I Quit My Job As An Engineering Manager (What I Learned)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ก.ย. 2022
- I recently quit my engineering manager job and figured I should talk to all you about what went into that decision to help give a little insight into what engineering management is all about.
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Good video, as an SDM/EM suffering from the same pains as you, it hits home. I am also dealing with sociopathic upper management and people who will end your career if you don't let them treat you like a slave. I never dealt with that as an IC. And to be fair, I wanted more power to have more control of what was built. I was in for a rude surprise when I found out the 5 PMs on the team got to do that. Then all I'm doing is giving project estimates and answering for code I DIDN'T WRITE, and never have time to go deep on. And then add in the personal problems, promotions, trying to get good work for your engineers promotions but having no control of what work is done, raises, ratings, perf management, micromanaging, attitudes. UGH I just could not take it anymore. This is not a promotion, I absolutely don't know if the right path forward is a pivot into Technical Product Management, because I love using my 20 years of experience to make the right calls about building a winning product. I found very little reward in EM, engineers really don't think you do anything, despite me working 12+ hours day vs ~9 as an SWE. It's thankless, it lacks any true control but gives you tons of responsibility.
I want to give EM one more try because my current company is know as seriously toxic. Perhaps that is the wrong move.
I think it depends a lot on the company when pivoting to really anything new. As experienced software engineers we can both identify issues and speak confidently to those issues because we've been there before.
As a TPGM or EM we aren't experienced and so we don't know if what we're seeing is dysfunction or just the way things are.
I share the same feeling, I have 4 years as a technical leader and 1 year as a manager. As a manager, I am charged with business matters and not with the quality of what is done, apart from the fact that in other people's eyes you are doing nothing, and that you are even responsible for not promoting some people, even though they need more time to evolve in their own careers. You are at the center of everything and it is all your fault, even though you have no power to solve the problems.
Hey Cody, thanks for sharing and for your honesty. I know exactly what you have been through. Stay strong, and be happy on the technical side of your career!
Thanks Carlos, I appreciate that!
Good content as always Cody! The meetings part sounds very similar to my last and current jobs. Unnecessary meetings when I could use that time to finish assigned projects. I am glad you were able to find a position that offers good work/life balance.
Thank you! As far as meetings go, one thing that's nice about being an IC is being able to decline meetings or go to a meeting and just tune out while multitasking. I did find that blocking my calendar with focus time helped out a lot with keeping my calendar empty.
Hey Cody, thanks for sharing. I wish you all the success back to the tech path.
I just made the same movement after ~1.5y as an EM.
Thanks and wish you all the best with your transition back to an IC as well!
Congrats for the video, very insightful!!
Great video, as EM myself currently I feel like im sitting on that exact cross roads for myself right now and i havent decided what to do yet going forward.
Thank you for sharing your journey. I’ve been a software developer over many years and have seen different things come and go in terms of technology, practices, software used, and the like. Congrats on your next step and may God bless your path. Interested to see what you do, so I’ll make sure to subscribe!
Thank you ☺️ I'm hoping to start up the new series this week.
Amazing video! Thank you for sharing your experience! So much to learn!
Glad it was helpful!
Cody, I connect so much with your thoughts and I'd always appreciate being vulnerable and sharing this so openly. It gives me hope because I am forced to be in the manager role but I really want to do an IC type of work where others' deliverables are not part of my contributions. any thoughts on how to make the move from a manager role to a more independent role that is tech-focused than mere meetings?
For myself I just told my manager a few times that I wasn't enjoying management. The first time was mostly looking to them to make the decision, they liked me as a manager so I continued on a for another half a year and then we had another conversation and I more or less said "I do not want to be a manager, I think I can be a better leader if I wasn't managing others" and then had a couple other conversations with other managers and that was that.
It is a risky conversation because there's always the chance that there won't be a place for you to move to. I'm fortunate that I'm in a position where if I did lose my job because of those conversations I could cover my living costs for a while so it's more or less risk free.
Thank you Cody for sharing this with us. I have a question for you that is in few months i will be graduating from electronics and Communication Engineering and I am thinking of doing masters in EM... can you share your opinion on this please?
good content, thanks for sharing
You described exactly what I'm going thru as the manager for my team for 2 years. Same thing, end of the day, I'm so exhausted and burned out, I don't want to do anything. Curious, how did your upper management take it when you told them you wanted to step back into a production role? That's what I'll be doing next week. Great video, thanks! I'm not alone! :)
Great reflection and thank you for sharing so openly. All the best in your staff engineer role. Do you feel that you'll be able to do your job better now that you've been a manager? A lot of engineering managers I know who went back to IC roles said they are now better engineers because they understand the expectation and perspective of their engineering managers better.
