Sergey Fedorov writes about engineering careers, getting promoted, interviewing, management, and reading, with some technical benchmarking.
Commenters link his promotion and management posts as useful, but one says the advice is mixed with weaker points and lacks stated confidence.
Middle management (above first line manager) in large organizations is hard to do well. I think it is difficult to understand if you have never done it, and it is even difficult to articulate why. I find it much much harder than working as an engineer or Eng Mgr.
Fundamentally, I think it is an incentive and systematic issue: what is expected of middle managers, and incentivized, requires almost complete dedication to managing up and laterally. People who spend time w/ their reports are the exceptions because there is close to 0 correlation with getting promoted. Caring about your report either require crazy number of hours, or ignoring what people above you will expect. The latter will ultimately affect their report.
Many people in that line of work do the minimum ? Yes, I can believe this. But the odds are stacked against you. I used to joke "as a middle manager, doing above average work requires extraordinary dedication".
1. Lack of agency: once you are above first line management (EM), you actually have much less agency. As an EM, you can tweak processes, and improve things. You only are accountable to your manager, and maybe 2-3 other people. Once you are above that, the number of stakeholders explodes, and any perception of failure will get at you. You can't say no to many useless meetings because you have to be there. If you don't go, and something goes wrong, guess whose teams/projects will be slashed next time.
2. Corollary: spooky action at a distance. Once…
This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in:
- https://erikbern.com
- https://lethain.com
- https://commoncog.com
- https://scattered-thoughts.net
- https://danluu.com
- https://ideolalia.com
- https://staysaasy.com
- https://collabfund.com
- https://blog.nelhage.com
- https://jacobian.org
- https://equalventures.substack.com
- https://defmacro.org
- https://spakhm.com
- https://apenwarr.ca
- https://scarletink.com
- https://benkuhn.net
- https://cpojer.net
- https://brandur.org
- https://zeptonaut.com
Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!
Like others said, the good advice here is mixed in with not-so-good advice and maybe even bad advice. I think if he stated his confidence on each point, I can calibrate my trust better.
Otherwise, my impression is the author has not questioned his learnings. For example, his other article, https://www.spakhm.com/bullshit-ratio, basically re-describes "cost/benefit" as "bullshit/commit", which could have worked for him, but seems too specific, if not unrealistic, to apply elsewhere. I would have expected more research or review (from others) prior to posting to a wide audience.
> That means you have bad middle/upper management. Large tech companies have heard of the Peter Principle and don't promote this way; they have separate technical tracks.
Relevant: https://www.spakhm.com/p/parallel-tracks
"Why did all major software companies settle on parallel career tracks? To keep engineering managers from developing loyalty to engineers."
Yes, by far! The Gervais Principle is brilliant and after reading it a lot falls into place. It also corroborates with Slava's experience https://www.spakhm.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
Node/V8 is insanely fast. I never quite realized exactly how fast until I worked on this: https://www.spakhm.com/ts-wolfram-bench. It's mindblowing how fast it is.