Ask HN: Will I fail as an Engineering Manager?
I am about to start a new role as a Senior Software Engineering Manager at a unicorn.
I have about 5 years experience working as a manager and senior manager at a big tech company, but not in engineering. I've other, non-engineering experience outside of that - I'm nearly 40.
I have just 2-3 years engineering experience, at small startups over the last few years, mostly as an IC, but also some management.
I've (somehow) managed to land a job as a Senior Engineering Manager at a unicorn. I'll be managing a team of 8-10 engineers, from leads to juniors. I won't be coding.
I'm confident in my people management, project management, networking etc skills and I love software engineering, but I'm worried my lack of engineering experience is going to hold me back and I'll fail in this new role.
What do you think? Do you have any experiences like this or being managed by someone like this and what they struggled with? Advice on books / blogs etc I can read to try and get up to speed would also be great.
I don’t know if you’ll be able to command or receive respect with such limited engineering experience. I think you may also struggle to convey technical details to non technical stakeholders. Finally, it will be your responsibility to make sure the engineers have proper training and mentorship to improve as engineers.
If you can win respect and loyalty you can probably lean on your senior devs for all these things, but I certainly wouldn’t take respect and loyalty as a given. If it were me personally I would consider this a risky career move.
As a manager you should not be making technical decisions. The most knowledgeable and experienced technical staff should be making those decisions. From your description you have the basic technical knowledge to ask intelligent questions; to guide your staff to consensus and cooperation.
I have seen several situations with managers making technical decisions based on outdated knowledge / experience and it ended very badly. With projects failing and the best staff leaving.
In my experience, the best managers protect their team from outside interference, distraction and conflicting directions. Thus ensuring that they stay focused and are able to do their best work possible.
> The most knowledgeable and experienced technical staff should be making those decisions.
Aren't such individuals the engineer managers themselves, though? Usually, engineer managers have years of experience doing engineering, while the team they are in charge of, is composed of juniors and seniors who have less years of experience than the manager.
Why would you take your best engineers and then give them a completely unrelated job which is going to be a huge time sink? It's something that is done, but should it?
I'd think of it this way - you've passed the interview process, AND you'll have a whole team of software experts with you the whole way. The company has assessed you and decided you're good enough for the role, and you've got the right people working with you to make it successful. Sounds like you've got a solid set of leadership experience as well.
Realistically as an engineering manager you should not be doing any coding yourself. Having a little background in it definitely helps even just in conversations with your team, and it sounds like you've got that covered.
Good luck with the new gig, I'm sure you'll do fine!
Honestly the bar is very low for managers in this industry. If you’re remotely intelligent you’ll do fine and/or fail upward.
Not necessarily. I've seen managers that don't have a software engineering background succeed managing teams and even whole engineering departments and products. It will help though if you develop a close relationship with the tech lead(s) to help make up for technical deficiencies. Trust them to make technical decisions that are best for the team.
It's much more about the people than the engineering! (As long as you can follow general engineering threads and intuitively pick up when someone might be in the weeds on a project, etc. The finer details don't matter.)
Trust your management skills and your people and you will be fine.