On the Transition from Being an Individual Contributor to Being a People Manager
As someone who got my first assignment to manage people at Cermati around three years ago — in March 2018 to be exact, though it wasn’t made official until September in the same year— I still consider myself a beginner in managing people despite the recent years I’ve experienced. I had some experience mentoring people before that, but I was never really in a position where I got anything to say about the said people’s future in the company.
At the moment, I happened to be managing a team of people with varying skillsets, backgrounds, and seniority levels. A few of them have already experienced being in the position of considering whether they want to develop into an individual contributor or a manager in the future. Being their manager, I usually try to give them as much information as possible regarding their chosen path with its pros and cons — so they can decide by themselves which path would suit them best according to what they want to achieve, based on all the information available to them.
“There is no imam but the mind, who guides by day and night.”
- Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri
This article is meant to share my experience so far as an engineering lead and engineering manager at Cermati, which might be useful for other people. As a disclaimer, I don’t consider myself that good as a manager — but to the best of my knowledge I haven’t ruined anyone’s career by being their manager so far, so at least I shouldn’t be that bad (yet).
Why Should You Become a Manager?
To be honest, I didn’t want to be promoted to a lead position. But the domain I was working on needed a lead and I happened to be the only available choice for the post — since I got paid by the company to help them with their company-related problems and having no lead was a problem, so I took the post.
Also, I happened to be pretty awkward in human interaction at the time so I decided to take the job and consider it a practice for me to become a more proper and decent human being. Not that I’m no longer feeling awkward in social situations at the time I’m writing this article, but I can say that nowadays I’m way more used to feeling the awkwardness than I was before.
Unlike me though, some people genuinely want to become managers, and talking with them gave me more perspectives. Some of them are the aspiring managers I spoke with, as mentioned earlier in this article. The rest are those who have walked the managerial path before me and become competent at it.
Generally, I can summarize their reasons to choose the managerial career path over the individual contributor path as follows.
- They want to have their own business in the future, and pursuing a managerial career path will help them more in developing their abilities in management and business strategy.
- They’re passionate about their chosen field and they want to be able to utilize their abilities to contribute in both organizational strategy and execution within their domain of expertise.
- They want to grow their career as much as possible and it’s generally easier to justify advances in the managerial career path if compared to the individual contributor path in many companies.
Those are very good reasons to aspire to become managers, as they have clear goals they want to achieve, and becoming a manager helps them in achieving their personal goals.
Still, not everyone has those reasons when considering our career development, and taking a managerial position might not help with our personal goals — depending on the said personal goals, being a manager might even go against the goals we want to achieve.
Aside from the aforementioned reason that I took the post because I was the only available choice at the time, from a personal perspective I also had some reasons to not decline when asked to be a people manager.
- Most of the technical stuff that needed to be done at the time was generally stuff that I already knew how to perform. Also, I hadn’t come up with an idea of what high-value technical improvements can be made for the company that I should execute myself — even if I did, the best return of investment most likely still came from the not-so-fancy tasks that are already right in front of our eyes anyway.
- It might be a chance for me to improve my overall skills in interacting with people. I also happened to be helping with sourcing and hiring engineers already, and hiring is a part of a manager’s job.
- Our CTO told me that the experience in managing people is going to be valuable for me even if I decide to switch to an individual contributor position again in the future. I haven’t switched back but I can already see how the experience’s going to benefit me if I were to become an individual contributor again. After being exposed to more problems the company as a whole is facing, now I have a better sense regarding what kind of investments can be good for the organization and what kind of investments are bad — which can be easily translated to technical and architectural requirements and decisions.
In general, learning how to do something that we have no experience with is a good thing. It helps to explore our strengths and weaknesses by throwing ourselves into unfamiliar situations and see how we’re doing in those situations.
We might turn out to be horrible for the job, and it’s alright. It’s another valuable information we learn about ourselves, and we can plan what we want to do in the future based on the knowledge. Just make sure not to make some irreversible mistakes, and consult people who know what they’re doing whenever we’re not sure if what we’re doing is correct — as managers, we’re dealing with other people’s career development and the company’s investment strategies after all.
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
- Carl Gustav Jung
Congratulations on Your Promotion, Now What?
Around the time I started doing lead work (despite not officially one yet), I was given a copy of the book The Manager’s Path by our CTO — I believe at the time every single person in engineering who holds lead and manager positions was also getting one.
The book describes the jobs of engineering managers at various stages in their managerial careers and various pitfalls they might fall into, from a tech lead to a CTO. For the case of this article, I’m talking only for lead and manager positions since those are the only posts I’ve experienced up to this point.
While I’ve read the book, I can’t really say for sure if I have been practicing it correctly. Regardless of my ability to digest the materials, I think it was a really good form of support from the company towards their engineering management personnel as some of them might not know yet what was expected from them.
