite decrees. Pacing and leading. Inducting new leadership before they fuck things up.
Retention. Keeping the people you need on your team. Cutting the people you don't. Compensation and promotions.
All of which is to say, Politics. How to not come out a loser at the game of thrones next time there is a merger, reorg, budget season, or just end of quarter.
It's interesting how the article equates Manager with Boss. If you're a "Line Manager" that's true but for Tech Leads, maybe less.
Great article. As a high-end residential builder, much of this also applies to my project managers and i shared the article with one of my APMs that's been promoted to PM.
Comments within this thread are quite interesting perspectives on the challenges of being a manager.
This was a good article but it doesn't even mention the hardest part of management: hiring and firing people.
I feel like a discussion of management without those components is missing something critical. Maintaining high performing teams requires that you get really good at this. This article makes it seem like the job is really just talking to people and making sure they're motivated, but in my experience that's the easiest part of the job.
Fantastic post. I became a manager in the style of the Steve Jobs philosophyâ take one of your best individual contributors and make them oversee the work of others. Professional managers didnât work out well for Apple, but the approach of letting growing leaders lead did. This post misses out on the important point to rely on your instincts because thatâs why youâve been put in that position.
If you fired all the people that build things, then your company could no longer build things. If you fire all the people that sell things, then your company could no longer sell things. Grug brain understand this.
But if you fired all the managers then... What? Wouldn't everything just continue as before? Grug brain has never understood management.
Never let the accumulated trauma from your managers (the unbearable ones) turn you into one of them. That's my takeaway here!
Great post. I'm still going through this process. I was offered the management cap a few years ago as an escape from the drudgery I was dealing with at the time. Now I am not sure if I regret it or not.
There are different type of leads, not only people managers. There are architects, chief-of-somethings, designers, people who give all their imagination, creativity and experience into leading teams and companies to achieve great things. Clearly that's empowering, and empowering is crucial: Preparing the ground and conditions for people to do their job as good as possible. But it's a lot more, and it's fun and you get feedback and reward.
Let's not get dragged down by this stories how pathetic the reality of leadership roles has to be, this all depends on the leadership structure and culture.
About 30 years ago I was in the early part of my career and was stunned to learn two of my favorite programmers were former managers. I couldnât understand why they âtook a step backwardâ to return to programming.
One of them explained âIn management, they nip at you from the top, and they nip at you from the bottomâ. Meaning that you had many more people with demands. A programmer usually has only one, maybe a few.
Later, I learned that many managers are paid less than senior programmers.
I turned down every request to begin managing, and I finished my career happy.
Good advice. Recently, I had to manage a team just because I am a senior employee of the company. I messed up the first project, but they still trust me for the second one. Honestly, the pressure is insanely hard to bear sometimes.
I've been down the toxic boss / burn out road. This article is spot on. Very good!
I've recently been getting more and more management responsibilities. This article seems very helpful - thank you for sharing! The advice on over-communicating & owning up to your mistakes is very on point.
This is why I won't become a manager
>Youâre Going To Mess Stuff Up. Repeatedly. [...] Nobody expects you to have all the answers. [...] Youâre not expected to be perfect. [...] Messing up is part of the job. What matters more is how you respond. Own your mistakes. Say the awkward thing out loud. Apologize when you blow it. Your team doesnât need a flawless boss, they need a human one whoâs willing to grow in public. That builds trust faster than pretending youâve got it all figured out.
Emotionally supportive advice like this is probably part of an important foundation. But I've been on the receiving end of management that's trying to figure out how to do their job through osmosis too many times. I move to avoid it, but I just don't have it in me to put my personal drive into work anymore when the generally-accepted way of training a new manager is letting them whoopsiedaisy torpedo a multiyear project or two along the way.
> But if you show up with humility, curiosity, and a genuine desire to make work suck less for the people around you? Thatâs real leadership.
No. No it's fucking not. That's necessary but not sufficient.
>Sometimes it means shielding your team from dumb shit.
I think this is a generally good advice, but can also be misused.
I liked my previous manager, he had a principle for that part. Shielding the team from those crap, especially paperwork stuff. The trouble was that I could see how it was grinding him down, and I knew I could help him with it (because this was Japan, he didn't speak Japanese, I do and language barrier create inefficiencies) but he refused. My manager before him (this time the opposite: Japanese but couldn't articulate himself on English so I took care of all the English team communication) did and it worked smoothly.
If you're a small team (in a startup) doubly so, since grasping the full context of your team & outside is not as big of a task.
Best is to at least be open if your team members are open to helping you with the trickling down bullshit.
Now the dark side grows in you. Managers are the anchors in every company. They make sure nothing moves ever again. They are like a parasite sitting on the shoulder of thinking engineers. They get there money for nothing
I kind of want to call BS on this. Sure, a bad manager can crush an employee's motivation and will to work. But when an employee is crushing it, I am not sure how much of that is really because the manager "empowered" the employee - unless you mean literally just allowing them to show up and work on something of value to the company?
This is a great article. It echoes a lot of what I went through when transitioning to management. I can also recommend the book "The Making of a Manager", which covers similar ground in more detail.
I have one criticism: no auto-play GIFs, please. They're so distracting. They could be better as short, pausable videos.
Add to it the ability to cut through the bullshit and follow through tasks till completion. The amount of bullshit that ICs, QAs, and products can spin in rounds and add to that the new bureaucracy that comes with being a manager is just unreal.
Some good advice. Itâs missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management.
Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your teamâs wins, and the other feel good topics.
If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people that the manager just needs to serve.
Iâm in a semi-private peer group for managers and the number one most common struggle for new managers is their first encounter with employees who arenât working unless a manager is standing over their shoulder, or who are causing problems within the team. Books like âThe Managers Pathâ can help, but in my experience the best help is to find a more experienced manager you can talk to for advice. A lot of the difficult realities of managing people are messy or even painful and are often intentionally avoided in feel-good internet advice.