Comment by cosmiccatnap
2 years ago
I don't see managers who grow and the reason is because they often weren't growing as engineers...
The most common reason I see people become managers is because they weren't cut out for engineering work or it burnt them out over time. Many couldn't keep up with the ocean of new technologies and philosophies software has gained in the last few decades and so they are relegated to being a machine that checks email for twice a starting engineers salary.
Some managers really have done so to steward a company or team through a problem but so many more of them just want to "check out" essentially and in just a few short years loose most of the engineering context value they had and become some degree of roadblock to progress because sadly they want their cake and they want to engineer it too...they often create tasks and conversations they don't make sense or deliverables that are missing the point because they are no longer engineers no matter how badly they still want to identify as one after leaving a organic growing codebase.
I get it they have families and they are getting older and the kids coming out of college are honestly intimidating sometimes but that's a problem with the absolute lack of upward mobility within engineering and they unhealthy standards of modern corporate culture.
It's sad really. Very intelligent opinionated people slowly go from talking about solutions in concrete terms to a mix of language about deliverables, burn charts, agile, circling wagons, getting on the same page, and determining a funnel for Q4 while the software they are talking about has no unit tests and they themselves have determined that it's not part of the MVP...
If they could go back 10 years and hear themselves I wonder what they would think of the people they've become...
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