The reality of being an engineering manager

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Key takeaways:

• Engineering managers shape the conditions that let teams do their best work.
• Stay technical, just differently. It builds credibility, trust, and makes you a better advocate for your team.
• The role is defined by the team, not the title: what an EM does shifts constantly. Adaptability isn’t a bonus skill – it’s the job.

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Engineering managers are often described as “human routers.” It’s not a bad definition. We connect the right people, pass along important information and context, coordinate actions in order to drive outcomes and, ultimately, deliver value to the business.

However, while the term “human router” is pithy and memorable, I’ve found that it doesn’t fully capture the nuance of the role.

When I made the switch from individual contributor (IC) to engineering manager a few years ago, I was surprised by how much of my day-to-day work was dictated by the needs of the team I was leading. Over the past few years, I’ve inherited existing teams and built out new ones. In both situations, I had to figure out how to support that specific team in the most effective way possible, and it looked slightly different each time.

Engineering management is all about understanding your team as a unit, the individuals within it, and empowering and supporting both in moving towards the right goals. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of subtlety in how to do that nebulous job well.

Operating within the sociotechnical system

One of the trickiest parts of transitioning from the IC track to the engineering manager role is adapting to a new reality where writing code becomes less of a part of your job.

Many folks struggle with this when they first dip their toes into management, and for some, moving further away from the weeds (i.e. the code) is enough of a dealbreaker that they eventually switch back to being an IC.

Whereas ICs spend a large chunk of their days building features, fixing bugs, maintaining the platform, refactoring or reviewing code, and making architectural decisions, engineering managers have to drop some of these tasks in order to make space for new responsibilities.

For a manager, the day-to-day focus is not the code that you produce, but rather the output of your team. As such, your main job is to support your team to help them reach their goals (notably, this does not mean that you no longer need to be technical, but more on that later).

While the engineering manager job is very different from the IC one, there is some good news: the systems-level thinking that you honed as an IC is still incredibly valuable in your new role. After all, the people who build software and contribute code are part of the sociotechnical system of an engineering organization.

Unlike an IC, instead of spending your day thinking about the services that interact with one another, you must now think about the dynamics of your team, how it functions internally, and the way it interacts with other entities within the ecosystem of the larger engineering organization. 

Ultimately, an engineering manager has to operate within a new system, where people and the technologies they use and build come together.

The day-to-day of an engineering manager

The engineering manager role looks slightly different depending on the structure and demands of a given company. As such, the day-to-day activities of the job can vary.

Technical vs. management work

One of the big variables in what your day-to-day looks like depends on how much time you need to spend doing technical work.

For example, if you’re an engineering manager at a startup or leading a smaller team at a mid-sized company, you’ll likely end up operating as a player-coach. This will require you to balance some degree of hands-on technical work with more operational and managerial tasks. A player-coach engineering manager might spend anywhere between 20% and 50% of their time doing technical work (perhaps even more if you’re leading a smaller team), and might even participate in an on-call rotation.

At a bigger company or given a larger team to manage, your technical contributions will likely be limited to architectural reviews, providing feedback on tech specs, or occasional code reviews. In other words, you’ll be guiding members of your team with your technical expertise when applicable, or coaching members of your team to help them find answers and resources to help them get unstuck. You might not be writing much code at all.

Similarly, if you are joining a company that plans to grow very quickly, you may find that your calendar is quickly consumed by building a recruiting process and hiring engineers to build out your team. This will require you to spend more time on management tasks and less time on technical work.

Setting your team up for success

Regardless of the exact makeup of your responsibilities, your main goal will always center around one thing: helping your team be successful. Everything else stems from that.

On a practical level, supporting your team includes cultivating a strong, inclusive culture and building an environment that encourages learning and growth while fostering healthy and respectful debate. You are responsible for the outcomes of the team, including making sure the right work is getting done and that your team has the proper staffing, technology, and tooling to help them deliver value.

Supporting your team’s outcomes might look like adding metrics to better measure and understand your team’s velocity, doing some capacity planning, or identifying bottlenecks that are slowing your team down or making it harder for them to do their work.