Yeah I think having the hands-on experience as a manager has been helpful now that I've moved back to an IC. Not so much from an expectations perspective but just realizing that the way I work is different from other engineers and it's beneficial to EMs because I try to understand both business desires along with what is possible technically, so I can serve more like an advisor.
Hey Cody, I like that the way you explained why you prefer a technical role. I wonder whether there are jobs where you can use both, your technical and people problem solving skills.
Great video I've been thinking about transitioning
I'm not the world's best developer but a great trainer once I learn something and want to help folks grow and lead
Love the fact you mentioned budgets and finance
Would love to hear more of tackling those details and how you handle those problems and the shift
Happy to hear this video was helpful! I could probably do a video talking about compensation from a managers point of view, unfortunately can't really dig into budgets/finance too much though.
Awesome video! Thanks for the insight!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Really really good points.
Engineering manager takes a hell lot pain I totally agree. You have to take care of everyone everything + yourselves. Also industry expects you keep technically competent.😢
Hey Cody, how has it been after going back to IC? Did that impact somehow how the job market see you or the questions that recruiters might have? Because there are some people that see this move as a step back, I'm considering doing the same as well but afraid of any possible undesired effects.
I was a field service tech for Cummins Allison 852 Feehanville Drive Mount Prospect, IL 60056 they make money counting equipment (not the diesel people) but same scenario, half assed parts and to top it of they told me not to do the preventative maintenance anymore at customer sites just run the vacuum a little bit and wipe down the machines. I was like "But that is gonna make the service call numbers go up and is >theft of service< WHY ? Well they wanted to keep selling new equipment every 3 years or so see ? With At Will I was fired,SAD HUH ? Country is in TROUBLE...
Thank you for your honesty!
You're welcome!
Good luck for the new journey
Thank you ☺️
Thanks-I’m at a career crossroads. I have been unofficially promoted to line manager for two years. Never had any negative feedback from upper management. Yet, demoted for a new manager with management qualifications but no engineering knowledge. It feels like the manager is a middle man between me an upper management. They ask him a question and he comes to me for an answer and passes it off as his own. Upper management now asking me if there are any courses I want to do to further my career. I really don’t know which way to go because of the way I’ve been treated. Better technical or better manager or not bother at all. It’s different if you quit a role - That’s your choice but to be demoted, you still have to face work colleagues you managed, explain to family, in-laws (mother in law) etc that you’ve been demoted. Even if I do sign up for a course, it’s likely to be 3 years and if the company pays I’d have to sign a retainer agreement lasting another 2 years with no guarantee of promotion either way. . .
Thanks , for sharing your professional eperience.
My pleasure!
Good to know this stuff. How can I find you if I want you to be my mentor. BTW there is no such platform, I think. This looks like a new product idea.. :)
It is a struggle for me even as a Technical Lead, lots of meetings, why can't people just shut up and breathe? But I am starting to be okay with it by adopting the airplane mode technique my baby sister taught me, "Zone out if what is being said is out of your context ( engineering context ) ", it works like magic, put up a fake smile while at it.
That's some great advice and I've tried a variant of it. If I'm not interested in what is being said, then I don't speak up and I don't pay much attention to it.
I was an engineering manager for a few years, and just recently stepped sideways into software architecture. Engineering management is a truly thankless and uninspiring job. You have all the responsibility for a team’s production, but none of the satisfaction of contributing and no creative input. It’s an endless parade of meetings and other people’s problems.
I can corelate with the last poin you which you have mentioned deeply !! I really owe you a frothy drink for highlighling the true words in a statement
This is currently what I’ve been experiencing. I went from being a high performing engineer and have been an engineering manager for little over year and am already missing that feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment from being down in the weeds problem solving. Now I go to work manage my team, delegate to the business needs without actually “feeling” like I’m doing something. I feel very empty when I drive home from work everyday lol.
wow... I also just quit 2 weeks ago being an Engineering manager. I plan to go back to development by next year, and currently I'm just taking a ~3 months off.
Reasons mostly the same.
Nice, congrats on the 3 month break. One of these days I'm probably going to take a similar amount of leave to just rest, relax, and reset.
Great video one question I have is you said that you don’t need the role to go up the corporate ladder I am still in college and I’m looking toward my career and I think I want to go as high as I can on the corporate ladder. Do you have any advice for anyone who wants to climb the corporate ladder in the software engineering space?
It really depends on which direction you decide on.
