ya we have 2 types of "managers" as well. the ppl who run the program/project. and ppl who are like bosses of others. the "bosses" pretty much do nothing as far as I can tell. like, ya they meet with us and do evaluations and stuff like that.

the program/project managers run stuff. usually they try to add a bunch of process and documentation and meetings that wastes everyones times.

incidentally, I just an email from my boss that irked me.



ok cool, makes sense whatever. then I open the document and theres 239 rows.

You're probably underpaid and should aim higher (or at least don't limit yourself) but it's important to understand that your market value is dependent on your skills, not your job title - the job title only matters to the extent that it signals something about your skills. For instance, let's say that you're a backup QB making 4M and an average starting QB makes 20M. The starting QB gets injured, forcing you to step up. Now, if you perform well, you have a chance to significantly increase your market value and since the opportunity doesn't come along often so you'll happily take it. But that doesn't mean suddenly you're underpaid - the starting QB being injured didn't change who you are.

Again, not saying this is your situation (but it's probably how they see it) and you should probably go get another job - the job market is significantly better than you think.

Also I think this is important to internalize - everyone is replaceable. Obviously this isn't strictly true but it's more true than anyone thinks.

These are very low for devs working at tech companies these days.

Assuming standard tech company comp/ladder/titles: Project managers typically make less than engineers. Product managers typically make more than engineers but this may vary since the title is not used in a standard way across companies. Engineering managers typically make more than engineers. With that said, product manager is not an entry-level role - even the lowest-level product manager is expected to have strong qualifying experience (typically something that would give you domain knowledge) and also generally strong qualifications. Likewise, engineering managers almost aways have some experience (and ideally a track record of success) as a senior engineer. Project managers can be entry-level positions and paid accordingly. Product managers are executive decision makers for the product, engineering managers manage people and build teams/orgs and project managers are coordinators of work, usually across teams.

Typically a tech product company of your size doesn't need a project manager at all. Project managers are often needed at some scale to provide support for cross-team projects that don't align with particular teams or products and provide visibility for upper management. Often project managers are also hired as support in situations where engineering managers and leads are too busy or otherwise not process-oriented and either you don't need a product manager or your product manager is too busy to moonlight as a project manager. Another major reason why you'd want dedicated project managers is if your company primarily engage in custom, fixed deliverables for specific customers - in that case, project managers can serve as a dedicated point of contact, provide visibility and ensure timely deliverables. The last situation is probably the one where project managers have the most power and also relatively higher comp compared to the devs, but mostly because devs typically make less in those situations.

Everyone should be held accountable.

Great post cb. The roles and relative pay aligns with what I've seen personally and heard through the grapevine.

I'm curious to hear the drama around the girl's departure.

Jmakin are you officially on the way out? Couldn't tell for sure from your post but it sounds like something about you was announced and now you're meeting with HR

The HR guy was congratulating me for the offer and seemed to have no idea what was going on

I have honestly no idea whats going on and everyone seems pissy, maybe i’ll be let go. Idk.

There was some informal announcement the other day, everyone seems to be aware of it on some level.

Oh yea and he wanted to know what prompted the angry email my CEO sent the other day that said i’m in charge and if anyone has a problem they can resign immediately. I think that’s what prompted the drama with the girl. She really, really, really hates me and has made it clear to everyone in the last few weeks she wont be managed by me. Pretty explicitly. Now shes been taken off the project and is gone for the next week. No idea what happened but the CEO wants her gone (there is a lot more history there that goes back before i even started)

LOL that is insane.

Stuff like that happened on a weekly basis at hyper-mega-corp. My standard policy was just to ignore it unless my boss bugged me about it 3 times. Then I knew it had to be done.

You haven't lived until you've been forced to "volunteer" to be a "theme champion" on how we can improve our internal employee satisfaction scores. Basically the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Oh yeah - guess who always had to do the most on these things and be the first to set a good example? Project managers ldo.

Definitely DevOps stuff since it seems like you like bash and back end.

Yea in that case probably need to learn python. I have been programming a little this week with it, it’s not that bad. A few things bug me a lot but i’ll get used to it.

I can do practically anything with docker/jenkins and some light kubernetes experience so those all seem like good technologies to know right now.

In my first workplace we had to fill in some quarterly survey about work satisfaction. So one quarter we got really low scores and then our manager scheduled "what could be done better in the future" meeting. This survey was meant to be anonymous, but since we had only 5 members in our team, the meeting was really "fun" and revealed all those misfits giving bad scores! Needless to say that next quarter our ratings improved (as no one didn't want to have that meeting again lol).

I feel like go is up your alley, esp for devopsy stuff now

It absolutely wouldn't hurt. But I'm doing it with zero python. I just use node or bash for everything. Probably not optimal.

