New managers who had been engineers before management and care about the work always tell me "I …

> Your job is to look A really dramatic way of learning this is to be a volunteer firefighter. After a couple of years of experience where you know all the roles, they have you try out incident commander in an exercise. Now your job is to keep your head up, your eyes open, your hands off the equipment and manage your team. And you fail and fail again until you finally understand the role of a tactical commander (line manager).

I learned a similar lesson outside of tech... with low wage employees. Often people would have problems dealing with our employee's and complain, but if we dug a bit deeper, it was very often an issue with training, manuals, high turnover, or managers not being good at setting expectations.

The cross training point is absolutely crucial. I've managed or worked on multiple Ops teams where one person was the "network expert" or the "kubernetes expert" or whatever. If that person left the company for any reason, or even went on vacation, it was a disaster . People on a team can and should have their specialties but you absolutely must document and cross train so that someone can fill in when the expert is unavailable. Anything else is a horrible failure by management.

> who is working late nights, who isn't Add to this who starts work early and who doesn't - just tracking when someone finishes working doesn't give you any information without knowing how long they've actually been working for when they leave.

> And I tell them, your job is to look. Look at your team, who is working late nights, who isn't. Sounds like a toxic environment...

And, of course, there are people working for that manager who don't think they are doing anything and that middle managers are a waste of oxygen--even though, in fact, they're shielding their team from a lot of crap and, as you suggest, they're doing a lot of coordination of a situation that would otherwise end up with a lot of wasted motion.

> New managers who had been engineers before management and care about the work always tell me "I feel like I'm not doing anything, I should be helping or something." Your points about managing (interfacing with the company, translating company’s demands into a reasonable, steady stream of work) are spot on, but I would also note that the expectations for engineering managers are all over the place right now. In my first engineering management job I was severely chastised for writing too much code, even though I had the time and was choosing non-critical tickets for myself. The company insisted that managers should manage/delegate and developers should develop with little to no overlap. I internalized this as the way management was meant to be. Later in my career I took another management role and followed the pure delegation strategy. I was later chastised for not writing enough code. T…