Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
1 day ago
> set the expectation that they have strong relationships with their own teams
Good luck with that.
In most cronytocracies (typical, at the top levels of most companies), you get who you get. They may be really good engineers and "first line" managers, but suck at anything else.
A big problem is that companies don't have career tracks that match people's skills. The Peter Principle[0] applies.
Bad managers hire and promote other bad managers. Highly skilled engineers can often be terrible managers, but want to be managers, because that is the position they equate with "success," at an organization.
A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.
And hire good managers; not ones that don't make the CEO uncomfortable.
> A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.
I spent my whole career avoiding engineering management and trying to grow in the pure technical leadership direction. One day I realized that for every staff engineer there are 10 managers, for every principal there are 5 senior managers, etc.
Turns out management is not so bad and companies seem to appreciate that kind of help a lot more
edit: also as a manager you get to work on all those pesky “It’s a people problem, actually” parts of engineering which is pretty fun. Every time in technical leadership where it felt like “Well we’ve got the plan now we just gotta incentivize doing the plan” you’re the one doing the incentivizing yay!
I was a manager, much of my career.
I hated it, but was actually pretty good at it (I worked for a company that didn't suffer slackers, and they kept me for almost 27 years). I mainly kept it, because I couldn't trust anyone else to do the job correctly.
But my heart has always been in the tech, and I did side projects, that whole time. Since leaving, I ran screaming back to being a technical implementation person, and am almost deliriously happy.
A good manager is actually fairly hard to find. It's been my experience that a majority of highly-talented developers, don't make good managers.
> I hated it, /../ I mainly kept it, because I couldn't trust anyone else to do the job correctly.
I think the best managers are people who will even do management if that's what it takes.
> A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.
100%. I’ve had to fight to build a real IC track at my last three companies - I don’t care if HR wants to call everyone a manager, or differentiate with “staff”/“principal” or whatever else, but there has to be a viable promotion track for everyone, and it has to be equitable.
Just experienced something similar working-at-definitely-not-capital-one as a principal engineer. My manager was horrible, and replaced by another bad manager. He incentivized bad behavior on my team and promoted inexperienced engineers, and group think, pushed me out for questioning the status quo.