Becoming an Engineering Manager Can Make You Better At Life And Relationships

The author revisits her view on engineering management and says that, today, the role is more difficult and more necessary. She compares the function with individual engineering, argues that managers sustain coordination, feedback, and alignment, and states that the experience can also strengthen lasting personal skills.

Reading notes

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• The text revisits an earlier article about engineering management written for a friend who was dissatisfied at work and missing building things as an engineer.
• The author observes that, over time, she came to feel uncomfortable with the anti-management bias of older texts, because the industry context had changed.
• Today there are more technical progression paths, such as staff+ engineering, and this reduced the pressure for people to enter management for the wrong reasons.
• The author says command-and-control systems are fragile and that good software depends on agency, critical thinking, and real involvement from people.
• The engineering manager role became more demanding because expectations grew and weak management became more recognized as harmful.
• The pandemic worsened the exodus of managers from the profession and made it harder to find people willing to take on the role.
• A team with a good manager tends to perform better than a team without that support, especially in larger organizations, complex products, and fast-changing contexts.
• The author lists obstacles to productivity that the manager helps address, such as working on the wrong problem, indecision, blockages between teams, ramp-up of new engineers, bad morale, poor processes, communication friction, and poor performance allowed to continue for too long.
• The manager’s role is to sustain the systems and structure that allow engineers to deliver results.
• Managers do not make every decision, but they ensure that decisions happen, that the work has resources, and that teams are aligned with external commitments.
• The author says coordinating complex business problems in software projects with multiple teams is very difficult.
• In systems theory, hierarchy serves to coordinate subsystems and create resilience, and managers embody the feedback loops that help the system adjust and improve.
• Among the good reasons to go into management, the author includes getting closer to how the business works, making the work more meaningful, developing mentoring and passing on learning, and forming future staff engineers with management experience.
• The main reason presented is that management can improve how a person lives and relates.
• The author compares the decision to become a manager to the decision to have children, because both change who a person is and how they relate to others.
• Being a manager forces work on more basic skills such as self-regulation, self-awareness, understanding other people, setting boundaries, attention to power dynamics, and handling difficult conversations.
• The author highlights that feedback works better when the relationship is side by side, with the intention to help and without taking away the other person’s agency.
• She says that her own family experience and personal path delayed her learning of difficult conversations and of a growth mindset.
• The text states that it was when she became a manager that she began to consciously practice giving and receiving feedback and starting difficult conversations.
• Work is presented as a particularly useful space for training life skills, because relationships are more explicit, roles are defined, and the stakes are usually lower than in personal life.
• The author says that tools like books, courses, mentors, and review cycles help this development, and that the role expects continuous growth.
• Technical skills may age, but relationship and communication skills remain and increase the ability to build trust, listen, and communicate in personal and professional contexts.
• The author concludes that, if a person is going to be a manager, they should choose the company well, because the role requires alignment with leadership and with the organization’s goals.