As an engineering manager, you’ll often find yourself representing your team and its initiatives to others within the organization. As such, there is an inherent project management piece to the job; you will have to set goals for your team, determine priorities, and allocate resources. You’ll have to partner with other disciplines (e.g. product, design, and engineering peers to name a few) to ensure that decisions get made, questions are answered, and that your team’s roadmap and deadlines are achievable yet ambitious.

Growing individual engineers

Beyond the team as a whole, part of the engineering manager role is supporting the individuals on your team and helping them grow and evolve as engineers.

On a day-to-day basis, this includes mentoring, coaching, championing, and providing feedback to ICs on your team. More broadly, this also includes helping engineers get promoted as well as managing poor performance or dealing with bad hires.

There’s a lot of job satisfaction that can come from this aspect of the role, but it also can be one of the hardest parts of the job. One of my favorite elements of engineering management is finding the right growth opportunity for an engineer that is in sight of a promotion. Finding the perfect project or initiative that will help that engineer learn, grow, and progress to the next level in their career is a fun puzzle to solve. Helping an engineer work towards and achieve a hard-earned promotion is very satisfying.

Building social skills

Successful engineering managers are able to balance multiple threads at once – context switching from one topic to another throughout the day happens regularly. Staying organized about your work and being able to ruthlessly prioritize what needs to get done first and what can wait until later is an underrated but incredibly powerful skill for any engineering manager.

Given that managers do the work of hiring, growing, and supporting individuals and teams, it helps to really understand people and what motivates or frustrates them. Strong engineering managers are good communicators, but excellent ones also have a strong degree of emotional intelligence.

While a manager needs to communicate goals, expectations, or a mission and vision, they also need to know when to be quiet and listen (for example, practicing active listening in a 1:1 with one’s reports). Similarly, coaching a senior engineer might require asking lots of questions and listening rather than providing answers based on one’s own experience.

Good communication also helps in managing up, sideways, and down, and will make it easier to build relationships across the organization, cultivate trust within and outside of your team, and allow you to influence others.

Even engineers who try out management only to discover that it’s not for them can gain a lot from honing these people-focused, social skills. It’s not a coincidence that the skills that make a good engineering manager also make for a good staff+ engineer. These skills end up being invaluable for folks who move back to the IC track, or even those who swing between the engineer/manager pendulum.

Staying technical

Finally, it’s important to keep your technical skills sharp while honing your management and people skills. While an engineering manager may not necessarily be deep in the code every single day, staying technical is important. A manager that doesn’t understand what their team does, how they do it, or what challenges they face will be considerably less well-equipped to help that team be successful.

Furthermore, staying technical helps to build trust and credibility and will enable you to better represent your team and its interests when talking to other stakeholders (including non-technical folks).

If your team ever needs an extra hand during an on-call incident or during a final push towards a deadline, you can be right there on the ground with them, helping them work towards the finish line. Even if you can only contribute technically through architecture reviews and tech specs, staying technically relevant will surely be helpful. It will allow you to have a deep enough understanding of the systems that your team works in, which will in turn allow you to contribute meaningfully in technical conversations.

The engineering manager of the future

The role of the engineering manager is undoubtedly evolving in the age of AI. With layoffs and budget constraints, we’re being forced to do more with less and ‘be scrappier’ than ever before. Managers are being asked to take on more scope or manage multiple teams. In some cases, teams are getting smaller while roadmaps aren’t always shrinking to match.

Managing performance is much more important than it ever was, and justifying a new hire might be harder than it was before.

However, there are interesting problems to solve as a result of all of these changes. The way that we deliver code is changing, and that changes how our teams operate and function.

There are key questions to answer:

• How do we maintain code quality and build resilient systems when our output is bigger and produced faster than ever before?
• How do we avoid technical debt and avoid unnecessary maintenance burden in AI-generated code?
• How do we maintain job satisfaction for individuals within our teams?
• What kinds of engineers are successful in this new paradigm, and how does that influence how we hire, grow, and promote people within our organizations?

In a time of so much technological change and possibility, engineering managers are in the unique position of observing how this impacts the social aspect of building software. It’s only going to get more interesting.

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