I for sure didn’t exactly know what was expected, the first time I was asked if I wanted to be an engineering manager (in 2017) my answer was, “I honestly don’t think I’d want that, I don’t know what a proper engineering manager should be like and I’d feel bad if I ended up ruining some other people’s future due to bad decisions I made.”
Our CTO proceeded to explain what an engineering manager’s job should be, and what kind of skills are required to perform it well. Later when we got a new hire to work in the same domain as I do, he told me to try leading and mentoring the new engineer as a practice. The engineer — Putra Sattvika, definitely one of the best young engineers I’ve ever met — turns out to be awesome to work with and a blazingly fast learner.
As a manager, the most important job is to help our team members grow while also ensuring the company’s business needs are met. The tricky part is that doing the technical work (programming, configuring servers, etc.) is not the main job anymore, so there’s this feeling of being unproductive when the work happens to involve a lot more communication and meetings instead of technical work — also a bonus of being tired of human interaction, especially if you’re introverted and prone to get worn out from human interaction quickly.
Even after three years of doing managerial work, I still feel bad when not doing any hands-on technical work — which is an issue because my actual work isn’t exactly the technical part anymore. Early on, I still could do quite a lot of programming and system administration tasks — since our team was pretty low in manpower because it was just me and Putra, me working on a lot of technical stuff was justified. As the company grows there are more projects to attend to — some need actual technical help, some others just need to be advised — and there are going to be more people in the team that need to be managed.
Should You Have More People in Your Team?
With the increasing number of projects, having just two people were no longer feasible so I needed to expand the team. So I allocated some more dedicated time for hiring. Hiring, especially for a new role, requires defining job requirements, designing the tests we use during the hiring process, and designing the career progression plan for the role. After those have been defined, we need to plan from where we want to source our candidates and how to attract them.
Team expansion, if done right, gives the team an overall greater workload capacity. But it also translates to having to spend more time in managing people, since having more people in the team translates to having more people to be managed. This translates to the manager — which is me — having less time to do actual technical work, and even when I do technical work I tend to pick something that’s not very mission-critical since I might not be able to dedicate my time to ensure it’s properly executed to the highest possible standards of quality.
The different kinds of skillsets and specialties in the people we manage also adds more complexity to the managerial job, as the expected deliverables for a software engineer is going to be different from the expected deliverables for a database engineer or a security analyst. Managing people with varying skillsets requires the manager to also be competent in the said skillsets for the best result — which requires us to find a good threshold regarding how much knowledge we should have in each field to be able to manage the projects and people well, and proceed to learn to that required threshold as the bare minimum requirement. After all the manager needs to set the goals and evaluate the performance of the team members, which is impossible to perform correctly if the manager has no idea how to perform the job functions they’re managing.
The technical knowledge required to be an engineering manager is quite a lot — aside from the obvious managerial knowledge requirements to perform the managerial jobs. There’s a popular misconception that people who choose to become a manager needs to focus on managerial skills and only those who aim to be high-level individual contributors need to keep their technical skills sharp. While indeed the engineering managers might not perform the job by themselves, having enough knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with the people who handle the technical work and understand their problems — also how to unblock them — is important.
Another thing that needs to be noted is discipline. Depending on the nature of the job expectation for the role we’re managing, being disciplined and consistent in performing the job can be very important. For example, a VoIP engineer is expected to actively monitor tickets and call center-related issues and respond in a consistent, timely, manner whenever problems arise.
While I generally have no problem in acquiring the technical knowledge required for various job roles, I might have problems adopting the level of consistency required for the job. I generally decline if I’m asked to manage a job position that requires the level of consistency I don’t really want to bother to commit to, but if we don’t have any other option I can take it on anyway — with a caveat.
It’s going to be pretty hard to sound legit when telling people to do something you don’t want to bother doing yourself, which is why I’m pretty much aware that I’m going to perform poorly as a manager especially for a few roles — despite having the required knowledge to perform the job for the said roles myself if I’m assigned to do just that — since I’m going to set a bad example for my direct reports for sure.
“If you wish to control others you must first control yourself.”
- Miyamoto Musashi
How Do You Measure the Value of Your People?
Deciding how much someone should be paid for their job isn’t easy. I know people who is a VP of engineering or even a CTO who also seems to have problems determining how much is the acceptable salary range for each of their engineers.
A common trap to fall into in this scenario is to just give them a bit more than however much the other companies want to offer them. Falling into this trap introduces other problems as follows.
- How valuable the person could be at another company might not reflect the value they bring to the table at ours, depending on the kind of work and the commercial value of the projects they’re expected to handle at the other company compared to what we’re expecting from them at our company according to our strategic goals.
