Hacker News Reader

That's because they're an engineering manager in tech lead clothing.

It's so the company can say they have more engineers and less management, but still fill all of the roles that they need managers to do.

(I've written elsewhere how you can run without engineering managers - see https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2024/03/31/a-world-without-en... - but the roles that need to be filled don't stop.)

View on HN

I'm the living example of this. I'm an engineer who thought he's signing up to be the TL to design the architecture and implement the hard parts, and at some point I realized I'm doing a terrible job because in reality I'm just EM-ing this project 90% of the time, while my manager is busy with something else.

I've learned the lesson the hard way.

I submitted that article over here [1], would be interesting to see a discussion on that in itself.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144389

Reply on news.ycombinator.com