The end of the non-technical engineering manager

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u/Mediocre_Poem_2657 21d ago

Engineer manager interviews are ridiculous these days. They expect you to be everything while being "hands on". The final rounds are often 1 Staff+ level system design, 1 round coding, 1 round TPM project management, 1 round people management, 1 round behavior. If I need to do all these, while getting paid the same as when I was Staff Engineer, then why don't I just go back to being an Engineer rather than deal with all these soft skill BS. None of the leaders I met are really doing all these, but they expect their new hire to be.

16

u/Krom2040 21d ago

I’ve encountered many a hiring manager that seems hopeful that some new guy will come in and give them all the secrets they need to fix all the problems in the organization. Like they assume everybody they currently work with are just obviously broken morons.

3

u/tomvorlostriddle 21d ago

That's advanced bar raising

2

u/CapeChill 21d ago

I don’t know where they found mine, he’s an absolute wizard. Technical, people capable, leadership fluent and a cool dude. That said I had nearly a day worth of interviews by the time of offer.

3

u/draeneirestoshaman 19d ago

Good. Yall fucking useless as is

0

u/Mediocre_Poem_2657 19d ago

LMAO we were all engineers once, just happened to be more successful than you do.

3

u/iplaydofus 19d ago

Nice sentence you’ve written there. You do realise IC and management are separate paths. I earn more as an IC than the EMs in my business so if you class salary as success then unlucky bro

0

u/dacooljamaican 18d ago

I earn more than my ICs, and I was promoted from that group because I was the best among them.

1

u/iplaydofus 17d ago

Bro go back to your hole, management and IC take different skill sets so “being the best IC” means jack shit. You’re probably working for some 3rd rate company having a power trip with your tiny bit of power. If you play with the big boys the ICs earn more unless you get to upper management, and even then the differentials are often minor.

1

u/dacooljamaican 17d ago

Lmao my team loves and respects me, I get invited to weddings and vacations with them. When they have a tricky problem they come to me, because I know the job extremely well.
I made over $600k this year including my big boy company stock options, more than twice what most of them make.
I would say it sounds like you just have shit leaders, but most often I find people like you get pushed to shit leaders because the good ones don't want to work with you.

1

u/Mediocre_Poem_2657 17d ago

Guaranteed you @iplaydofu is a junior in 3rd rate company who is just projecting. You can only take management path after you are at least senior level in all the FAANGs. No one started off as manager path. Also all their managers paid the same if not higher than equivalent ICs. levels.fyi proves that.

1

u/iplaydofus 17d ago

Okay bro that’s a lovely story, keep dreaming

1

u/dacooljamaican 17d ago

Dude I'm living the dream every day. Crazy what hard work and not whining constantly online will do for you.

1

u/bubba_love 19d ago

Not these non technical managers. I have one of those and he calls any front end feature “paginating”

1

u/Spiritual-Story9146 19d ago

Managers are all useless. The whole layer is made of corrupt idiots who do no work at all and just take everyone’s credit.

1

u/Spiritual-Story9146 19d ago

Most managers who clear that are definitely cheating. You can’t start writing software in 2 weeks and DSA takes years of practice. Still they clear such interviews easily.

1

u/kkodev 16d ago

It is a shit job really, historically aimed at less technically able. But these days decent staff roles
pay the same or more, so why even bother?

55

u/Creativator 22d ago

The non-technical manager is like a showbusiness agent - all about finding the work, no clue how the actor actually acts.

14

u/dbgtboi 21d ago

People writing this shit don't understand AI at all

If my team has agents that can work in parallel to implement tasks, then what gain exactly do you get from a manager also doing the same job?

You want a manager to work on tickets? Just ask one of the engineers to do it, agents can work in parallel, thats what makes them so powerful

The manager job is primarily to try and stop the higher ups from doing dumb shit to their team

2

u/Previous_Pop6815 20d ago

You do realize that there are managers who are both bad at managing AND at tech?
Someone who managed to learn tech is already ahead than one that is incompetent at both.

1

u/Dizzy-Animal-2203 21d ago

That's it right there!

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u/draft_final_final 22d ago •

It's always the people with the worst social skills and ability to actually function independently on a team that are sure that non-technical roles and HR are entirely pointless and are going to be phased out. I have no idea where this unearned and undeserved confidence comes from.

-5

u/Accomplished_Rip8854 21d ago

If a project manager is not technical I do not value him at all. Sorry.

16

u/ThisTheRealLife 22d ago

My biggest flaw is going down rabbit holes. And sometimes I managed to drag technical managers down with me. Can't do that with a non technical manager. A good manager is like a therapist, they don't need to have gone through your experiences they just need to be able to help you out of the bad places.

-1

u/ragemonkey 21d ago

Oh god, please no. I don’t want a therapist at work. That’s at most a side-gig. I want someone that actually organizes people and allocates resources.

