During my regularly scheduled lurking on Hacker News, I came across Don’t Become an Engineering Manager, making the case that senior engineers should stay IC. The ladder is flattening, Staff pays better, tech is moving too fast to step away. Probably right, but it bugs me.
It treats the EM role like a career trade. A thing you optimize for or against. And when you look at it that way, sure, the math is shaky right now. But that skips the question I actually care about: what does a good engineering manager do for the engineers on their team?
The actual job
The best EMs I’ve worked with spend most of their time on the unglamorous stuff. Not “shielding the team” in the vague r/LinkedInLunatics way. The specific stuff. Why has the deploy pipeline been flaky for two weeks and nobody’s fixed it? Two teams are about to build the same thing, so get them in a room. Product is asking for something unreasonable and the engineers are too polite to say so.
None of that shows up on a career ladder. It barely shows up in performance reviews. But it’s the difference between a team that ships and a team that fights its own org.
Making people better
The part of the job I care about most doesn’t come up in any of these “should you become an EM” debates. Are the engineers on your team getting better? Not in the promotion-packet sense. Is the person who joined six months ago actually understanding the system now? Is the senior who’s great at heads-down execution starting to think about what happens after they ship?
That work is mostly invisible. It’s a one-on-one that looks like a casual conversation. It’s asking “what would you do?” instead of giving the answer. It’s putting someone slightly past their comfort zone and making sure they don’t eat it.
So should you become an EM?
If you care about people, and you want to make those people better engineers, then yes. Engineers need you.