How Engineering Management is Changing in 2024 🎽
Fewer managers, more technical, different careers.
What does an Engineering Manager do?
This is an impossible question to answer because the EM role is a fluid one, where different teams call for different approaches.
The best managers shape-shift to fill the specific gaps of their teams, be these about tech, product, process, or else.
That said, in recent years, we can see a decisive trend in the industry where:
Managers are getting more technical — they are expected to give a stronger technical contribution than before.
Managers are fewer — per number of engineers. Orgs are also getting flatter, with less middle management and fewer levels overall.
Big tech made the headlines about this multiple times, from the Twitter + Elon stories, to Meta asking managers to go back to ICs — but you see this in startups as well, where the ratio of engineers-to-pretty-much-anybody-else is skyrocketing:
Today we’ll try to unpack how the Engineering Manager role is changing today, where it is going, and why. Here is the agenda:
🏋️♀️ Empowered engineers — how engineers do more today thanks to better tooling & AI.
💨 Coordination headwinds — how companies are learning from big tech struggles.
🎽 What does an EM do? — a 10,000 feet picture of EM most common duties.
📊 The five EM archetypes — the main types of EM, according to their area of influence, and how these are affected by this shift.
🪤 Technical EMs traps — are technical EMs the solution to all? Not so fast.
💬 Community Stories — insights and real-world experience from managers in the Refactoring community.
Let’s dive in 👇
🏋️♀️ Empowered engineers
The first reason why ICs are sought after is that they are more productive than ever.
You might think this is obvious: tooling naturally only gets better, so productivity is anytime at an all-time-high, just like any new iPhone is the most powerful iPhone ever.
This is kind of true, but there are also very specific trends that are helping with this:
AI coding — there are several reports now on the effect of Copilot (and the likes) on productivity, which is immense. AI not only helps engineers do more of the same, but it helps them become more independent, as they get basic proficiency across the whole stack.
Full-stack — as opposed to 10 years ago, it is way more common for the same language to stay the same across the whole stack. From the popularity of JS frameworks, to the resurgence of Ruby on Rails, engineers are more and more full-stack these days.
And more full-stack — full-stack doesn’t stop at coding. Good tools today help with UI, infra, project mgmt, and all kinds of things for which you used to need a full team. Now, you might still do it for big projects, but not for a lot of small stuff.
So, engineers today are just doing more: 1) more of what they were already doing, and 2) more of what other people used to do.
💨 Coordination headwinds
These trends are bound to have a strong impact on how teams are run.
An obvious effect is, of course, that you can accomplish more with fewer people, but it doesn’t stop here. Other than being more productive, engineers are more autonomous: they can own full slices of the product, drastically reducing the need for coordination, layering, and work’s work.
So, a team of 30 engineers today can be run differently than the same team even just 5 years ago. With the same headcount, you get 1) more output, and 2) less need for management.
Is this bad for engineering managers? Not necessarily 👇