17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

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Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin.  We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.

One interesting question that came up repeatedly was: “what are some reasons that someone might not want to be a manager?”

Fascinatingly, I heard it asked over the full range of tones from extremely positive (“what kind of nutter wouldn’t want to manage a team?!”) to extremely negative (“who would ever want to manage a team?!”).  So I said I would write a piece and list some reasons.

Point of order: I am going to focus on intrinsic reasons, not external ones.  There are lots of toxic orgs where you wouldn’t want to be a manager for many reasons — but that list is too long and overwhelming, and I would argue you probably don’t want to work there in ANY capacity.  Please assume the surroundings of a functional, healthy org (I know, I know — whopping assumption).

1. You love what you do.

Never underestimate this one, and never take it for granted.  If you look forward to work and even miss it on vacation; if you occasionally leave work whistling with delight and/or triumph; if your brain has figured out how to wring out regular doses of dopamine and serotonin while delivering ever-increasing value; if you look back with pride at what you have learned and built and achieved, if you regularly tap into your creative happy place … hell, your life is already better than 99.99% of all the humans who have ever labored and lived.  Don’t underestimate the magnitude of your achievement, and don’t assume it will always be there waiting for you to just pick it right back up again.

2. It is easy to get a new engineering job.  Really, really easy.

Getting your first gig as an engineer can be a challenge, but after that?  It is possibly easier for an experienced engineer to find a new job than anyone else on the planet. There is so much demand this skill set that we actually complain about how annoying it is being constantly recruited!  Amazing.

It is typically harder to find a new job as a manager.  If you think interview processes for engineers are terrible (and they are, honey), they are even weirder and less predictable (and more prone to implicit bias) for managers.  So much of manager hiring is about intangibles like “culture fit” and “do I like you” — things you can’t practice or study or know if you’ve answered correctly.  And soooo much of your skill set is inevitably bound up in navigating the personalities and bureaucracies of particular teams and a particular company.  A manager’s effectiveness is grounded in trust and relationships, which makes it much less transferrable than engineering skills.

3. There are fewer management jobs.

I am not claiming it is equally trivial for everyone to get a new job; it can be hard if you live in an out-of-the-way place, or have an unusual skill, etc.  But in almost every case, it becomes harder if you’re a manager.  Besides — given that the ratio of engineers to line managers is roughly 7 to one — there will be almost an order of magnitude fewer eng manager jobs than engineering jobs.

4. Manager jobs are the first to get cut.

Engineers (in theory) add value directly to the bottom line.  Management is, to be brutally frank, overhead.  Middle management is often the first to be cut during layoffs

Remember how I said that creation is the engineering superpower?  That’s a nicer way of saying that managers don’t directly create any value.  They may indirectly contribute to increased value over time — the good ones do — but only by working through other people as a force multiplier, mentor etc.  When times get tough, you don’t cut the people who build the product, you cut the ones whose value-added is contingent or harder to measure.

Another way this plays out is when companies are getting acquired.  As a baseline for acquihires, the acquiring company will estimate a value of $1 million per engineer, then deduct $500k for every other role being acquired.  Ouch.

5. Managers can’t really job hop.

Where it’s completely normal for an engineer to hop jobs every 1-3 years, a manager who does this will not get points for learning a wide range of skills, they’ll be seen as “probably difficult to work with”.  I have no data to support this, but I suspect the job tenure of a successful manager is at least 2-3x as long as that of a successful IC.  It takes a year or two just to gain the trust of everyone on your team and the adjacent teams, and to learn the personalities involved in navigating the organization.  At a large company, it may take a few times that long.  I was a manager at Facebook for 2.5 years and I still learned some critical new detail about managing teams there on a weekly basis.  Your value to the org really kicks in after a few years have gone by, once a significant part of the way things get done resides in your cranium.

6. Engineers can be little shits.

You know the type.  Sneering about how managers don’t do any “real work”, looking down on them for being “less technical”.  Basically everyone who utters the question “.. but how technical are they?” in that particular tone of voice is a shitbird.  Hilariously, we had a great conversation about whether a great manager needs to be technical or not — many people sheepishly admitted that the best managers they had ever had knew absolutely nothing about technology, and yet they gave managers coding interviews and expected them to be technical.  Why?  Mostly because the engineers wouldn’t respect them otherwise.

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1169685458340573184

7.  As a manager, you will need to have some hard conversations.  Really, really hard ones.

Do you shy away from confrontation?  Does it seriously stress you out to give people feedback they don’t want to hear?  Manager life may not be for you.  There hopefully won’t be too many of these moments, but when they do happen, they are likely to be of outsized importance.  Having a manager who avoids giving critical feedback can be  really damaging, because it deprives you of the information you need to make course corrections before the problem becomes really big and hard.

8.  A manager’s toolset is smaller than you think.

As an engineer, if you really feel strongly about something, you just go off and do it yourself.  As a manager, you have to lead through influence and persuasion and inspiring other people to do things.  It can be quite frustrating.  “But can’t I just tell people what to do?” you might be thinking.  And the answer is no.  Any time you have to tell someone what to do using your formal authority, you have failed in some way and your actual influence and power will decrease.  Formal authority is a blunt, fragile instrument.

