My favorite type of engineering manager is the Reluctant Manager.
This person is as happy as a clam developing software. They take great pride in designing elegant, scalable, performant systems. They love teaching the ropes to junior engineers.
At some point in their career, they notice that things around them are sub-optimal. Maybe a well-deserving peer doesn’t get the promotion, or a project that they care very strongly about gets deprioritized. Maybe the team is not working most effectively together. So they start proposing and running team processes, and get more involved in roadmap planning. Other teams naturally come to this individual more and more for their insight. Next thing they know, there’s a Manager in their title.
What this person will also discover is that while the desire to solve problems has extended beyond code to people, it comes at a cost — they no longer have the deep focus time to form mind maps of the codebase and create clean data models. Months pass and they haven’t written a single line of code.
Some will bid goodbye to their code like an old friend they may never see again. Some will miss the code so much that they painfully forsake the allure of solving organizational problems on behalf of their fellow engineers.
Either way, the core of a Relucant Manager will always be the Earnest Engineer and that is why they are my favorite.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.