Comment by cbm-vic-20
5 days ago
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.
You forgot the worst one imo: * when re-org happens / changing jobs, you now have no deep knowledge at all in the stacks you are managing. And no time to develop such knowledge before the next re-org anyway. So you are constantly in a state where you are dealing with topics that you only have a superficial understanding about.
I really feel like the tension between <time to develop a deep understanding of your scope> VS <time before the next re-org (or layoff)> is not in your favor.
Problem is: going to Director level takes several years, at least. And even there, you are basically the CEO of a small start-up, in the sense that you need to constantly fight for "market shares", i.e. scope. Else your org risks getting irrelevant pretty fast, and you are in for a lot of trouble.
> "You get to be the "executioner" when a RIF rolls through..."
The other fun bit about that from the worm's eye view is bottom tier managers who haven't really internalized that their direct reports also are very aware that they're stuck with the "executioner" role and, before/during/shortly after layoffs, frequently reach out with "Got a minute to talk?" with no additional explanation or context, giving their reports a mini panic attack every time.
I've received messages from people (who don't even report to me) asking whether they did something wrong because I had forgotten to close some google doc they shared which then showed me as "active on the document" for hours and they thought "he's combing through everything, I'm in trouble" and eventually reached out because they couldn't take it anymore.
People read things very differently based on their perceived (job) safety. If you add culture differences (I'm german in a company with a lot of non-germans; what's normal communication to me makes some people gasp), there's a lot of opportunity to accidentally cause stress.
It depends a lot.
In your first two points, I think that after you know your team well enough, you will understand where your engineers' skills lie and learn how to delegate effectively to either the person most capable or the one who will learn the most.
Your last point is true in larger enterprises. However, it's not so bad if you are a manager in smaller companies or startups, when you are 1-3 steps from the CEO, you get a lot of independence.
In the other points, I must admit I never went through an RIF and never had a situation where the "engineers were too green." However, I worked at an enterprise company where there was a 1:1 ratio of interns to employees, so it might be a large enterprise. Generally, there is always at least one senior in the team to deal with firefighting.
> 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.
As long as you are a go-to person, you have more clout than you realize. Spend your social capital while you have it and make changes. Also, making change requires allies but they don’t necessarily have to be in your direct chain of command. Lastly, to make a change in an org, just change. People will follow. Most people are not leaders, but you are. Act like it and you will see that you command far more respect than you think you do.
One of the more real management comments I've read on Hacker News. Most people just post LinkedIn feel-good spam when it comes to management.
Nitpick, but directors are typically considered executive-tier, not n-tier-management.
It depends. I worked at a company with tons of title inflation. The first layer of management was referred to as "director." One of the "directors" literally had one report. The organizational hierarchy was bizarre.
Depends on the company, but in my experience that is not true. VP is the first executive level. Directors are middle management.
Well at least you’re paid more