As an engineering leader and startup advisor, I know all too well that a « promotion » from dev to engineering manager may not be a promotion at all.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. In my role as an engineering manager, I know making the leap from an individual contributor (IC) to engineering manager (EM) is not a promotion. Instead, it’s a different career track. What we are discussing here is a fundamental difference in terms of the responsibilities of the roles. What you do as an engineering manager versus what you do as a developer is fundamentally different. There is a possibility that you might not write code altogether. A promotion means continuing to do the same thing, while being paid more to do it. Becoming an engineering manager means transitioning to a different role with different responsibilities. In other words, a separate career track. First, let’s break down our target audience into two groups. One group who is transitioning into engineering management. And then, the second, folks who have been made engineering managers recently. For those who are still considering, this decision could be made due to a couple of factors. It could be tenure-based, it happens in many companies where you are the senior-most engineer, or you have spent a fixed amount of time. The company or the team believes that you’re ready for managerial responsibilities, asking you to make the switch. This is a more traditional track that we see. Alternatively, there’s a more interest-based approach that you could be even at a mid to senior software engineer level. An important clarification with this is when to use the term « tech lead » and « engineering manager » interchangeably. The Tech Lead is a system owner, and the Engineering Manager is more of a team/people manager equally. So the former is responsible for the overall success of the architecture while the latter is responsible for the team success, motivation and morale of the people they manage. There are some key signals regarding both the tracks (IC & EM) to be aware about. They are: Are you able to compromise on the technical output that you will end up with as an engineering manager versus a strong engineering IC? If you are coding 60 to 70% of your time currently, let’s say it’s going to reduce to 0 to 30% of the time.
