Is Engineering Management DYSFUNCTIONAL In My Organization?

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Hey folks, we are going to Twitter for a message and I appreciate this one coming in from this individual. It's a it's a lengthy read, but I'm glad because when people send in messages, then they can add more details and then more details means more context for me and then I can try and answer more clearly. Before I go read this one out, friendly reminder, this channel is mostly driven by people that write in uh messages or leave comments that you want answered on software engineering topics or career development. Happy to try and answer. Comments are public. Messages I keep anonymous. Um and then if you want to message me, you can message Dev Leader on any social media platform where you can find me, which is all of them. And uh that's also my main YouTube channel. You can check that out as well. So, let's get into this one.

It's about engineering management. Um, and I'm going to read through it, but try to skim at the same time, not read it word for word. So, they're basically saying they're curious how engineering management functions in different organizations because they have limited experience kind of observing this and wanted to understand is this the common thing? Is this dysfunctional? Like what what should they expect? So they're saying in their organization uh it's like 30 full-time engineers and some contractors uh and there's five engineering managers but they say manage oversee direct reports by discipline and then said like front end backend uh site reliability engineers devops so functional rather than by like I guess like they say by team oh yeah so like a product or feature focused team right so um so instead of a mixed disciplinary team working on a product function or feature or service. It's just on sort of the the type of role um with mixed disciplines often has members reporting to different managers.

Maybe I have to reread that one sec. So rather than by team so a product or feature focused team with mixed disciplines often has members reporting to different managers. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I get that. So, I thought they meant that each individual was reporting to diff uh like multiple managers. They just mean a team that's working on something. Each person has different managers. Interesting. Um then they say, "Not engineering managers don't meaningfully engage with my team at all." Okay. So, they're not in standup sprint rituals, don't contribute to our deliverables, plans, etc. Literally zero involvement in any capacity with my day-to-day. Okay. Um they say they may get some general um you know input but generally trusted to oversee most things. Um and they say it's been pretty consistent like that in their time there. So uh fill in gaps where needed especially on contractor heavy uh teams where they're naturally less inclined to step up.

So yeah, this person's like expected to do that. As a result, I suspect I'm performing many typical engineering manager duties without formal direct reports. what managers do their thing elsewhere? Which is interesting. They don't seem to be talking like in a way that's like negative about their engineering managers. Like that's not how I see this language by the way. Um and then they're saying or perhaps this is what engineering looks like for the archetype of dev who is leadership inclined and I'm just doing what everyone else is. But so they love my take on this. Is it typical? Uh how do you handle this scenario? They said they're engineering. My manager loves my work. And they said pessimistically it's likely because no news is good news and my teams generally deliver on stuff. Um long term I worry it's hard to demonstrate my impact when managers aren't involved at all and I do less technical work to pick up slack.

Um and then they kind of go on. In my view, an ideal manager leads a team, assesses its strengths and weaknesses, and drives its growth, enhances its ability to ship rather than just being an HR interface, uh, who they only see for their bi-weekly 101. How is management typically structured and operated elsewhere? Okay, lots of stuff here. This is why I love when people write things in because I have more things to kind of scroll through and and chat about. But, um, in my experience, this is not typical. I'm not saying there aren't other places that do this. It's not typical. The most that I see split um in terms of responsibilities in terms of like a let me say like a role um is not like DevOps front and back end to different managers. It's actually more like engineer and product or project manager.

So even at Microsoft it's like an engineering sort of uh reporting structure and in parallel to that is a PM structure that reports up um that's like mostly what I've seen even before um Microsoft I was at a startup and we were like coming up with this stuff right there was literally like less than eight people when I started there so this stuff got built up over time when we got it was over it was over 250 people by the time I left so things had to grow evolve and even for us we ended up having like a PM kind of split out as well um at different you know high up higher up in the or it kind of you know bubbles up to the same people kind of thing but different reporting structures so I've never seen it done you know to the

front-end manager to the backend manager and the other part that's weird about this and I say weird just because it's it seems like it would be difficult that's what I mean by weird is that when you have a feature team or a product team or a service team that the individuals on the team are reporting to different managers. So the reason this probably seems to work at their organization is because this person said the managers aren't involved into the day-to-day. So, if I can think about how this looks, right? This the only interaction I've had with this person is like their message and I said, "Hey, thanks." Like, I'll I'll get and try to make a video about this. I don't know. It seems like to me that they have these feature teams with uh people who have roles that are of like different disciplines.

