korrents

korrents · piece

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

Charity Majors · 11 May 2017

Others here said this too

Making management the only path to career progression is a mistake that costs a company the senior engineers it needs.

Their wordsFuck the whole idea that only managers get career progression.

Also said by Camille Fournier

Read the piece on charity.wtf ↗

4 korrents from this piece ↓

Charity Majors did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Making management the only path to career progression is a mistake that costs a company the senior engineers it needs.

    Their wordsFuck the whole idea that only managers get career progression.

  2. Our reading

    The best engineering managers are never more than two or three years away from hands-on work, and the best individual contributors have done time in management.

    Their wordsThe best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management.

  3. Our reading

    Engineering and management cannot both be improved at once, so a new manager has to stop trying to be the senior engineer as well.

    Mental modelTrade-offs

    Their wordsYou can only really improve at one of these things at a time: engineering or management.

  4. Our reading

    A manager’s calendar and an engineer’s calendar are incompatible, because management is interruptive and good engineering requires blocking interruptions out.

    Their wordsManagement is highly interruptive, and great engineering — where you’re learning things — requires blocking out interruptions. You can’t do these two opposite things at once.

Keep reading

The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.