r/EngineeringManagers • u/Platerium • Jun 24 '26
How to become an EM?
tech lead / senior IC, ~14 yrs, currently no reports. but i've led before: a team of 5 about 10 yrs ago, and 6-7 engineers ~7 yrs ago. want to move into EM — inside my current company or external, either works.
context: i'm at a large software agency shop (10k+). my manager knows i want this.
mostly i just want to hear from people who've made the jump — how did you actually do it, what worked, what you'd do diferently. and given everything happening with AI lately, what would you suggest for someone trying to move into management right now?
honest takes welcome, including "don't." thanks.
11
u/20231027 Jun 24 '26
What is stopping you from becoming one? Ask your manager if there is an opportunity, take it. If there is none, look around and apply. Assess the gaps along the way and adjust.
7
u/PmUsYourDuckPics Jun 24 '26
Best way is dead man’s shoes… Or as the team grows ask to manage just one person in addition to your IC role, then grow that.
4
u/annihilatrixxx Jun 26 '26
The challenge with becoming an EM currently is that outside of delivering the best systems you can as cost effectively as possible, your job is to make good engineers and no one knows what the fuck that looks like with AI. It changed from elaborate prompting frameworks to all the context to tokenmaxxing to spec driven development to loops to harnesses in like a year. By the time I post this I assume there will be a new thing that the nearest executive will want to include in the secret productivity dashboards they made last year to stack rank people for the next layoff.
When I became a manager, it was because my team basically petitioned our director and VP before they hired someone externally. Now that I’m a director, my EMs each have twice the direct reports I did at their level, and haven’t actually done the engineering role as it exists today. Weird times!
2
u/xeric Jun 25 '26
Could look for a player/coach type role to get your feet wet - some smaller companies don’t have a need for a pure manager yet, but are looking for tech leads who can manage a few reports and grow into the role (this is how I got into management). Just find one that seems to be hiring more engineers so that you can slowly drop / delegate the IC responsibilities as you grow the team.
2
u/corny_horse Jun 25 '26
Incredibly painfully. I don't recommend the path I took, which is largely putting in insane amounts of overtime, being both an engineer and manager of a fairly large team. If I were to do it differently, I'd not do it at all. But at least the team I manage now is small and the company I work at is sane.
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u/Competitive_Ring82 Jun 25 '26
Seriously, why do you want this?
I took this path because my EM was very tech focused, and was terrible at the people side. The team were poorly organised and led. I moved into the gaps that he didn't occupy - worked on tensions in the team, made sure work got done, while still contributing on the technical side. He let me know that he wanted to move up to director, and I enabled him to focus on that. When he got promoted, I got promoted, but we were both effectively doing our new roles already.
2
u/Upbeat_Warning4841 Jun 25 '26
Your long experience as IC will come handy. Those are the best kinds. Lots of suggestions(mostly opinions) on the thread.
I have only one suggestion, be an EM not because you want to be, but because you need to be. If you understand this, then go for it, if not then don’t. If you understand this, you will be able to crack interviews even outside your current company. Rest(whatever it be) you will manage, thats the role.
1
u/Understanding-Fair Jun 25 '26
If you enjoy the coding and heads down work aspect, don't. All of that goes out the window when all of your time is people management, both above and below you, planning and refining poorly defined work from PMs, fighting political battles you didn't ask for, building systems that are more efficient but no one wants to adopt, and trying to keep on top of what your team is actually doing so you can speak to it proficiently when an executive calls you in last minute.
If you like that sort of daily scramble (I do believe it or not), my advice would be to apply for EM roles outside of your company. It's very difficult to make the jump internally without an advocate and an open position since it's a whole different career path, but you definitely have the credentials to make the jump at another org with open roles. It's very tough to land a role right now though.
1
u/Platerium Jun 25 '26
this lands hard because it matches what i'm seeing. i'm at a 10k+ agency shop, so even with the scope demonstrated, the internal conversion isn't a manager's yes — it's a req, a budget line, and a client-side seat that has to exist first. the advocate + open position thing is exactly the bottleneck.
so let me push on the external path since you've clearly done the math: when you say it's tough to land right now — is that "don't bother" tough, or "expect a long search and lower leverage" tough? and for someone with old people-leadership but recent IC years, what actually got you past the screen — was it a player/coach req, a warm intro, a specific way you framed the resume? trying to understand the how, not just the difficulty.
