What's your opinion of the new hiring standard that has arisen the last several years across Big Tech and has trickled down:
We're looking for an experienced Software or SRE or DevOps or X Manager in this exciting and fast growing company! Must be able to code in a job interview, have five years experience or more directly managing a staff count of at least ten engineers, and answer algorithm questions! We also expect you to know not just application architecture and CI/CD workflow inside and out, but experience with X and Y vendor applications, Z framework, and running Agile teams!
My qualm is that a manager can't remain a hands-on coder very long if they're spending their days in 1:1's, product meetings, negotiating with other teams to protect their engineers, and generally being good managers.
I'm baffled by how someone can be an experienced and talented manager, and also have their technical chops stay strong - forever. Technology changes such that what you became and expert at when you weren't a manager, is different from when you're manager today. All that remains are patterns, intuition and wisdom that can't easily be captured.
When you've experienced first-hand managing various personality types like 'shy engineer who needs to be encouraged' and 'arrogant talented engineer who everyone relies on but does what they feel like' and 'new junior engineer' and 'repurposed engineer who was doing a completely different role' as well as 'the other remote team that's just joined'... you realize these things are hard.
There's no way a heads-down coder can be good at these things. Unless they're elite geniuses or people who work 6-7 days a week.
So I don't understand the job specs for tech management today.
I’m not a manager but I’ve observed managers stay technically strong by being involved in technical activities. Participate in design reviews, project planning, on-call issues etc. being able to smell good vs bad system design does not change that fast. Also they’ll occasionally bust out a ticket that only takes a few hours, aka still able to commit code. I don’t think this is unreasonable for edge level managers. I even get good insight from managers at the director/vp level at where I work.
We're looking for an experienced Software or SRE or DevOps or X Manager in this exciting and fast growing company! Must be able to code in a job interview, have five years experience or more directly managing a staff count of at least ten engineers, and answer algorithm questions! We also expect you to know not just application architecture and CI/CD workflow inside and out, but experience with X and Y vendor applications, Z framework, and running Agile teams!
My qualm is that a manager can't remain a hands-on coder very long if they're spending their days in 1:1's, product meetings, negotiating with other teams to protect their engineers, and generally being good managers.
I'm baffled by how someone can be an experienced and talented manager, and also have their technical chops stay strong - forever. Technology changes such that what you became and expert at when you weren't a manager, is different from when you're manager today. All that remains are patterns, intuition and wisdom that can't easily be captured.
When you've experienced first-hand managing various personality types like 'shy engineer who needs to be encouraged' and 'arrogant talented engineer who everyone relies on but does what they feel like' and 'new junior engineer' and 'repurposed engineer who was doing a completely different role' as well as 'the other remote team that's just joined'... you realize these things are hard.
There's no way a heads-down coder can be good at these things. Unless they're elite geniuses or people who work 6-7 days a week.
So I don't understand the job specs for tech management today.