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Comment by tkiolp4 | Hacker News Reader

> I've met plenty of engineers who seem to believe that everyone else's non technical role is easy.

In my experience it’s like that (I’m talking about engineers vs eng. managers). Another significant difference is the amount of work, I believe: as an engineer I work 4h/day but those 4h are “hard” hours (fully focused) and my brain ends up a bit exhausted after. But that’s all I do in the day for work. On the other hand, eng. managers do more lightweight work, but work longer hours.

I have to say that in my experience, what my eng. managers were doing all day was: 1:1s, meetings with other managers to decide how to shift around people, interviews, being present at some sprint plannings without saying much, being present at some daily meetings without saying much.

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To offer a counter datapoint: I moved from engineer to manager while tracking my hours fairly accurately. I can pull off 50 hours of development, including late night emergencies, some client pressure, etc., and still feel energized the weekend, while after 40 hours of management, meetings and firefighting, I become mostly useless and have to take some serious breaks. I enjoy both.

However, there are so many parameters affecting this result that I wouldn't dare to make a call on which role is more tiring in general at a regular company.

- I'm less experienced as a manager, I have to continuously learn a lot and grow fast.

- This is in a young start-up context.

- This is with a very broad scope of responsibilities.

- I'm me.

- etc.

YMMV

The largest fatigue factor to me seems the amount of context switch I have to do as a manager.

People always say that managers work more hours, but I feel like it’d be quite possible to do the job in the time I spend doing my work now. We don’t think it’s normal if programmers work extra hours to get their work done. Why should we for managers?

Quite right! In my experience, it is a combination of people who are ambitious to climb the hierarchy, the difficulty of scheduling meetings when people are actually available, and just quite a lot of fire fighting, where urgent issues have to be resolved quickly.

Obviously, it depends on the organisation you work at.

I think the problem is that eng. managers have not much control regarding how many meetings they have (and at what time they are scheduled). Being meetings the big chunk if their day to day work, that restricts the amount of freedom eng. managers usually have.

For engineers it’s different: we have complete control regarding when to work, and we don’t have as many meetings as eng. managers have. So there’s more freedom in my opinion.

I think it’s not very realistic for a manager to say: I’ll work extra today so tomorrow I’ll work only 1h (because you probably have meetings to attend that you cannot postpone). As engineer, I work whenever I want and rest whenever I need it (as long as I meet deadlines and the like)

Nah, but this ‘meetings to attend that you cannot postpone’ is almost always bullshit. I see a lot of managers in meetings where their presence is more hindrance than help. If they drop those they suddenly have 50% of their day free.

Of course I won’t actually know until I am one myself, but it certainly feels doable if I’m willing to sort of trust my team.

It's not typically the meetings with the team that are the ones you cannot postpone. It's the ones with key people from the business, senior managers, partners, vendors...

If you do become one and find you can control your schedule, please write it up and share!

Meetings over video conference are as mentally exhausting as coding, honestly. Especially if you actually pay attention

God’s truth. I do find debugging/getting to compile with green tests mostly written code combines well with meetings. I can go to next error or failure and keep an ear out for interesting stuff but don’t have some big mental plan that can be wiped out by an important chat.

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