I'm responsible for the wellbeing of my direct reports. I need to ensure they can grow their careers. I need to know when they're stressed or burnt out or bored. I need to manage projects and be a shit umbrella.
While I am technically strong, I have architects and technical fellows who are WAY stronger than me. I work closely with them to ensure we're adopting the latest best practices and tools. They do much of the system design. They also mentor newer employees, but they don't have direct responsibility for those employee's careers. And they don't have direct responsibility for the success or failure of any given project.
Typically the direct reporting relationship is about managing someone’s career and not necessarily their work. The leadership described here is more about the work to be done rather than the person’s fulfillment and suitability with that work. This separation is more pronounced with large (1000+) engineering organizations. Often people don’t experience this difference because it doesn’t exist at the smaller scales.
Engineering management is more on the management of people and engineer leadership is more on the management of products/projects/systems.
When you say "about managing someone's career" I can't help but feel you actually mean "someone's job". No manager is paid to care about an employee's career that I have ever seen or heard of.
Ehh, I am employed at a company where, despite things being very tense at the moment, I've felt very comfortable expressing to my manager my intent to transfer out of the team I'm currently on and into a different position, as I'm not happy with things as they are.
My manager, skip, and director have all been extremely supportive of this throughout the process, despite it taking a somewhat lengthy period of time and putting me (a senior-almost staff eng on the team) in a position where it's very difficult for me to commit to a significant ownership of big strategic things (which is my job) since I might transfer out at any moment.
Similarly, a few years back, I expressed intent to transfer away from my team to my manager. He basically said "stick around an extra quarter since you're on the cusp of promotion and it'll be easier this way" (and he was correct, my promotion would have been delayed if I transferred first), and I did and got promoted, and ended up staying longer, for various reasons.
Additionally, my managers have all been receptive to my goals in terms of career growth: do I want to lean into management (no!) or into deep technical expertise? Do I want to go for additional promotions, or am I happy to stay in the role I'm in and continue doing the same kind of work?
All of this, to me, reads more like career management than job management.
> No manager is paid to care about an employee's career that I have ever seen or heard of.
This is an incredibly common part of the role(s), so my guess is that you have been unlucky in this.
For what it's worth, all the strong managers I've ever know or worked with pay attention this this, and vast majority of companies (again in my experience) made it an explicit part of their role.
I'd go so far as to say as a people manager (as opposed to a project manager, say) you cannot do a great job without considering things like career progression, because if you don't, you don't understand your team well enough to be really effective.
> This is an incredibly common part of the role(s), so my guess is that you have been unlucky in this.
I could be very unlucky, sure, but I've worked at my fair share of places and it's always been the same. Management is there to keep the cats herded and HR is there to make sure nobody fucks with the money. All that matters is that I do my job and that the employer can use the manager to push more work on me under the guise of setting myself up for a promotion or raise that will never, ever come - it never has.
> all the strong managers I've ever know or worked with pay attention this this, and vast majority of companies (again in my experience) made it an explicit part of their role.
All enhancing an employee's career does is ensure that they have leverage to negotiate higher salaries or leaving the company. No company wants this.
> I'd go so far as to say as a people manager (as opposed to a project manager, say) you cannot do a great job without considering things like career progression, because if you don't, you don't understand your team well enough to be really effective.
Sure, you know where strengths and weaknesses are but that doesn't mean you devote company resources to making the employee better suited for leaving the company. You can do things like growth but you're going to come around and put penalties and fees to prevent the employee from leaving voluntarily.
I have never seen any manager or business treat an employee's career as anything but an inconvenience at best nor have I heard of any of my coworkers or friends or family having experienced anything like this. I can only assume that it doesn't exist or that it is so rare that it may as well not exist.
> All enhancing an employee's career does is ensure that they have leverage to negotiate higher salaries or leaving the company. No company wants this.
Explicitly, no. Growing talent inside is far less risky than hiring from the outside. Sometimes that means someone will leave, yes - but if the relationship is good they will do it at the right time when they are ready, not when they are miserable. This is win win. Long term net positives here are hard to understate.
> I can only assume that it doesn't exist or that it is so rare that it may as well not exist.
Well I can equally attest your assumption is false. But this is probably just a demonstration that path dependence is a real thing.
All I can say is you have a very negative view of the whole situation, which doesn't match my experience at all, or that of many people I know.
Every org has different cultures and leadership culture within it.
A power culture has zero trust and is high blame.
Bureaucratic is process oriented.
Generative experiments, tests, learns from failure.
The organization you have never experienced is generative. And coupled with transformational leadership it’s a pleasant environment to work in as either a manager or IC. These orgs do exist and are not rare either.
To my mind, management is about having direct reports and doing a lot of work around things relating to that responsibility: quarterly reviews, compensation and promotion discussions, assigning work and suchlike.
Leadership is about leading: helping the company make strategic decisions about what problems to solve and how to solve them, mentoring and inspiring and educating others, generally up-leveling the wider organization but without the direct responsibility of managing individuals.
The best distinction I have heard is that you lead people, and you manage things.
People whose job title is manager might have to lead people too, but they're being held accountable for managing a thing. A project, a product, a budget, a release, a software system. Managing means 'making sure the thing happens'.
What a staff+ engineer is held accountable for is engineering. What gets built and how. That a technical solution meets its requirements and constraints.
In order to do that they might also need to lead people. But they don't have to manage anything.
A Staff Engineer doesn't really have to care about for example people that have a rough patch, or about notorious assholes ruining the team's morale. That's mostly a people's manager problem.
On the other hand people's sense of who they should really listen to always skews to their manager (the person that can fire and/or promote them, or at least has the most say in the process).
If I can modify that slightly: The staff engineer isn't accountable for people that have a rough patch or who are assholes (and the manager is). I've found as a staff engineer that I definitely have to care, adapt to the rough patch, and campaign/do politics to get the assholes out, but I'm not accountable for it.
(I originally wrote this with "responsible" in place of "accountable" but that was fuzzier; surely as a staff engineer I'm responsible for more than my direct contributions even if I'm not directly accountable for them.)
In this context (and the usage is not always consistent) it's probably easiest to think about leadership as an activity and (people) management as a role. If you are not formally responsible for some aspect of other peoples jobs and career you are not "managing them" but you may be leading them (e.g. as a senior engineer, or mentor, or in terms of a project design, etc.).
