Why companies shouldn’t treat management as a promotion.
Management should be a transition, a job change, not a promotion.
I first read the concept that becoming a manager is a transition as opposed to a promotion in “The making of a manager” by Julie Zhuo.
Later, I went to one of her book tour talks at Galvanize in San Francisco, where she talked about management. She spent a good chunk of the time talking about one of manager’s biggest jobs: giving feedback.
Logically, it made sense why being a manager is a different job, as it involves solving different problems in the company.
However, it’s hard to truly grasp something when I haven’t seen it in real life. In all the real life experiences I’ve had, becoming an engineering manager indeed felt like a promotion.
This is the pattern at most companies I’ve worked or interviewed at:
When an engineering team becomes too large for the sole technical founder to manage, the engineer who’s been there the longest usually gets promoted to a manager. But they’re still coding most of the time. And in many cases, because they’ve been at the company the longest, they’re also the tech lead. Their primary job is still coding. Delivering a product feature in time still takes precedence over…
