Unclear Goals in Hiring Engineering Managers

Some organizations don’t know whether they want an engineering manager or a lead engineer.

I’ve seen this manifest as:

• Interviewing a would-be manager for their ability to code like a lead engineer
• Asking inwardly-focused, process-disinterested, high-output engineers to sprout the capacity to direct, nurture, and manage other humans

And, perhaps more pathologically, I interviewed at organizations where they knew they needed both, but interviewed aggressively in hopes of landing one and getting the other “for free” (with pay to match).

Doing any of these behaviors hurts the organization, the currently-staffed employees, and wastes enormous amounts of time.

Consider:

Why?

Given this simple matrix, it becomes very clear that miscasting the role, in either case, is catastrophic. Executives or upper-middle management should be aware of these pathologies. So, why do so many organizations get it wrong?

Explanation 1: They Don’t Build this Matrix

Simple. They don’t do the exercise in imagination done above

Explanation 2: They’re Vampires Feasting on the Perfect Unicorn

It’s also possible that hiring teams are knowingly, depending on your moral stripe, cheating (or optimizing) and getting a bargain. If I find a senior engineer who’s recently had experience that makes them serviceable as a manager, then I can get them for a senior engineer salary but work them for senior engineer + clerical (i.e. hobbled manager) role. I view such a game as a type of fraud, so I’d opt for “cheating” here. A way to clear that moral smudge is discussed below.

I believe this can happen in a malevolent form and an ignorant form. Let’s cover the malicious case first, since it’s more entertaining.

Add in some Borgia-level psychopathy with: “Well, maybe management isn’t for you, if this is too much work…” and the organization can unsustainably vampire upon a very special individual. They will give their code (their known strength) to mollify the team and they will squeeze in the work that they believe will prepare them for management (their growth area). They’re doing this for the price of the former role by itself. This person is caught in a living Hell working (at least) 10 hour days.

Like Voldemort in the forbidden forest, this organization is feeding off of someone special to make up for their failure to prioritize, organize, or execute.

Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Explanation 3: They’ve Missed a Growth Step

A non-malicious version of Explanation 2 is that the organization missed that the role “Senior-Engineer-And-Manager” now needs to be split and they’re attempting to carry the number of chairs at the table forward from yesterday into tomorrow. The growth step here, of course, is to realize a chair needs to be added and the budget extended in the department.

From the board room, this looks like an increase in cost, however with the reduction of coordinating costs, more time for the senior engineer to mentor the juniors, and better alignment with the rest of the organization through the engineering manager, these are, in most cases, readily supportable increases to marginal spend.

The case where it’s not as easily supported would be in the case of a bootstrapping startup. Lacking other peoples’ money they cannot make this maneuver. As with most things in business, honesty and communication is key. IF this is the situation, it can be explained in the interview and remedied with a compensation structure that pays off “surviving this challenging growth phase.”

• engineering
• management
• hiring

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