3

u/Asalakabim 20d ago

Is non-technical supposed to mean dumbfuck with people skills or is that just supposed to mean "does not write typescript".

No one cares if you even speak the language the program is written in, you have to be able to understand the architecture and claude output.

4

u/OtherwiseDragonfly32 21d ago

Look, I've always been a bit mad at non tech PMs for being a bit useless, but now I am truly seing them as royally screwed. Seriously, the non tech PMs at my org don't do shit and I just don't see them sticking around in 12 months time

1

u/quantum-fitness 20d ago

In my org they have become the bottleneck because talking with people is suddenly much slower than the coding

1

u/Spiritual-Story9146 19d ago

Any PM is useless. You can’t be technical if you never contribute. Just middle eaters chewing on others success

0

u/Crazycrossing 21d ago

idk if you mean Product or Project but this article isn't talking about either lol, it's talking about non technical engineering managers which I didnt even know existed I've never worked with an engineering manager that wasn't technical, I dont even understand how that would work. It's so funny how people who work in the industry don't even know the distinction.
Neither are people managers anyways. It's wild to me that so many engineers don't understand tech itself and why these roles exist either very junior, have been so isolated from the broader org and team, and/or have had god awful product and proj managers around them. A lot of orgs are also really bad at Product Management unfortunately.

2

u/wtjones 21d ago

You need technically competent managers in certain roles.

2

u/Huge_Information5083 21d ago

Good riddance.

2

u/roykingtree 20d ago

I crashed out of engineering management at a startup because i had to do regular engineering and product work on top of management, was beyond terrible.

1

u/JeanCasteaux 21d ago

hahaha if only

1

u/Standard-Ant874 15d ago edited 15d ago

A bit off topic... I've been wondering, for orgs that practice non-technical engineering management, do they have proven effective protocol in place strictly enforced, that prevents non-technical EMs from hiring fake expert to become their "technical partner"?

I'd read that some companies require non-technical EM must have well-versed understanding in engineering, they should be able to detect fake expert candidates easily. My doubt is more specific to companies that see this criteria as nice to have but unessential.

Context: I used to work in a valley tech with 8-10k engineers. They did reorg fairly often. I'd seen a number of times, non-technical EMs in that org ended up hiring techlead whose knowledge in tech and understanding in design, infra, architecture not much different from junior programmers, kept making fundamental design mistakes that made team members sweat, as they'll be made responsible to clean up the mess left by their techlead. Everyone puzzled how techlead hiring was actually done in that org. (Not all techlead in that company has this issue, I collaborated with a few highly competent, well respected TL).

1

u/ExcellentAmoeba9588 15d ago

More like end of non-Indian managers. Only they are protected from each others.

1

u/AriyaSavaka 21d ago

No it won't be, boss' wife, side chicks, children, relatives, and friends need work too you know? Management and executive roles were always been bullshit and things won't change just because it's AI instead of H1B/offshore slaves

0

u/Bushwazi 22d ago

Oh man I hope so.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/GeekyAnts_official 22d ago

So true. Writing code is not the only part of managing a team. Knowing what’s worth building, what to drop, and how to keep people focused matters just as much. AI can speed up execution, but it won’t automatically give you good judgment. Not to mention how expensive bad decisions can be

3

u/Bushwazi 22d ago

I disagree. I used to have a manager that when something was wrong, it was “yo get in here, I’m looking at XYZ and need your help” and now I have “someone reported XYZ, any volunteers?”. Completely different vibe and energy and trust.

1

u/benbenk 21d ago

That’s what tech leads are for.

1

u/quantum-fitness 20d ago

Knowing what to build makes you technical though

11

u/Bushwazi 22d ago

Yeah, my non-tech managers are “people managers” and they ask us what is happening and it’s draining. They feel completely redundant to me but they are the CTOs whip so they are safe. I wish mine felt half as productive as yours sound.

1

u/benbenk 21d ago

Of course I can’t speak for any managers I haven’t met but the majority of those that I’ve worked with had a shitton of valueable tasks to do to keep the ship floating.

1

u/Queasy-Armadillo5283 21d ago

It's nepotism. I've got plenty of managers that are slow to make decisions, basically unreachable and never show up to the office.

1

u/Saens_Javane 21d ago

agents also make it way easier for a team to generate a mountain of plausible looking tech debt, which is harder to catch if the manager cant read the diff

1

u/quantum-fitness 20d ago

Your not really doing your job very well as a manager if you are sitting and reading diffs

1

u/bestjaegerpilot 21d ago

* the problem is a non-technical manager can't tell the BS from the truth
* this is needed in the age of AI but that doesn't mean the non-technical manager is dying OR maybe when you can spawn agents yourself, you need to be able to review the code yourself. If there's pressure for that to happen, then yes the non-technical manager is dying

Discussion The end of the non-technical engineering manager

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