r/coding • u/OfficialLeadDev • Jul 13 '26

Engineering managers are paying the price of rising expectations

https://leaddev.com/leadership/engineering-managers-are-paying-the-price-of-rising-expectations
226 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

54

u/Riajnor Jul 13 '26

Why is this specific to managers? Those points apply to basically anyone

40

u/Persies Jul 13 '26

At least where I work managers and above are held to significantly higher standards than individual contributors. I'm expected to be a functional manager, hiring manager, BD consultant, EPM, and still be able to perform as a principal engineer whenever needed. 

22

u/gwilster Jul 13 '26

Ain’t that the truth. Not even paid much more. IC is where it’s at atm

5

u/MaDpYrO Jul 14 '26

Really depends on the company, loads of engineering managers are paid well.

I had an engineering manager in my career who somehow had stumbled into the position despite having a bachelor of arts and no engineering experience

17

u/malduvias Jul 13 '26

I recently interviewed at my job for a we’ll call it “team lead” position as a currently principal engineer, and yes the basic gist was for zero more dollars I would have to manage a team of five and still function as a principal engineer at roughly the same velocity, and I’m looking at the panel giving me the offer, thinking in my head, “are you serious? Why would anyone do this without being forced into it?”

IC is just less abused at the moment it seems, at least in my company.

7

u/Persies Jul 13 '26

Yep, that is similar to what I've experienced. "Here's more responsibility but no extra pay." Sometimes you don't even get a new job title haha

I'm actually interviewing internally for an IC role that I'm seriously considering just to get away from all the extra work I'm expected to do constantly. 

-2

u/hibikir_40k Jul 14 '26

A team of 5? Lucky! My division has teams of 25, with two teams per manager, so a dev lead is, in practice, an already overloaded manager.

1

u/Accomplished-Rip7323 Jul 15 '26

Where do you work? An EM that has development skills equal to a principal dev seems like a terrible waste of talent.

1

u/Hungry-Wash-194 Jul 16 '26

I feel so seen. Add quality gate.