Whatever you do just start looking right now. Don't worry about what you don't know yet, or get into battered wife syndrome thinking maybe your work will change. You're young enough companies will hire you for what you can learn, not what you know.

Go put your resume on indeed, hired (if they do OC), zip recruiter (which sucks but you might get a lead). Do not use cyber coders. Eff those guys. Let some real recruiters find you and go on some interviews.

Lol same here. What made it worst is that there was one person who admitted they didn’t fill it out, so only 4 of us.

One of points that scored low was “I feel that management doesn’t hold individuals responsible for poor work”

That made it for an awkward conversation.

it's better to have those surveys than not imo

to elaborate, i think one of the major benefits of the survey is that it puts a cap on how awful a manager can be. you can have a horrible manager that everyone hates, but it might never becomes a publicly acknowledged truth. and upper management can be completely ignorant of that forever. if you're a manager and you know that this survey happens every so often, there's a limit to how evil you can be. you simply can't survive and succeed in your job long-term if everyone in the company knows that everyone on your team hates you. it serves as one mechanism for removing (or preventing) managers that are just terminally incompetent.

Right - but if that manager is terrorizing employees year after year over bad survey and nothing happens, eventually the employees are going to stop filling out bad surveys.

I had a long debate with myself after the "theme champion" debacle when I got my survey (I wasn't in that group when the survey went out that year).. My boss sucked but it's one of these things where he'd know it was one of 5 of us. Also the company loves him. Eventually I just gave all 4 out of 5 and no comments. Not worth it.

Yea i think sometimes devs think certain things are worthless (and they probably are a lot of the time, and even in the cases they arent, they dont seem to provide any value to the dev) but from an organizational perspective they are necessary.

I am curious what you guys think managers should be doing at all. Of course they are necessary on some level.

I went around some key members of my team today and gathered feedback and consistently they want more management and organization but they hate meetings and process. Ok. How can we make these things worthwhile TO YOU? A lot of times no answer. But we must have at least some meetings, if only for the sake of everyone being aware of the larger context in which we are all working. I got some good feedback to implement but ehh. This isnt gonna work long term.

Everyones feedback is i’m never gonna be a rockstar dev and i’ll do better as a manager. Ok then. I kinda disagree and think it’s the opposite but at least i finally convinced them to drop one of my jobs (dev) so i can focus on doing management 100%. I think a few people are gonna quickly find that without my help their jobs are gonna get significantly harder. Maybe (hopefully) i am wrong.

Updating my resume and linkedin this weekend and hope to hit interviews by late next month.

From Hacker Newsletter today: The Art of Command Line

As an intermediate command line user, lots of great tips in there I didn't know:

Although, surprised it doesn't have ^ substitution (I use that one a lot)

At well-run tech companies, engineering (line) managers primarily exist to to fire bad engineers and help good engineers get recognized (whether for compensation or promotion). Beyond that, it's primarily about team/org-building and doing whatever is needed to fill the gap (at larger companies, this is often navigating across org-charts to find the right people to collaborate with). Sometimes line managers double as tech leads or project managers but that's typically only common if those line managers were also high-level contributors in the same or related context. And as I said, project managers typically coordinate projects at a higher level, usually cross-team stuff, and/or provide visibility to upper management - your entire company isn't big enough for there such roles to exist naturally. It's important to distinguish between project management and project management as a profession. To some extent, basic project management is something nearly everyone does - dedicated project management professionals are typically not needed for regular projects.

To be fair to them, one of the few good reasons to have a project manager at your scale is to have management and organization while having engineers do the minimum possible. I think it's an anti-pattern but one of the ways project managers can add value in this situation is by doing these kinds of things for the engineers so that engineers themselves can just code. If your engineers can just go to all the meetings, organize their own projects and so on, project managers are entirely unnecessary at this scale. Either way, to succeed in that role, your attitude towards engineers needs to be, how do I get all non-essential BS out of your way so you can focus on what you do best, not how can I get everyone to stay on top of all these things that we need as an organization. It should be relatively easy to add value even without bothering anyone, and that's where you should start. Even real managers are best off thinking of their own role this way.

One of the problems seems to be that you also moonlight as an engineer so you have unnecessary opinions about the relative competence of your peers (and possibly this goes the other way as well) that cloud your interactions with them. Ideally, project managers should not be involved in evaluating the performance of engineers. I don't know if this pressure to be the boss (project managers are not typically considered managers, as they manage projects, not people) comes from the negligence of your company's absentee management that's trying to use you to manage by proxy or your own ambition (I remember you referring your position as a leadership role way back - that's typically not how project management is seen) but you're absolutely not yet qualified to be an engineering manager (actual manager) at any tech company that's worth your time.

