Understanding Engineering Managers

You have seen them. They live in meetings. They use spreadsheets, lists, calendars. They nod at your technical comments but haven’t pushed a line of code in years. Who are Engineering Managers? What do they want? Do they even think like us?

To understand who they are, let us look at what might happen in an engineering team. In a perfect world, team members produce high-quality work on time. No arguments, no missed deadlines, no one quits. The company runs like a Swiss watch.

But that doesn’t exist. Here’s what happens instead:

• Someone slacks off.
• Someone churns out garbage code.
• Someone else burns out pulling overtime.
• Two team members can’t agree on what to do.
• Someone grumbles about leaving for a better gig.
• Someone wants a service the budget won’t allow

If unmanaged, these small issues widen. Productivity dips. Costs rise. Good people leave.

Companies choose to hire engineering manager to make sure that the team’s total delivery is optimal.

Engineering Managers shepherd projects, advocate for their teams, and make sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction. They translate abstract goals into actionable plans.

Their inputs? Burnt-out coders, clashing egos, vague specs, and deadlines that don’t budge. Their outputs? Predictable releases. Happier teams. Better results. Real skills are required to navigate through these challenges. Trade-offs between speed and quality are wisely made. And like a captain, they are tasked with keeping the morale up even if the ship is going down. Their abilities:

• can explain a complex problem to a frustrated engineer and a non-technical exec without losing either
• can rally a team around a tough deadline, or talk a burned-out dev off the ledge
• Know who’s stuck where, amidst JIRA, calendars and to-do lists
• And conflict resolution and strategic thinking

The job comes with bigger paychecks, fancy titles and no on-call shifts.

But there is a price. They don’t get to “build” anymore. They are alone. They have to deal with politics and fight over resources. And when things go wrong, guess who gets blamed?

An engineer quits for more money? Their fault.

A product bombed after launch? Them again.

The coffee machine broke? Probably their fault too :)

If you want to understand them, think of engineering managers as former developers who traded their lines of code for emails. So, the next time you wonder why your manager’s calendar is full, remember this: someone has to keep the circus running—and yes, that includes arranging peanuts for the elephants.