17 Comments

Some good advice here. EM is definitely more a side step than a step up. Patience, humility and empathy are required skills. Your observation about lack of advancement rings true as well, especially when the org or team is not growing. It can be frustrating to deliver great results but not have a sense of going anywhere.

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Nice article! I’d add that you will never be a good manager if you are not technically proficient. So whatever your decision, it is your responsibility to keep learning the technical side of things.

You are not expected to be an expert, but you must understand it well enough to know how your management decisions will affect the technical work.

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Definitely, technical competency improves judgment and helps managers represent work better during performance reviews.

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You're right. Someone who wants to be manager should keep technical skill learning until understanding what it comes even though you dont want to be a expert about that.

I think it's most important attribute of manager.

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If you've maintained a high level of technical proficiency before becoming an EM that should translate into camaraderie and empathy with your direct reports later. And that's what you need most going forward: empathy and other behaviors that build trust. As EM you won't have time to keep up with the technical skills anymore outside of basic familiarity - and that's okay because you shouldn't feel compelled to dictate the standards anymore like you may have when you were tech lead/ staff engineer. Companies who expect their EM to code a lot and still set the standard for the other devs are misconstruing the role and setting an EM up for frustration and burnout IMO.

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Love hearing your perspective, Ryan!

I personally made the switch into management almost a year ago now, and here’s what I used at my company and what I’ve heard work for some others I’ve talked with.

1. Find something you can take off your managers / tech lead / staff’s plate

2. Ask if you can own it so they can focus on higher priorities and give you a chance to grow and stretch your leadership skills.

3. Do those things amazingly well. 💪

4. Keep them updated to build trust and confidence that you are owning it well. 🤝

5. Continue to grow your responsibilities and thinking as you take on more and more ownership and leadership in various areas

6. Bring up promotion with your manager and show all the areas you’ve been taking on ownership and impact above your current level

7. Work on any feedback they share and continue to repeat this “Magic Loop.”

Also, like Ryan said, You’ll need to be patient as a promotion into a leadership position – EM or Staff – will take a while and need business funding + justification.

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Thanks for the article. I have one more thing to add.

As a manager, you get a much broader perspective of what’s happening around you and why. The IC focus is deep. Becoming a manager will help you understand how all the pieces fit together and as an IC you will usually focus on a single thing at a time.

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That is often true. One notable exception are high-level ICs who act as "uber-TLs". They often have a similar big picture view on the business and workstreams.

One thing that's unique to management though is you get all the "behind the scenes" information necessary to run the org. This includes performance information, reorg strategy, and at some companies you even know compensation.

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Hey Ryan, I see you've given this a lot of thought. I've helped mentor more engineers into managers but also helped quite a few that recognized it wasn't the path for them. Close to 40 made it to VP of C-level so far. Happy to chat if it would help. You can also get a bit of my thinking on the transition here: www.TalentWhisperers.com/New-Managers

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What about on the IC path? If someone choose that then are they going to be like Principal Frontend Engineer, Principal Backend Engineer, Principal Distributed System Engineer etc? When they are expert of one things, how they create more individual impact?

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Leverage is the main way ICs have more impact. Here's a little summary to give you an idea: https://www.developing.dev/i/147262462/leverage-is-how-you-have-more-impact

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Insightful article. New here but interested to know what you ended up doing Ryan. Did you stick to management or tried it, didn’t like it and got back to being an IC.

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I switched to TLM first (manager still doing IC work with a small team) because I wasn't sure I wanted to give up the technical work I loved.

I didn't have as much time to be hands on but still got to learn the high-level tech. This along with the other parts of management I enjoyed made me comfortable with making the full switch to EM.

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It's nice to see this insight explicitly called out:

> The high-level tradeoff is that you work fewer hours but you have less control of your time.

It's something I think I had in the back of my mind as a small part of wanting to get into management. I think I work well without strong control of my time, AND would also prefer to not work the long hours that engineers often experience.

I've also seen plenty of cases where managers do end up working those long hours and not having control of their time though...

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> I've also seen plenty of cases where managers do end up working those long hours and not having control of their time though...

Yeah there are always exceptions. Also even managers that often have good work life balance can expect to work a lot more during performance review season or if there are people issues that come up.

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Moving into management should perhaps be seen as a change of career rather than a natural progression from IC. People, relationships, and organisational challenges are of a very different nature and scope - there are many more highs and lows and the effects of your actions are not immediate (you can't unit test your team!).

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> the effects of your actions are not immediate

Agreed. Hiring or strategy decisions take much longer to play out

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