> Suffering from front-end fatigue? Can't keep up with the newest shiniest frameworks and tools? Management's got you covered! The "hot new" agile / kanban / scrum methodologies are 20–30 years old. The basic meeting types (demos, dailies, 1-on-1s) have been developing for centuries.
> Frankly, after 4–5 years of working in a particular tech area, you can solve the vast majority of practical problems well enough. If you want some work challenge, you can:
I hate takes like these. "Good technical skills are dime a dozen, but management? that's the hard shit."
There's absolutely no lack of meaningful skills you can expand into if you're plateauing as an engineer. If you're a front-end engineer, go learn some design and product thinking, that'll help you give better input to other teams. Learn some scripting, and automate a bunch of shit. Learn some SQL and learn to query data on your own, instead of relying on others.
The best manager I had had a wide range of technical skills, so was able to make smart decisions since he had a very holistic picture of the codebase. Technical management shouldn't be about following methodologies, doing 1:1s, and being a middleman, it should be about making good practical decisions.
Yeah, and it's horrible advice. If you're an EM or higher, you still wind up making decisions with heavy technical impact, even if it's "this pitch from a Senior Engineer on my team is smart, let's do it."
You don't have to be the best programmer, but you need to be able to have thoughtful technical conversations with the in-the-weeds engineers, and represent their work to the wider org. If your mental model diverges with the day-to-day reality, your judgment breaks down along with it, and you're going to wind up being the problem instead of being an asset to your teams.
Not saying management is harder than engineering, at all. It's just another nice big area to learn something new.
Big companies tend to be quite prescriptive about role boundaries, so if you're an FE engineer, you can learn design and provide input as much as you want, but you won't likely get to design a new screen from scratch instead of your regular designer.
I mean, over the last few years as an IC I fiddled with CI setups and automated QA, wrote some CLI codegens, but after some time you really notice you start inventing problems to have some fun.
You're mostly right, but: depends on your manager.
I do let my FE engineers do mockups when they want. It is often objected by other people who wanted to do it (but didn't) or wanted someone else to do it (but didn't have time). But whoever is trying to make me and my team's job hell, will get the same treatment from me.
> Frankly, after 4–5 years of working in a particular tech area, you can solve the vast majority of practical problems well enough. If you want some work challenge, you can:
I hate takes like these. "Good technical skills are dime a dozen, but management? that's the hard shit."
There's absolutely no lack of meaningful skills you can expand into if you're plateauing as an engineer. If you're a front-end engineer, go learn some design and product thinking, that'll help you give better input to other teams. Learn some scripting, and automate a bunch of shit. Learn some SQL and learn to query data on your own, instead of relying on others.
The best manager I had had a wide range of technical skills, so was able to make smart decisions since he had a very holistic picture of the codebase. Technical management shouldn't be about following methodologies, doing 1:1s, and being a middleman, it should be about making good practical decisions.