Comment by Esophagus4
6 hours ago
In addition, I think the roles of manager and engineer will blend and management layers will flatten - companies are mostly looking for managers who code some of the time. It helps them run lean and avoid layers of management which slow down execution.
As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we’ll be demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading.
So if you do go into management, keep in mind you can’t let your engineering skills atrophy… you now have to be good at both. There aren’t many people who can do both well, but companies will expect this moving forward.
Or, because coding is now not a bottleneck, it'll become increasingly important to ensure all your developers know what to do/achieve, and you'll need to put more effort into setting up structures, processes etc to do that. More collaboration (instead of lone wolf coder) may actually increase the need for good managers.
That could be - I hadn’t thought about it that way, actually
> that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading
That never lasts. No one can do do both and do them effectively.
I happen to agree with you entirely… but I just have this feeling things will go this way as companies put more and more cost pressure on middle management layers.