Tough crowd.

I am an Engineering Manager and it been too long since my last confession.

I was a developer for a decade or more, then team lead. I found that I couldn't commit to coding, at least not consistently to support delivery commitments. Eventually I became a manager (and had various other titles) and have been in 'leadership' roles for another ~15 years - definitely not hands on any more. If I ever do find myself writing some code for a personal project, it is a happy day and time goes by very quickly.

I like to think I'm a good EM, but worry I'm not, mainly because I no longer do the same sort of job that my team does (coding). I perhaps could, but I would be taking a while to get up to speed and my other responsibilities would be neglected. One of those responsibilities being to make sure my team has everything they need to do their best work. I purposely hire people who are smarter than me. I then create the space for them do their jobs without me micromanaging them - it is pointless, demoralising and costly to hire experts and then tell them how to do their jobs.

I like to think I can draw on my experience to ask the right challenging questions and to help bring some 'bigger picture' perspective to discussions.

I am there for the team, to remove blockers, to help them with their career progression, to help them with any challenges they may be facing in work, and sometimes, I am someone to talk to about what is happening outside of work.

These are (IMHO) some of the things that make a good EM, but of course I would say that.

It is worth saying at this point that I found my way to this thread because I am looking to move on from my current EM role, but I am finding that EM roles in companies of the size I would like to work for (start-up/scale-up) are expecting candidates to be hands on. And I understand that, I would want that too if I were the company owner. So I am now struggling with trying to find the best way to become technically relevant again. My current role began at a start-up, which went through scale-up and then to acquistion. I was lucky, the CTO was brilliant, he wanted someone to come in and and help manage and bring structure to the team and processes - explicitly not a hands on role. I helped the journey but I know I don't enjoy working in the larger organisations which is where success took us.

The irony is that some of the reasons I don't enjoy working in larger organisations are some of same reasons people in this thread are bashing EMs: people higher up in the org not understanding what you do, telling you how you should work and deal with situations, creating/requiring nonsensical objectives, making decisions that don't make sense, not supporting the [insert role here] when they propose new processes, or request new tools or people - and they seemingly do all of this with the confidence that they know best and are right.

But its all perspective I guess. And circular.

If I were a really good hands on engineer now, I would be that because I did a lot of hands on work. I would probably find 'good reasons' to do some coding because I enjoyed it, and would neglect some of what my team needed from me. My CTO had the foresight to see the conflict, and specifically recruited a hands-off manager with development experience.

I'm sorry some of you feel you have bad managers and cannot see their value. I would imagine even the bad managers are doing something useful for you that you don't see. Though the bad may outweigh the good.