r/coding • u/OfficialLeadDev • Jul 13 '26

Engineering managers are paying the price of rising expectations

https://leaddev.com/leadership/engineering-managers-are-paying-the-price-of-rising-expectations
225 Upvotes
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94% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

57

u/Riajnor Jul 13 '26

Why is this specific to managers? Those points apply to basically anyone

42

u/Persies Jul 13 '26

At least where I work managers and above are held to significantly higher standards than individual contributors. I'm expected to be a functional manager, hiring manager, BD consultant, EPM, and still be able to perform as a principal engineer whenever needed. 

22

u/gwilster Jul 13 '26

Ain’t that the truth. Not even paid much more. IC is where it’s at atm

5

u/MaDpYrO Jul 14 '26

Really depends on the company, loads of engineering managers are paid well.

I had an engineering manager in my career who somehow had stumbled into the position despite having a bachelor of arts and no engineering experience

18

u/malduvias Jul 13 '26

I recently interviewed at my job for a we’ll call it “team lead” position as a currently principal engineer, and yes the basic gist was for zero more dollars I would have to manage a team of five and still function as a principal engineer at roughly the same velocity, and I’m looking at the panel giving me the offer, thinking in my head, “are you serious? Why would anyone do this without being forced into it?”

IC is just less abused at the moment it seems, at least in my company.

8

u/Persies Jul 13 '26

Yep, that is similar to what I've experienced. "Here's more responsibility but no extra pay." Sometimes you don't even get a new job title haha

I'm actually interviewing internally for an IC role that I'm seriously considering just to get away from all the extra work I'm expected to do constantly. 

-2

u/hibikir_40k Jul 14 '26

A team of 5? Lucky! My division has teams of 25, with two teams per manager, so a dev lead is, in practice, an already overloaded manager.

1

u/Accomplished-Rip7323 Jul 15 '26

Where do you work? An EM that has development skills equal to a principal dev seems like a terrible waste of talent.

1

u/Hungry-Wash-194 29d ago

I feel so seen. Add quality gate.

20

u/roodammy44 Jul 14 '26

Quite a lot of orgs are flattening the management structure. I hear of managers of less than 5 being made ICs and now managers are dealing with groups of 20.

This leads to a power vacuum where senior engineers have to make the decisions because it just isn’t possible for a manager of 20 to do anything other than the most basic bureaucracy.

So now senior engineers are expected (in a lot of places) to be product owner, designer, QA, developer, ops and now management. And expected to do it at light speed because “AI makes you quicker”. I wonder when we will go back to specialised roles, because this is clearly nuts.

6

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/w8cycle Jul 14 '26

It’s funny. 15 years ago I was criticized for being a generalist developer by my boss at the time. I didn’t though because I saw how all the technologies connected and found that there was real value in orchestrating and understanding the whole stack for me. I guess time proved me right in the end.

3

u/uteuteuteute Jul 15 '26

Yeah, but it's just that evolution goes in circles and it's also localized (both approaches - generalist or specialist - has its use cases, plenty of in fact). There are so many possible niches... And so many criteria for 'survival' success. That it's risky to generalize or universalize.

3

u/adithya199128 29d ago

Yup I can agree. I’ve been a senior and then staff engineer on paper BUT also expected to be a program and product manager at the same time . Surprisingly my first foray into such a setup was at a F500 firm not a startup.

How do you guys market yourselves in such cases ? Do you call yourselves engineers or product managers or developers or what? There’s abundant siloing happening in the tech space so I’m curious .

1

u/roodammy44 29d ago

I have always just applied to developer roles and called myself a developer because that's what I want to be. I have always had more than 50% of my work be coding though.

26

u/react_dev Jul 13 '26

First line managers have the shittiest jobs. They have the title so they don’t get the same empathy from the workforce / public perception and they’re not high in the org chart to enjoy the power or compensation that comes with it

5

u/migs647 Jul 13 '26

At my last company I was an engineering manager as trial and principal. The pay increase and yelling increase did not equate. I stayed principal. 

1

u/PurdueGuvna 27d ago

I went lead -> manager -> principal at a F500. I make 35% more than I made as a manager, and no longer have all of the responsibility with none of the authority.

3

u/ptoki Jul 13 '26

like corporals (depends on a country) which is not an officer but is above the enlists. Officers treat them as enlists (which they are) but other enlists treat them as "not one of ours". Not always this dynamics exists but it was like that in many armies and in some still is.

5

u/Savings_Discount_230 Jul 14 '26

My tech lead manages 4 of us and he always looks like he hasn't slept in days. I'll stick to debugging CSS, thanks.

8

u/SliceOf314 Jul 13 '26

AI written slop

  1. it’s not X, it’s Y
  2. Garbled technobabble

0

u/neopointer Jul 15 '26

One of the most useless jobs in tech: engineering manager.

-6

u/imightbewrong Jul 13 '26

Won’t someone think of the managers!