There are individuals on the team probably like this person that act more like a team lead or a tech lead that are doing a lot of like whether it's uh project management kind of interactions or or team lead or tech lead responsibilities and a lot of this stuff in general usually engineering managers have aspects of these things that they're responsible for. So it sounds like that's kind of happening autonomously in the team and then the engineering manager is completely removed and they said it interest like a in an interesting way that I think makes sense to me. It's almost like the engineering manager just becomes like this proxy between HR and the engineers, right? Like it's they do one-on ones.

They probably talk about career development and like navigating challenges and stuff like that, but I think it ends up probably working for them because if you had multiple engineering managers that were trying to like prioritize work for the people on the team and stuff, who like how do you get how who would you listen to? You're going to have all these weird competing priorities or like an overmanaged group of people. Like could you imagine having like three or four engineering managers trying to manage the work on like a team of six people? It would be nuts. So I think it probably works for them because the engineering managers are removed and then the team leader, the tech leader, this this person's kind of role is is kind of facilitating that. So I think they make it work. It's just that it's odd to me because I don't think I've ever seen that or heard of that.

Um, so my take on this is like I wouldn't say it's dysfunctional. It's it from walking through that it seems like it probably works, but um some things about this make me a little bit nervous I guess. Um ner I guess the first part it makes me nervous because like I've never worked like that. So I don't really know how I just I I don't know. It seems odd. The the thing that really makes me kind of nervous is around um and maybe not for this person uh maybe for the managers. I don't know. I'm trying to think about being a manager at this person's company and thinking about the things that I'm responsible for. And it sounds like it's, you know, not working directly with the team, right? Like I'm not writing code as an engineering manager anymore. That's not a big deal necessarily, but I mean like they're not in any of like the sprint ceremonies, the planning discussions.

They're not participating in architecture. They're not like they're not doing the engineering work. They're they're doing the HR work. Don't get me wrong, I think people leadership is a huge part of being an engineering manager, but when you remove yourself completely, then I start to wonder like what kind of impact are you having? Like if you're not even familiar with the things that are going on in the team, how do you have impact? So, I actually worry for the engineering managers at this company because I'm thinking like, I don't know, man. And if you were to go to a different company, you're probably going to have a rude awakening if now you're expected to go do all these things that you haven't been doing. And not because you were doing your job wrong at the current company. If that's the expectation, that's the expectation. I just don't I don't think that that's like an industry expectation.

So like to give you an example when as an engineering manager when I'm interviewing for engineering manager roles they will be asking me things about how I was prioritizing work or had to uh you know if a feature was going to miss delivery or you know like how I participated in architecting things like I will get asked that kind of stuff and if someone's like well I was an engineering manager for 5 years at this company and basically I did oneonone with people see it seems like there's a lot of the responsibilities that are are probably missing. Um so again uh I try to make sure that when I talk through this stuff I'm trying to get some different perspectives like this person like it's not that I don't have a like I don't believe them on this but this is their perspective on it. Um maybe you know maybe in reality the engineering managers are doing a lot more than they're they're kind of perceiving.

Maybe I'm just going to say it. Maybe it's just their engineering manager, right? Maybe the other engineering managers are doing a lot more than this one. It's hard to say. I just mention this because like when I talk through this stuff, I don't want to go down one path so hard that like we don't at least entertain the idea that maybe there's something else going on. Um I've certainly I've 100% seen scenarios um where we don't have a setup like this. We have what I would call more traditional where an engineering manages over a team and they end up delegating so many of their own responsibilities that they should be expected to do that basically they don't have anything left to do and their team is like carrying all these responsibilities um and and like not in an effective way. So, I've seen that happen and like this person's saying like, "Hey, no news is good news kind of thing." Like their manager is probably happy.

Yeah. And the other managers that I like kind of talking about in this scenario, they're happy, too, cuz they're like, "I don't have anything to do, right? I can I can mess around. I can do whatever cuz my responsibilities are getting taken care of." So anyway, I don't I think that this person um at least based on the work that they're the responsibilities they're probably doing and carrying out. I think that's great. I think you're getting a lot of exposure to to like what I would call team lead and tech lead type of things, right? If you're helping run um planning, if you're helping run like uh standups or sprint meetings and things like that, I don't want to necessarily get into the whole agile thing. I just mean like some of the operations around the team. If you're doing planning operations around the team, like kind of project stuff as well as writing code, participating in architecture, like these are like team lead type things.

it's the the direct reports they don't have that ends up becoming, you know, management type of aspects that come in where you have responsibilities for people's career progression. But I think this person is probably getting a ton of great experience um in terms of responsibilities. I don't know if the the work culture that setup is necessarily something that I'd uh recommend. So, um to to wrap this one up, um um one more part I guess I say longterm I I worry it's hard to demonstrate my impact when managers aren't involved at all. So like this I mean if the managers aren't involved at all and this is all stuff you're doing, you have so much impact. So it's not it's not that you don't have impact. I guess the concern is like how do you demonstrate that? If you have, this is going to be all about communication and visibility.

