The crappy parts of engineering management

There are two categories of crap: good stuff you lose, and bad stuff you gain.

Good stuff you lose: this post has a solid list of them. TLDR:

• Focus time
• Short feedback cycles
• Conflict avoidance
• Making technical decisions
• Learning new technical skills

Bad stuff you gain:

• The whole performance review/management process:
  • Writing performance reviews and promo packets
  • Employee calibration meetings (which, by the way, are generally terrible)
  • Delivering reviews which may disappoint people
  • Telling people they didn’t get promoted
  • Firing people
• Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings
• Shielding your team leadership or stakeholder nonsense
• Being a communication middleman
• Telling stakeholders things won’t be done when they hope
• Telling stakeholders we won’t build what they want at all (although a good product manager will shoulder a lot of this)

But there’s lots of good stuff too!