Accidentally in Code

Tag: engineering management

  • The New Realities of EM Lyfe

    The New Realities of EM Lyfe

    Image credit: Joe Groove

    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.

  • Force Multipliers

    Force Multipliers

    Image credit: Joe Groove

    It’s harder than ever to be an engineering manager. Fewer resources, higher expectations, and a public conversation actively questioning whether the role should exist at all. Less support than ever, in a job that already often felt hard and lonely. That’s why Jean and I built the Engineering Manager Survival Guide – and I’m so glad we did, because the first cohort just wrapped, and it confirmed everything we thought was true about the gap, and how rewarding it would be to help people close it.

    We spent weeks debating what an EM actually is before we could build the course around it. The definition is both poor and variable. Same job title, completely different jobs. We eventually landed on force multiplier for the team – and then spent the rest of our build time working out, tactically, what that means and how to do it.

    We knew going in that the role was variable, but there’s a difference between knowing that intellectually and seeing it up close. The exercises where we asked people to go through every direct report, one by one – what they’re working on, what they need, what’s getting in their way – I love seeing how deeply people understand and care about their teams. I know, as a manager, how often conversations were dominated by the problems. It’s good to create space for all of it.

    Recording our wrap up audio, Jean pointed out the frameworks are simple – what you get out is what you put in. But the process of systematically looking through things, identifying the gaps, and figuring out the changes you need to make: it can be hard to do when so much of your job is responding to what people expect from you. Carving out space, support and structure to think is valuable.

    In DRI Your Career we’re often encouraging people to widen their frame. With EMs it was the opposite – what they lack most is time and perspective, and our role was more to help them narrow in on which of their many ideas could have the most impact.

    I wrote recently about the role middle managers were supposed to be doing, the flawed metric of headcount that defined them, and how unsurprising it is that people feel adrift when that metric collapses. I’m now three months into something new, and what I notice is that the mindset – the orientation toward making everything around me better – hasn’t changed, even as the work has. Process and efficiency, abstracted by skill.md files now instead of people. The work of being a manager, in a different form.

    What I want for every EM is the same thing I wanted for myself, when I started being an EM, when I wrote The Engineering Leader, what I now try (with Claude) to create for myself each day, each week: a clear enough definition of the job that you can have a sense of whether you’re doing a good job and be able to call it when the day is done. Something concrete enough that you can still hold onto when the org chart shifts under you.

    The course covers what a force multiplier actually does, across four modules: sustaining yourself, leveraging feedback, leading with clear direction, and expanding your range as a leader. We read and comment on every exercise submission.

    The next cohort of the Engineering Manager Survival Guide starts in June. You can find out more and sign up at driyourcareer.com/em-survival-guide.