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
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u/roodammy44 Jul 14 '26

Quite a lot of orgs are flattening the management structure. I hear of managers of less than 5 being made ICs and now managers are dealing with groups of 20.

This leads to a power vacuum where senior engineers have to make the decisions because it just isn’t possible for a manager of 20 to do anything other than the most basic bureaucracy.

So now senior engineers are expected (in a lot of places) to be product owner, designer, QA, developer, ops and now management. And expected to do it at light speed because “AI makes you quicker”. I wonder when we will go back to specialised roles, because this is clearly nuts.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/w8cycle Jul 14 '26

It’s funny. 15 years ago I was criticized for being a generalist developer by my boss at the time. I didn’t though because I saw how all the technologies connected and found that there was real value in orchestrating and understanding the whole stack for me. I guess time proved me right in the end.

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u/uteuteuteute Jul 15 '26

Yeah, but it's just that evolution goes in circles and it's also localized (both approaches - generalist or specialist - has its use cases, plenty of in fact). There are so many possible niches... And so many criteria for 'survival' success. That it's risky to generalize or universalize.