If it's the management route then after you hit senior engineer you want to start working on your people leadership skills and make a lateral move into management. From there you'd need more people reporting to you, so at first it might be 2 engineers and then progress up to 4 or 8 or 12. Next up is Senior Manager, then Director, followed by VP, and then probably CTO.
If it's individual contributor then you want to focus on your technical problem solving skills and at each promotion you should be garnering more and more influence. This is a good video to check out for more information on that: th-cam.com/video/FutjtRFSOsQ/w-d-xo.html
In case you are taking ideas, a full Android app development would be awesome! CI/CD, TDD (if you use it) / tests, architecture decisions etc. Other than that, best of luck!
Thanks! I don't know that I'll be doing Android for the project (at least not to start) but I will be doing CI/CD, TDD, and architecture decisions. At some point, assuming it's successful, I'd want to work on Android and iOS as part of the project.
He was at Twitter.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Should of had blue shield blue cross at Twitter..! So it wouldn't violated any kind of discrimination code of any sort.
Been there too. In my last employment I’d become the head of the software engineering department and I did less and less on the technical side. And more and more meetings and talking to customers. You just are a router really, just relaying information.
So I decided 15 years ago (wow time flies) to go freelance.
And I changed my expertise 3 times, first started in platform design and security. Then in identity and access management and this also becomes a very political lot of blah blah thing so now CI/CD and tool smith. Which is really a lot of tech from infra (learning a lot of new cloud specific things), to security to software design and architecture. Basically everything in my skill set is combined there except for hardware engineering.
any advice on how to move from Engg Manager to IC role, I also come from coding background but last 7 yrs have left me exhausted, I want to make a come back to IC role :) however again struggling for the same despite me being strong in system design .
@@poonam-kamboj I assume you are from India seeing your name? I understood India is really difficult landing jobs in IT. As there are so many people competing. And I've never worked there myself so I can't give any advise on going freelance or finding startups. Maybe you should talk to a recruiter, see what they can offer you in help.
Such beautiful video
As a mechanical engineer should I pursue my master's degree in Engineering Management? Would it be worth in terms of job securing?
any advice on how to move from Engg Manager to IC role, I also come from coding background for 10 years but last 7 yrs have left me exhausted, I want to make a come back to IC role :) however again struggling for the same despite me being strong in system design .
It really depends on your situation. If you haven't been in an IC role for 7 years then I'd focus on side projects to get up to speed with how things are built now. I'd also work through Leetcode just to get comfortable with solving algorithmic problems again.
For me it was fairly easy to switch back because I was only out of the IC world for a year. I let my manager know I wanted to move back to an IC and then his manager talked with a peer and between the three of them they agreed it'd be okay for me to switch back.
If it's possible to do something similar where you work, that'd be by far the easiest route.
Is becoming EM worth it in terms of boosting your salary?
Cool transition Cody! Excited to see what's next on the channel.
Maybe I'll give the manager thing a spin one day but I don't want that to happen anytime soon haha
Thanks Dave, and it's certainly worth trying out at least once if you have a waning interest in it. Definitely makes you think in a different way.
I'm technical and recently I got an opportunity to become a manager but I just want to try because I haven't done that and there are things I don't know and probably I would like to but I don't see myself in management path so yeah I will just try and see what happen
Give it a shot and see if you like it. It's easy to switch back within the first 2 years.
Is coding and people management mutually exclusive?
I’ve been hearing a lot about the developer advocacy role from software engineers on yt. With your interest in mentoring developers and creating videos, maybe that’s worth looking into.
I've looked into it and joined a company once to do that, but never was able to do the advocacy part. The nice thing about my current role is our VP wants us (the staff engineers) to be the developer advocate for our platforms which is really exciting.
@@CodyEngelCodes nice!
As a young industrial engineer I do worry about my aspirations to become a manager. I have been leaning towards project mgmt or engineering mgmt but am still curious...
hey same here what's your taughts about it now ?
I'm curious, why was your calendar full of meetings if you were the manager?
@@ball-e yes, if you have many meetings and you are a manager, is your fault for being a bad manager
It was full of meetings to talk with others and make sure I was helping to guide my teams in the right direction. They were usually discussions to figure out if I should direct them to folks on my team or just say "no we can't do this right now" while keeping those requests in mind for future meetings.
I lived my life hiding with low profile technical engineer, many times the management talking about a promotion and i want to apply for the rule. They advertise the rule and I don't apply ,they are stunned. My answer was, time worth money, I have free time (freedom) and decent salary. I don't want to trade more of my time for money.
Yeah, it’s really a time-limited venture. It really should be given as a role for people do in a tour of duty to avoid burnout. It’s a great experience for like a month.