- Someone who invests more time in trying to get competing offers from other companies to negotiate for a raise might end up being our company’s highest-paid engineer due to them leveraging the offers to get a raise from us. This is not generally an issue if they’re indeed the best performing engineer in our team and the salary they get really worth the work they’re producing, but this will turn into a managerial debt in the case where we have other people who contribute more to the team compared to the engineer trying to get a raise. The most valuable contributors who’re supposed to be paid more in a fair system might get overlooked since we’re spending too much money and effort to retain someone who’s not as strong as a contributor.
- The other employees will eventually realize that improving their actual performance and contributions to the company isn’t the optimal way to advance their career and compensation rate since the company doesn’t enforce any standardized measurement to translate their performance into compensation. The morale will drop significantly by then.
Luckily, we have a standard method for measuring the value of our team members in our company. I mostly just apply the standards in the assessments and decisions I made.
- How much work is done by the person relative to their peers in the same, higher, and lower seniority level with similar responsibilities?
- How much impact is made by the person’s work relative to their peers in the same, higher, and lower seniority level with similar responsibilities?
- How much knowledge the person has that can be leveraged to improve the overall performance of the company? Has the knowledge been leveraged properly? How much value have we got from this expertise they have?
- How much more potential for future growth the person has in terms of work quality, work quantity, depth of knowledge, and overall impact?
Budgeting for the pay ranges for each employee grade is generally out of my work scope, but ideally, the pay ranges should be calculated according to the expected value to be delivered by a person holding the position to the company’s unit of economics as a whole.
Aside from the actual value that’s derived from their skills and work output, we also need to take a note of the following factors — assuming the company’s culture is already well-established and the expectations regarding the company goals, values, and professional conducts are already set.
- Are the employee’s goals well-aligned with the company’s strategic goals? People whose goals are conflicting with the company’s strategic goals might not share the same vision, and this difference in vision might bring different expectations between them and the company that needs to be mediated.
- Are the employee’s values well-aligned with the company values? People with conflicting values with the company might not feel comfortable doing things that are expected in the company, this might negatively affect their performance or their peers’ at some point.
- Does the employee’s overall professional conduct reflect what’s expected by the company? For example, does the employee harass coworkers or act unprofessionally in some other ways that stand against the company’s code of conduct?
Ideally, the best-paid people who’re also promoted to the highest positions should be high-output and high-impact people whose goals and personal values are well-aligned with the company’s — since those kinds of people have good potential to consistently make great contributions, which the company desperately needs to continue to survive.
Conclusion
When I was still an engineering lead, I had a one-on-one session with the VP of engineering I was reporting to at the time regarding my career development. Me being a tsundere turned the conversation into something like this.
VP: For your future career development, do you want to be an individual contributor or a manager?
Me: That’s a difficult choice. I don’t really like managing people, but even if I were to be an individual contributor I can’t guarantee that the kind of work I’ll be motivated to do is the kind of work that the company wants to be done. Either way, I think I’m going to suck at my work.
VP: I don’t think you’re that bad in both though, the way I see it you’re able to do both the individual contributor work and the manager work whenever you actually put your mind into it.
Me: I’ll let you choose which kind of suck you prefer to deal with then.
A few months after that I got promoted to the engineering manager position and got a few extra responsibilities that come with it.
From my work managing people in the past few years, I learned that I don’t need to enjoy managing people that much to be able to do my work well. Also, there are times when it feels rewarding — especially when someone you’re helping to grow actually shows signs of growth.
Even if I’m not aspiring to be a manager, I can still be functional as one by being transparent to people — those I report to and those who report to me — regarding what I’m comfortable doing and what I’m not comfortable doing. This way, we can find ways to capitalize on my strengths in the context of being a manager while also mitigating my weaknesses to keep them from hindering our work and growth. I can say I’m extremely fortunate to work in an environment where people are generally accepting and supportive — I have a lot of weaknesses after all.
For engineers who want to transition to the engineering management career track, I think the most important things are knowing the expectations of being a manager and making yourself comfortable doing it. If you don’t like it you can always transition back to being an individual contributor (after helping your company to find someone capable to take over your managerial work of course), since being a manager shouldn’t deprive you of gaining new technical knowledge — we might be getting a bit rusty since we don’t perform the job by ourselves most of the time, but we should still have a good idea regarding how to perform the task — with the bonus of gaining the managerial experience and more high-level business knowledge.
In the end, if someone asks me whether I like being a manager I’d still say that I don’t prefer having to be responsible for other people’s work and growth — I still have a lot more to learn myself, and I’m quite occupied with that. But since doing it helps the company — and also myself, as the experience also helps me grow even in non-managerial and technical skills — I think it’s fine as long as both sides can agree on a set of expectations that should be met.
This article is my take on what I’ve learned from working as an engineering manager, but many other people might have even more valuable things they can share from their experience. If you have one, feel free to share your thoughts in the response section of this article!