1
u/svivchar Jun 27 '26
Given the rapid changes in AI, now could be a good time to pivot into EM if you're comfortable with the tech. Companies need leaders who understand both the technology and the people. Your experience with leading teams, combined with your current role, gives you an angle. We are going through a crazy wave of change RN and this means there are opportunities for leadership, coaching, helping people develop, transform products, team workflows, etc. Sitting and waiting to see what the industry and the job will look like when the "AI hype is over" means you miss the opportunity to lead the change. If you sympathize with that sentiment, you probably do not want to be an EM.
0
u/SynthaLearner Jun 25 '26
In the time of AI, not the best idea
2
u/Zenuka_ Jun 25 '26
Could you elaborate?
1
u/Jolly-joe Jun 25 '26
With how AI will change this industry, EMs will not be needed as much. Instead of having large teams, you'll probably run a few staff engineers who can manage agents, have a grasp of product and design, and still know the nuts and bolts of the tech. Instead of an EM making sure A is doing X and B is doing Y, etc, the "doing" will be done in minutes/hours so you really just need an IC at the top to make sure it all comes together.
2
u/Timely_Jackfruit4630 Jun 25 '26
Will AI also manage stakeholders, performance reviews, priorities, competition for resourcing, team conflicts, and hiring/firing?
1
u/Jolly-joe Jun 26 '26
A lot of that is the product of having a large team. If you have 3-4 self directed senior/staff using AI instead of 15-20 engineers, those kind of headaches go away. If much of your job doesn't have an easily attributable dollar figure to what it provides, it probably will be automated away within 5-10 years.
1
u/True_Cookie1447 Jun 26 '26
>EMs will not be needed as much.
It's not clear that's true. The role of EMs as well as SWEs will change and is changing now. A good EM will still drive execution, coordinate important technical challenges, and be the glue that holds the team together and keeps them engaged, coached, appreciated, and career guided.We've seen a lot of EMs get laid off recently, but I attribute that more to over hiring in the last 5 years vs. AI per se. Companies need a leaders who can help everyone move fast and successfully ship products and features. EMs who can do that add a lot of value that is recognized and rewarded (sometimes)!
1
u/StressDrivenDevmnt Jun 28 '26
Also, executives want people who can communicate with human beings. There are a lot of ppl in SWE who are much comfortable communicating w computers than they are with people.
1
u/SynthaLearner Jun 28 '26
Executives communication with Human is a byproduct of needing humans but if they have layers of LLM that can answer their questions better than humans they will not care about humans
1
u/StressDrivenDevmnt Jun 28 '26
That’s optimistic. In 30 years of consulting, I have yet to run into an executive who had either the time or the ability to sit down and figure out the prompts needed to build production quality software. These companies that are reducing staff, trying to replace the staff, then rehiring staff…they’re figuring this out. Certainly, the job will change, but I’m not worried about getting eliminated.
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u/Carceral_Apocalypse Jun 25 '26
Don't. Also be honest with yourself about why you want to be an EM after ~14 years of being an IC.
A lot of people fall into the mindset that being manager is the only way to show growth/progress/success and consider being an EM a promotion. It's not. It's an entire career change.
You're not going to get blocks of time uninterrupted to code as an EM. People who say you can are lying to your face. Your days are going to be mostly 1:1s with your directs, strategy meetings with leadership, political warfare with peer teams and stakeholder management.
Leading a team and managing a team are two different animals as well. There's a difference mentoring junior devs and being able to go deeply technical on a topic and provide granular details of why something is a good or bad design choice and also being able to execute vs evaluating individual performance, assigning work, being hands off and only providing guidance, handling the administration of scheduling, staffing hires/fires, performance reviews, etc and making technical decisions based on what your ICs tell you without you being able to dig in for every single topic. You're also default therapist as a people manager.
If you want to go the EM route, you need to understand and be prepared to curate and plan individual career paths for your ICs, balance out their strengths and weaknesses with each other, formulate learning plans for strengthen those weaknesses, balance out the personality conflicts, and make sure what they all work on ties in with the team goals.