<story><title>Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management</title><url>https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/unintuitive-things-i-ve-learned-about-management-f2c42d68604b</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>siliconc0w</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never really seen &amp;#x27;separate but equal&amp;#x27; career tracks be true.  The manager track is always better compensated and has more say in the direction of the business.&lt;p&gt;IMO - talking with people makes both parties feel better but is overrated for affecting change.  A better way to manage and grow talent is to put people in a position to succeed.  This involves giving the right tasks to the right people, removing obstacles and distractions, understanding when and how to prioritize production(product stories) vs productivity (i.e tooling, infrastructure, and tech debt).  None of this happens in 1:1s.   You need to intimately understand your developer lifecycle and how your engineers are getting blocked or where they&amp;#x27;re wasting their time and how to go about fixing that.   Even though they&amp;#x27;re often mediocre communicators an engineer-manager is better at making those decisions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raz32dust</author><text>I think the difference in compensation is inevitable in the free market. To command respect from engineers, you have to be a good engineer yourself and have to be smart and have a lot of technical depth. Among this set of people, it is very hard to find people who are also good at managing people. I think great engineering managers are genuinely rarer than great developers, and consequently, they will be better paid.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management</title><url>https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/unintuitive-things-i-ve-learned-about-management-f2c42d68604b</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>siliconc0w</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never really seen &amp;#x27;separate but equal&amp;#x27; career tracks be true.  The manager track is always better compensated and has more say in the direction of the business.&lt;p&gt;IMO - talking with people makes both parties feel better but is overrated for affecting change.  A better way to manage and grow talent is to put people in a position to succeed.  This involves giving the right tasks to the right people, removing obstacles and distractions, understanding when and how to prioritize production(product stories) vs productivity (i.e tooling, infrastructure, and tech debt).  None of this happens in 1:1s.   You need to intimately understand your developer lifecycle and how your engineers are getting blocked or where they&amp;#x27;re wasting their time and how to go about fixing that.   Even though they&amp;#x27;re often mediocre communicators an engineer-manager is better at making those decisions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vellum</author><text>You need to talk to your people a lot, in order for them to get comfortable talking to you.  95% of the time, you&amp;#x27;re just shooting the shit.  But 5% of the time, they&amp;#x27;ll have some critical information.  Conversely, if you don&amp;#x27;t talk to your people, they won&amp;#x27;t volunteer this info out of the blue.  You have to lay the ground work first.</text></comment>