9. You will get none of the credit, and all of the blame.

When something goes well, it’s your job to push all the credit off onto the people who did the work.  But if you failed to ship, or and, or hire, or whatever?  The responsibility is all on you, honey.

10.  Use your position as an IC to bring balance to the Force.

I LOVE working in orgs where ICs have power and use their voices.  I love having senior ICs around who model that, who walk around confidently assuming that their voice is wanted and needed in the decision-making process.  If your org is not like that, do you know who is best positioned to shift the balance of power back?  Senior ICs, with some behind-the-scenes support from managers.  For this reason, I am always a little sad when a vocal, powerful IC who models this behavior transitions to management.  If ALL of the ICs who act this way become managers, it sends a very dismaying message to the ranks — that you only speak up if you’re in the process of converting to management.

11.  Management is just a collection of skills, and you should be able to do all the fun ones as an IC.

Do you love mentoring?  Interviewing, constructing hiring loops, defining the career ladder?  Do you love technical leadership and teaching other people, or running meetings and running projects?  Any reasonably healthy org should encourage all senior ICs to participate and have leadership roles in these areas.  Management can be unbundled into a lot of different skills and roles, and the only ones that are necessarily confined to management are the shitty ones, like performance reviews and firing people.  I LOVE it when an engineer expresses the desire to start learning more management skills, and will happily brainstorm with them on next steps — get an intern? run team meetings?  there are so many things to choose from!  When I say that all engineers should try management at some point in their career, what I really mean is these are skills that every senior engineer should develop.  Or as Jill says:

12. Joy is much harder to come by.

That dopamine drip in your brain from fixing problems and learning things goes away, and it’s … real tough.  This is why I say you need to commit to a two year stint if you’re going to try management: that, plus it takes that long to start to get your feet under you and is hard on your team if they’re switching managers all the time.  It usually takes a year or two to rewire your brain to look for the longer timeline, less intense rewards you get from coaching other people to do great things.  For some of us, it never does kick in.  It’s genuinely hard to know whether you’ve done anything worth doing.

13. It will take up emotional space at the expense of your personal life.

When I was an IC, I would work late and then go out and see friends or meet up at the pub almost every night.  It was great for my dating life and social life in general.  As a manager, I feel like curling up in a fetal position and rolling home around 4 pm.  I’m an introvert, and while my capacity has increased a LOT over the past several years, I am still sapped every single day by the emotional needs of my team.

14. Your time doesn’t belong to you.

It’s hard to describe just how much your life becomes not your own.

15. Meetings.

16. If technical leadership is what your heart loves most, you should NOT be a manager.

If you are a strong tech lead and you convert to management, it is your job to begin slowly taking yourself out of the loop as tech lead and promoting others in your place.  Your technical skills will stop growing at the point that you switch careers, and will slowly decay after that.  Moreover, if you stay on as tech lead/manager you will slowly suck all the oxygen from the room.  It is your job to train up and hand over to your replacements and gradually step out of the way, period.

17. It will always be there for you later.

In conclusion

Given all this, why should ANYONE ever be a manager?  Shrug.  I don’t think there’s any one good or bad answer.  I used to think a bad answer would be “to gain power and influence” or “to route around shitty communication systems”, but in retrospect those were my reasons and I think things turned out fine.  It’s a complex calculation.  If you want to try it and the opportunity arises, try it!  Just commit to the full two year experiment, and pour yourself into learning it like you’re learning a new career — since, you know, you are.

But please do be honest with yourself.  One thing I hate is when someone wants to be a manager, and I ask why, and they rattle off a list of reasons they’ve heard that people SHOULD want to become managers (“to have a greater impact than I can with just myself, because I love helping other people learn and grow, etc”) but I am damn sure they are lying to themselves and/or me.

Introspection and self-knowledge are absolutely key to being a decent manager, and lord knows we need more of those.  So don’t kick off your grand experiment by lying to yourself, ok?

 

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

40 thoughts on “17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager”

  2. What on earth is an IC? It’s apparently pretty awesome, not for engineers and for companies who’d like to avoid paying managers, but I couldn’t find it defined I the article, I’ve not come across it in multiple decades of working, and even Google couldn’t find a definition that made any sense. (Don’t try Urban Dictionary – while comical, it just doesn’t understand the complex world of business acronyms)

    Does sound pretty good though! 🙂

    Reply
      1. Erick says:

        Bonuses are a fraction, Pay can be half, why be a manager, cause your income will skyrocket not the case for individual contributors.

  3. solakv says:

    Thank you for this post, Charity. It resonates well with my own experience.

    Decades ago, the manager of one of our sibling organizations gave a talk about engineering careers, and his through-line was basically the assumption that one does what he did: engineer until you know a lot about projects and teams and stuff, and then you become a manager. I listened attentively, but the more I thought about it later, the less I believed it. I was going to have to get *really* bored with coding to give it up.