How do you plan to communicate that? If it's just in your one-on ones with your manager, you better hope to hell that they're representing you in other conversations. You really better hope. And maybe that is the case. You have an awesome working relationship with your manager and they're going to bat for you and that's great. Like, cool. Um, I personally wouldn't just rely on that kind of stuff. So I would be trying to think about how do I increase my visibility? How do I make sure the work I'm doing is uh significant enough that the other engineering managers also see that like I'm having a positive impact. So um I would look for ways to try and demonstrate that more just so you don't have to worry about this. Um but they're saying I do less technical work to pick up the slack and keep our team operating as well as I can.

This is um like as someone who transitioned from a individual contributor to an engineering manager and I I did both roles for like uh in parallel for eight years. This is one of the hardest things to learn for yourself is like your impact um when it comes to leading teams even not even as a manager necessarily like as a team lead right it inevitably means that you will be coding less if you're spending more time doing other things that are operational or helping organize or pushing things through. um you need to be able to learn that um just because you're not coding the thing that you can still be part of that success. Right? To give you an example, I haven't not that I've written zero code at Microsoft in 5 years, but in 5 years at Microsoft, I've not like delivered features or fixed bugs.

Okay? Does that mean that I have zero impact? No. because I am helping basically coordinate and drive all of the work that my team's responsible for. I have to be part of architectural decisions so I can talk through my participation in that. I have to talk about prioritization changes so I can talk about how uh different priority changes were strategic or tactical. I can talk about how I'm growing people in their careers. Um there's there's so many things that aren't just I wrote code. So these things will take some time to try and uh for yourself to even understand like hey like how impactful was this? That takes time. It took me like roughly roughly seven years before I was like I'm having a bigger impact by taking my hands off the keyboard. It took me a long time.

One of the side effect or one of the things that didn't help with that was that I worked so much that I could make time for both because when you're trying to fit both into a workday, you'll find that that your hands come off the keyboard a lot more. You're writing less code. Um but yeah, um I kind of answered one of their questions. How is management typically structured and operated elsewhere? I think it's basically not by um not by role unless it's like engineering PM kind of split. I think that's the most common. Uh if orgs have like testers as well. Uh I think I feel like this is kind of a dying thing where you just have like a dedicated testing org. I think some places still do it, but then you might have like engineers, testers, and PMs up their own kind of uh reporting structure perhaps.

Um, but I think like front end versus backend versus DevOps like that seems a little bit odd to me personally. So it seems to me a lot more around like a feature area or service or or product uh depending on the scale of those things. That's usually how I see that done where the engineering managers um are usually taking on a lot more of all these pieces in some cases literally expected to write code. So potentially coding, architectural changes, uh planning absolutely project management types of things. When I say planning, I mean more on like product side, right? Like what features and like things areas we want to improve on, but also like the project and coordination of things. So you end up wearing tons of hats. Then the actual management part, right? So, as a middle manager, you it's like, don't get me wrong, I I love the role that I have.

I love the, you know, the coverage of responsibilities. At the same time, it's a shitty role because like you're literally in the middle of everything and you have to do a lot of everything. So, it can be pretty overwhelming. But, um, I would say that's the more common thing that I see for engineering managers. Um, and they say, "Is my perspective of management idealistic or naive?" No, I think they're they're thinking about the right things. Um, I think that this person is probably doing a lot more of like a team lead or tech lead type of thing and the structure of management at their company is a little odd in my opinion. I don't mean to offend anyone with that, but um, yeah, I think that's where I'd wrap that up. Um, but like I said, I think for this person, they probably have a lot of awesome experience they're gaining.

um if they were to change companies or that kind of thing, they'd probably, you know, they'd probably have a bunch of experiences that would set them I don't even know how much experience they have, right? But at least, you know, for senior engineer type of thing where uh senior engineer to like tech lead kind of positions, I think that they could probably demonstrate a lot of that. And if they were interested in moving into engineering management, I feel like they're doing a bunch of the stuff that moves them in that direction at least. So, um yeah, I hope that helps. Uh, great question. Again, thank you so much for so much details. Um, so hopefully that helps and I will see you folks next time. Take care.