<p>I’ve worked for the same guy for 15 years. Performance reviews are awkward at best, but always blissfully brief… He’s the best engineering manager I know of, bar none. Top notch engineer, incredible manager, very nice guy overall. Used to have an awful sense of humor, but 15 years with me and my ilk have fixed this :)</p>
<p>Having said this I would not want his job. He does a lot of travel, budgets, paperwork, blah, blah. Since he has only a couple of degrees to my four, and we have the same years of experience, I’m pretty convinced I make more than he does in base salary (he makes a lot more on the bonus tho - HR has a formula for starting salary and both of us are lifers there). </p>
<p>Like me, he’s had plenty of internal and external opportunities to move up, and has not done so because he loves managing people and loves technical work. </p>
<p>My wife has worked for every clown manager in the Midwest and then some, and finally, her current employer follows Simba’s model of self-managed teams. Her manager is some dude in the East Coast I think and they talk once a month or so for 5 minutes.</p>
<p>My point still stands. There are more average programmers outside of SV that need to be managed because of SV’s obsession with “A level players.”</p>
<p>There is an element of management (some kind of supervisory or project responsibility where you are responsible for younger engineers) for most engineering jobs 5-10 years out. It’s expected. Otherwise why would they pay you so much.</p>
<p>^^^ the last couple of team leaders/project managers have been half my age and a fraction of my experience. To be young, restless, and ambitious…</p>
<p>"…a position where I have some degree of autonomy in my work,…"</p>
<p>You may be operating with the wrong assumptions. Take it from me, you won’t have any “autonomy” as any kind of manager. You will be burdened by keeping your group/dept on task and producing… not an easy job at all, but rewarding if leadership is in your nature. You’ll actually find yourself being the opposite of autonomous. You’ll have many masters. You work for your management, but you’ll also work equally hard for your people. Any good manager works for his people. If you don’t empower and motivate your team to go where you need them, you won’t last and your life will be crap during your short stay in engineering management. </p>
<p>You better have a track record of staying on task and completing projects on time and under budget. You need really good people skills and must be empathetic. You’ll be managing highly intelligent professionals who will come to you with work issues. Generally, those issues won’t be minor. Minor… they can handle themselves. </p>
<p>There are a few people in our company who can claim to have some “autonomy.” They go by the title “SMTS” (Senior member of technical staff) and have proven themselves as top performers/producers repeatedly throughout the years. The title is equivalent to management, but with no people/group management responsibilities, other than having lab techs working for them. They are in research and get assigned to the “what if?” projects and are given a very wide latitude and generous budget (still needs approval, but usually gets it).</p>
You need far less managers than you need engineers. It doesn’t make sense to rotate if someone is clearly the better manager. Therefore, most engineers will not be managers. It’s arithmetic.</p>
<p>Who says that they do pay you so much? You only get a large salary if you’re worth the money or your company is bad with finances.</p>
<p>I guess you’ve never worked in a growing industry. I can see your viewpoint in a static or shrinking company. In a growing company, there is a shortage of leaders.</p>
<p>Or perhaps you shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that every industry is a growing one.</p>
<p>Static and/or shrinking is not necessarily a bad thing. Demand changes over time, and static might just mean that the industry has reached its logical maximum point. There are definitely more jobs here in general because less established industries are doomed if they’re already shrinking before they’re even stable.</p>
I draw the following line between “supervisory” and “managerial”: in supervisory roles you spend more time performing a technical role than you spend directly managing other people, while in managerial roles the reverse is true. A substantial majority of senior technical roles (and a surprising number of junior technical roles) are supervisory in my experience, but only a handful are managerial - you usually need to jump into an official management position for that.</p>
I guess that rules out jobs at established firms, such as Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and endless non-tech industries that need a programming team for their work. After all, these companies aren’t really growing all that much.</p>
<p>NeoDymium, I would be interested in knowing your background, just so I understand where you’re coming from. Your explanation of how management works in CS-related jobs doesn’t jibe with what I’ve experienced.</p>
<p>I’d rather not. But I don’t work in high-tech, which is what I assume you work in, which would very much explain the difference. </p>
<p>There is far more programming work to be done in non-tech than in tech, and I just want to make sure that that’s clear to those in CS.</p>
<p>Oh, and just to be clear, this is the main points I’m trying to get across. I doubt you’ll really disagree with them.</p>
<ol>
<li>One person manages multiple people. The only way everyone can become a manager is if you have growth.</li>
<li>You cannot have perpetual growth. This is called a pyramid scheme.</li>
</ol>
<p>In the rapidly growing software company I know, not in silicon valley, those who have recently been moving into management roles have between 7-10 years of experience. The majority of the managers have 15+ years of experience and in the past two years several of them have moved into executive roles. That said, there are many more developers who haven chosen to remain purely technical rather than move into management with just as many years under their belts. It’s actually a problem that they have very good developers but very few competent managers (and even fewer competent executives).</p>
<p>edit: should also note that excluding lawyers and pure business execs, all executives have either a PhD or MBA, all managers are PMP, half have cs or related masters, and half have a management degree (MBA, Engineering Management, etc). Everyone has either a CS, Math, or EE undergrad degree.</p>
<p>edit2: @Neo, their work is considered high-tech/cutting edge.</p>
</p>