    Eventually I knew enough about projects and teams and stuff to be a team lead for a release of my team’s product. Our team had excellent rapport, but the change in the menu of my daily tasks took me away from everything fun and was all “executive function” things that are not natural to my ADD brain. I focussed hard and got it done, but I took that experience as proof that the “career track assumption” I had been told was not at all universal.

    Such occasional assignment shifts taught me a lot that I hope make me a better individual contributor due to having temporarily lived in or near the management viewpoint. Both for collaborating with my co-contributors and for communicating with management, I can usually figure out how to frame what I know into a shape that they can use effectively. However, despite years of improvements in my self-management, at this point I don’t see myself moving any closer to a real _management_ position than “senior technical lead”. I’m good at figuring out how to make the hardware and software do what we want. Not so much at figuring out how to direct the wetware.

    Reply
  4. pavelgritsay says:

    I feel all of this! 🙂

    Very good list of reasons!

    One aspect that you have not explored is the longevity and ease of not running the tech skill race (new language every 5 years, new framework every 2?!) but being an experienced “people manager” with success stories when you are 50?

    Reply

    1. I would love to believe you are right, but will need to see evidence that people skills are indeed respected within the tech industry. Instead, I see far too much of the assumption that if people know the technology, they can learn anything else, instead of the reverse.

      Reply

    2. I am not a manager, but just from skimming news over the past few decades, management is **NOT** a static set of skills. Think of all the management paradigms that have been introduced and lost: management by results, management by objectives, matrix management, business process reengineering, TQM, …. I confess I’m stealing a bunch of these from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_fad. Anyhow, it’s my believe that to stay a manager for decades is just as difficult as staying up to date as a software engineer for decades.

      Reply
  5. Josh Cunningham says:

    Thank you so much for this, it put so much of what I have bouncing around in my head into words.

    the-hero-we-need-not-the-hero-we-deserve.gif

    Reply
  6. Shockwave says:

    I found this to be an extremely insightful article and one that is completely based on reality. This has also quashed any tiny bits of thoughts I may have had of becoming a manager. Thanks for enlightening the community!

    Reply
  8. ken ambrose says:

    I never wanted to be a manager in IT, not from day one through to my retirement after 25 years. For two reasons really:
    1: I had been a manager in a previous career (offset printing) and never found owners/VPs who I could really respect.
    2: None of the tech cultures I worked in during my tech career had the faintest idea who W.E. Deming was, let alone understand the principals of continuous improvement and Deming’s 14 ponts. And I knew from long experience in manufacturing that I didn’t want to work as a manager in any organization that was not fully commiited to Deming.

    Reply
  11. Martín Rivero says:

    Great article. Thanks for sharing.
    One question, why does wanting to have a greater impact and helping others is considered a lie as a reason to become a manager?

    Reply

    1. it’s just the answer you’re “supposed” to have, and lots of ambitious people know that and so they parrot it. therefore i am perhaps unduly cynical about it.

      Reply

  12. I’ve been an engineering manager for more than 3 years now. And the question if I should continue being in the role keeps appearing to me every now and then. I try to observe myself and ask why I think about it AGAIN, what caused it. Most of the time the cause are moments which cost me a lot of emotions and stress. Thank you for the article, it helps me organise my thoughts better 🙂

    During my career I didn’t have chance to discuss this with many managers. And I’d like to ask you and your audience here: how many times do you ask yourself if the roles is for you?

    Reply

  16. I’ve been managing in one manner or another, on and off, for pretty much my entire career. I’ve also been an IC, a technical co-founder, a tech lead, and all the shades in between. And even though most recently I have been doing nothing but management (the last 4 years or so)… I’m still finding myself at a crossroads where I’m really questioning whether this is what I want. Thinking about people all day is just *so* exhausting, and I really recognize a kindred spirit in the reasons you mentioned. Are you still managing? What keeps you doing it? How do you know it’s the right thing for you?

    Reply

    1. Sounds like you are ready for a break, friend.

      No, I am not managing an engineering team at the moment. My direct reports are the engineering director, product manager and principal developer advocate — all of whom bring their own structure to the table. I do minimal “management” for them, really. And I keep doing what I’m doing because I believe the world needs to change in the ways we are trying to change it (at honeycomb.io). <3

      Reply
  21. Kapil Sharma says:

    I want to be an EM because I genuinely want to help people grow. And I am not lying.
    What do you think are some good-reasons-to-be-a-manager ? Your article has exhausted all the options it seems.

    Reply

  22. I’m in my fourth year of this stint. Every single bullet in this article is what is eating me up everyday, I’m exhausted. I am divorced now and hardly see my friends anymore. It’s time to be honest to myself and change jobs. Thank you so much for this article, it makes me feel like I’m not alone and it’s normal to have these thoughts.

    Reply

      1. Thanks, I set things in motion after reading this article. I read somewhere: it’s easier to fill the hole in your bank account when quitting, then fixing your mental health.

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