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The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

by Charity Majors11 May 2017

Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).

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Highlights

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  • The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management.
  • the best technical leaders in the world are often the ones who do both. Back and forth.  Like a pendulum.
  • Management is highly interruptive, and great engineering — where you’re learning things — requires blocking out interruptions. You can’t do these two opposite things at once.
  • A tech lead is a manager … but their first priority is achieving the task at hand, not grooming and minding the humans who work on it.
  • They still need the full manager toolset.  They’ll need to know how to rally people and teams and motivate them, or how to triage and restart a stalled project that everybody dreads. They still need to connect the dots between business objectives and technical objectives, and break down big objectives
  • So these tech leads usually spend more time in meetings than building things, and they will bitch about it but do it anyway, because writing code is not the best use of their time.  Tech is the easy part, herding humans is the harder part.

Summary AI-generated

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In summary, the most compelling insight is that management functions as a lateral profession change rather than a promotion, making it highly beneficial for engineers to intentionally alternate between individual contributor and leadership roles instead of feeling confined to a single career lane.

  • Reject rigid corporate ladders; senior individual contributors can achieve significant progression without transitioning to management.
  • View management as a distinct profession requiring new skills, not a status-based promotion that engineers inevitably outgrow or resent.
  • Adopt a "pendulum" career path by rotating between hands-on engineering and leadership to accumulate rare, well-rounded technical expertise.
  • Align role choices with personal passion and team needs rather than ego, returning to coding whenever management no longer brings joy or effectiveness.

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