Why would you want to in the first place or was this your first experience?
Cody, IMO the biggest issue with being a manager is the COST OF OPPORTUNITY. Having my schedule fully booked with BS meetings (most of them) wouldn't allow me to have 4 fulltime SWE jobs and a 650k/yr total comp income =D
So yeah, I prefer to be an individual contributor and having people to leave me alone.
I just manage my own personal projects that I deeply care about
🤣 true, if you wanted to be over employed being a manage would not be the right track.
You have four full time jobs? How does that work? 😮
Could you do a video on what to do if you have a sh*tty product team that doesnt provide requirements and wants the engineers to write the requirements for them? I have a product manager that wants me to on hours long meetings where we help her write up the product requirements in a word document - total waste of time for me as the engineer/architect. How do deal with these time sucks?
Truthfully it depends. Product should be seeking advice on how to build the feature, so I'd rather collaborate on requirements as opposed to having them handed over to me. With that said, it's also important for the product team to know what the boundaries are for the feature because if they don't, they are just wasting everyone's time.
I'll mull it over and see if I can turn this thought into a 6 - 9 minute video.
This is exactly how I feel as a Software Engineering Manager. I recently went from Staff Engineer to Manager. Not sure it's for me.
It's worth trying it out to see how it goes. I originally went in saying 2 years would be the minimum amount of time but revised that to 1 year since it felt like I got the equivalent of 2 years of experience here lol.
How long have you been a manager?
@@CodyEngelCodes only 3 months in but it’s a stark difference from being an engineer. Walls of calendar meetings everyday and petty people drama that I was ill equipped for. And now none of my peers talk to me the same since they now report to me. It’s sucks tbh
Im actually searching for engineering manager roles but my experience as a developer is limited, only 9 years. Is it too soon to start EM interviews? Also what is the work load like ? What are the skills required to interview for the job?
@@prerna3404 9 years is a long time. You have more than enough experience. But like I said, throw what you know about the engineering career progression track out the window. EM is not a part of the engineering career progression. It is it’s own separate track.
The workload can feel like getting nothing done at all. You will be mostly in meetings, hoping on calls with engineers to help guide them (best part imo), dealing with a lot of people issues that you never knew existed and reporting status to upper management. Be ready to be held accountable for your teams failures and give credit to them for their successes.
Be ready to give up coding. You won’t have the time and if you are trying to be an IC in the EM role chances are you will do a poor job and people will resent you, thus making you a crummy manager.
This is very subjective. I moved into an EM role two years ago after 9 years as an engineer - I love being an EM.
I love the focus on People, Processes, and Outcomes.
I love being at the intersection of people, product, business, and tech.
Both IC & Management tracks are fascinating with the challenges they bring. They also have lots of overlap around required soft-skills & leadership in order to succeed.
One should not move into management if their passion is coding. Though senior IC’s like Staff and beyond also become much less hands-on over time.
OMG, Cody, this is me!!!! So you resigned as an Eng Mgr what did you after? Went back being a regular coder?
Yep back to regular coding!
Just a tip: May be Rock the Snowboard for a week? IMHO - You should take a vacation for a week to escape the things. p.s. May be later You can restart managing role?
Vacations are planned for sure ☺️
Solved.!
It's advisable that you start your own online school .. please, sir, if it's possible , we will love it
i've avoided management for a couple decades. 😁
leadership is great, i'm a natural. building things is my jam. "managing," bleh.
Yep.
staff software engineer? what company? or a secret?
I don't publicize where I work on TH-cam but I also don't make it a secret elsewhere.
That job was wasted on you. So many people strive to become Engineering manager. Glad you quit, to give way to people more appreciative.
ditto, ditto, ditto. Lmao its like you've entered the mind of every EM. Most managers lose the drive and never switch back to IC then become bad managers. Even as a great leader you still lose control, if you try to keep control, you just get in the way of the team. EM's become phone operators and essentially butt heads with PMs over control of their teams.
Show me your business card !!!
Wanna join together for a start-up. Let me know Cody
Thanks for the offer, right now I want to focus on documenting this side project to help others out that want to start up a new project.
I thought u quit all together from engineering.
You should leave this rat race at some point. Being on the technical side isn't going to be much better on the long run. You will be deep into the coding aspect and the world around u will start to shift, if you are to juggle both, you will end up stressed out of your mind
Nah it's too much fun to want to quit.
you like monopoly eh
You just need to be a billionaire like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs to name a few. They're engineers that run the show and get to do what they are borned to do, MAKE THINGS GO!
I call BS !!! He was pushed out. My opinion