Good managers will ruin your life
A good manager will ruin your life.
Because you’ll never be able to work for a bad one!
There’s a lot of what I’m going to say that likely applies to most professions, but I come from an engineering background, so I will speak with that context. There are a lot of engineering managers who wholly lack the technical expertise to appropriately manage the teams that work for them.
However, I am not saying that a manager needs to be the singular most technical person on a team. And many managers will remind you of this fact! That being a good manager requires people managing skills above all else and that doesn’t necessarily mean being the most technical.
True. Of course that’s true, but here’s one fact they’re forgetting:
It’s also entirely (dare I say likely) possible to be bad at BOTH.
It’s difficult to speak on poor management without coming across as “salty” (jealous or bitter that you’re not a manager). However, for much of my career I avoided a management role because 1) I didn’t want to lose my technical skills while I was still young and 2) I thought management came with a certain amount of accountability.
But what I found over time is that management roles often attract those who want to dodge and deflect responsibility. People who, instead of being shit umbrellas for their teams, became shit funnels. People who failed both technically and lacked the ability to manage teams and grow people.
However, I have had amazing managers. People who propelled my career and made me feel capable of even more growth. Managers who shielded me from bureaucratic nonsense and ensured my work could continue. These people will change your career for the better. And they’re good for the company too as talent is not wasted by low morale or “hire to fire”. Happy employees do better work.
All positions of power attract a very large number of people who deserve to be in the position the least. It’s easy for them to feign effectiveness due to the nature of their job being done largely through spoken communication, but are easily ousted by anyone who has greater technical or organizational knowledge than them. If you list the things a manager should be good at (shielding team from nonsense, cross team communication, giving hard feedback, growing team members instead of firing them), you’ll find they fail at a lot of these.
There’s a growing attack on managers in the AI era. It’s unfortunate because no, I don’t think the concept of managers is useless nor would I want to be managed by AI. However, in the big tech companies (especially in the AI era), it’s clear poor managers are flourishing. And they’re the ones using AI the most which is exacerbating their poor management.
Since I know what good management looks like, I can’t work for these managers. It’s no wonder I had no choice but to become my own boss.