This is an anti-pattern - if there's one thing most technical people are good at, it's absorbing information in written form on their own. You don't need to get people in a room together to do this. I'd add at meetings are a necessary evil at a larger company because there are lots of things that need feedback from people from completely unrelated areas - when you have like 10 engineers, you can probably do without any meetings at all if you wanted to. The raw amount of communication needed at that scale is relatively small. If people are already meeting-averse a company of your size, you probably have too many unnecessary meetings.

Overall, you need to work on correcting your experience to opinion ratio - you have very little experience in any of this, but you have far too many opinions and way too much baggage tied to these opinions. I suspect that purely in terms of how they will fare in properly functional organizations in their current role, your company's engineers will do much better than your company's managers. At the least, you need to stop internalizing the struggles of your management to get useful work out of the engineers.

Haha everyone relies so heavily on CL that id get made fun of if i didnt do any of these in front of someone else. See me for all the hot command line tips. I can now navigate the terminal faster than any UI i can think of

Oh man candybar thank you. You perfectly stated what I've been feeling for a while. I'll preface this response by saying I have felt my title hasn't really aligned with what we actually needed for a while. for a long time I never had a real "project." Now things are coming down the line that are actual projects - for instance right now we're trying to partner with some companies and joining sales/dev teams to deliver a solution to market. For the first time in the entire year I've been here I did actual project management in one of these engagements with another team on another continent. But I agree it really isn't necessary here, at least in the traditional PM as a profession sense. I'll get into the last conversation I had about this in a moment.

Correct. One of the suggestions I made in my meeting with my boss (head of engineering, basically the CTO) and the CEO. I said my boss's time is completely wasted dealing with customer engagements and all the minute bull**** that bogs him down on a day to day basis. He's an incredibly talented engineer and his time would best be spent spearheading engineering projects and getting down in the weeds with the engineers like I have been doing for months. He said he could take over the "project management" (whatever I have been trying to do) if he shifted over some of his "monkey work" (what I call it, it's not that hard to communicate to customers or talk to a bunch of people and make sure everyone's on the same page about things) like running our engagements dashboard and handling incoming requests from stakeholders. I can take the brunt of all that and relay it to him and the other managers, I really don't see why he feels the need to do that. But he's always told me he's bad at managing so I think that I was supposed to be his enforcer but since I don't have the political capital or authority that he does it's just never worked out (IMO).
100% agree with this and this is what I want to do.

you are right. This has been a huge problem and I have tried to communicate that to them for a few months now, that I cannot do the "25% dev, 75% management" they want from me, for a lot of reasons you just stated but simply because both of those are full time jobs and I just can't keep up. I was the bottleneck in a late deliverable this week and so they finally said I won't be touching code anymore if I go all in on management. I'd rather be 100% dev but this is the option right now.

They have made it really clear since day one they want me to manage by proxy. They want me to be the enforcer, my boss's have have all stated this week that they think they are weak at management and I can fulfill that role. They want me to do the unpopular things they know they need to do. I probably misinterpreted things along the way, I am prone to that, but it is really, really ****ing clear now.

Correct. I need to figure out how to solve this. Not coding will be a big step. They still want me to validate things, which I am very good at in my opinion. But that step should not involve me even having to look at code at all and that's the state I want us to get in.

One area I really need to focus on is better requirements gathering and making sure the stuff we're working on actually aligns with our business goals. One thing that sucks is our business goals are super unclear. They seem to want my input on that too for some reason, idk why.

One route I think I may go and I think they will listen is to hire a consultant. Would that be a bad idea? I don't know how to implement process. My CEO wants to come up with the process on his own but I think it's gonna be terrible. Some of the ideas he's saying are just bad - like he wants people to be in the office 40 hours a week. I really pushed hard against that and said I dont give a **** how often people are in the office as long as they deliver. The problem is the people who are least frequently in the office right now, are the ones that arent delivering. So that is the easy place to point blame. But it is not the real problem.

Tell him good luck keeping good devs if he requires them to put in “butt in seat” time rather than just caring about productivity.

The whole idea of an enforcer for a tech start up is terrible. I might be misremembering but I think this was also the company where 2-3 of the top execs (including CEO) had no real clue of product or customer details.

It’s not a good scene.

Jmakin, I might have missed it, but do you know what you want to do with your career at this point? If not, I’d think a lot about that before having these discussions with your boss(es) or starting a job hunt.

If you want to go the actual tech route (or real tech management) I think you need to abandon this place. Start preparing for tech interviews and go job hunting. If you want the project/product management route there’s probably learning / experience you could do here before job hunting. Things like asking for more training opportunities (rather than direct comp). But even then I’m not sure this company is a particularly great stepping stone in your career.