A fascinating thing is happening. EMs are saying it’s better to be an IC. ICs think being an EM is where it’s at.
This is part of the AI shift. The industry seems to be in chaos, and wherever you are, somewhere else seems better. But below that, it’s not just the job that’s changing. It’s the context we’re operating in hitting like a bucket of cold water.
The seller’s market is over
We lived in a seller’s market, and we thought it was because of our own brilliance. Jobs were easy to come by, and with them comp, job titles and perks.
It’s a buyer’s market now and that loss of leverage means we have to justify our impact. If you think you can get a better job, the organization is more likely to say “okay” than give a meaningful counteroffer. It’s always been true you shouldn’t negotiate on a job you don’t mean to take, but now that needs to be a hard line as you’re more likely than ever to be called on it.
It’s a hard thing to accept, being less special and less in demand.
The attrition is the point
When management is an abstraction over people, it only has value when people do.
For example, during ZIRP, being a good hiring manager was a huge part of the job, and a good hiring process was a real differentiator. People were the constraint. Companies competed on how well they identified, attracted and developed talent, because that was what determined what you could build.
That’s gone. Hiring is slow or frozen. The L&D budget has been slashed. I wrote last year that management debt was looking cheap. Now I would say it’s looking actively desired.
Why develop your people if attrition will sort it out for you. Why give hard feedback if the person will burn out and leave. Why fix morale if the ones with options have already gone and the ones who stayed can’t go anywhere. The workforce that’s left is cheaper, quieter, and more grateful.
The risk, of course, is that the people without options aren’t usually the people you most wanted to keep. This is the AI-era debt; we’ll see what it costs down the line.
Mass layoffs are the new RTO
Post-pandemic, return to office looked easier than management fundamentals. Remote work didn’t break those organizations. It made it visible long term deficiencies that were too expensive and structural to fix.
Mass layoffs are the new blunt instrument.
Running a layoff is, bureaucratically, easier than writing a PIP. A PIP requires you have been managing the person. Documentation, expectations, feedback they had a chance to act on. A layoff requires a spreadsheet and a comms plan.
Both punish everyone for problems leadership created. I miss the time when a layoff included an admission of failure. Now they read more like an acceptance speech for visionary of the year.
This is not to say I don’t think AI will restructure the workforce. I do. I’ve been realizing efficiency gains with it. Reflecting on my time running a large org, I don’t honestly know how I’d make those gains real without a layoff. But that’s not an indictment of the workforce, nor one that I would measure in a %. It’s the change-management and people-development bill coming due. What was less than optimal becomes a structural block.
We never agreed what an EM is
We never had a shared definition of what an engineering manager is. Sometimes you could figure it out from the job description, but not always. People-leader, technical-leader, project-runner, career-developer, information-router, scope-holder, vibe-shaper. The profile depended on the values of leadership and the outcome of the latest reorg.
Fundamentally, you didn’t have to be great at all the things to be good enough for the org, and the people stuff was big enough and fuzzy enough that it often became the job.
Now I keep seeing the phrase “player coach” and I don’t know what it means. But the overall shift is, I think, pretty clear: get closer to the work, drive delivery improvements, be able not just to know what is going on but consistently make it better (or at least faster).
Without a good definition, it’s much harder to absorb the chaos of senior leadership litigating in public whether the role should even exist. Trying to “improve productivity” by “doing the work” has ICs describing the output as AI slop. Being told you could be more efficient by having fewer 1:1s, but no one gave that memo to the ICs who still expect their 30+ minutes a week as well as an actual fix for the things they’re complaining about.
It’s hard to fit all this conflicting feedback into an undefined scope.
The force multiplier
A consistent thing I keep seeing from EMs is moral injury. They got into the job because they care about their teams and want to support them, and they feel conflicted between that calling and the organization’s demands.
It’s fair and understandable. The challenge, I think, is moving to more of a collective care than an individual one. And rightsizing your care to the market we’re in. Taking personal responsibility for things where you have little to no power is a recipe for burnout.
Something I have long believed: a manager is a multiplier on the team. The worst ones for bad. In a growth market, you didn’t have to be much more than a 1x to have value. Now, the expectations are higher.
Framing the role this way, a force multiplier for the team, creates clarity. You’re expected to make the team better. It also explains the calculus in a way that makes sense. If being a great hiring manager was a multiplier effect before, now it’s not. Retention is not seen as valuable. I believe retaining your strongest team members still will be, but that’s unlikely to be everyone. You’ll need to pick your battles.
The thing is, there’s a good chance your organization won’t tell you how to do that. You have to figure out how to take in the information you have, and figure it out for yourself.
If that sounds like a lot, the EM Survival Guide cohort 2 starts in June. Join us, we’d love to help you.
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