Most US engineering managers have
never managed senior engineers

Many engineering managers in US tech companies were promoted during an era of hypergrowth. The industry expanded so quickly that management pipelines scaled faster than engineering maturity. That created a strange organizational problem: many people responsible for evaluating senior engineers have limited experience working with truly senior engineers themselves.

This creates distortions across hiring, performance reviews, and team structure. Especially in remote organizations.

Management and engineering are different skill sets

Being promoted into engineering management does not automatically create deep technical judgment. In many organizations, managers are selected based on:

• communication ability
• process reliability
• stakeholder management
• organizational coordination

Those are useful skills. But they are not the same thing as understanding how elite engineers operate. Highly senior engineers often:

• work asynchronously
• produce uneven but high-leverage output
• focus deeply on architecture
• avoid unnecessary meetings
• challenge process aggressively
• optimize for long-term stability instead of short-term visibility

To inexperienced management layers, that behavior can appear uncooperative or inconsistent. Especially in organizations that measure productivity through visible activity.

Visibility is not leverage

One of the biggest problems in modern software organizations is confusing visible work with valuable work. The engineer who attends every meeting, updates every ticket, communicates constantly, and produces steady incremental output often appears more productive organizationally.

Meanwhile, the engineer who spends two weeks quietly redesigning a critical scaling bottleneck may appear inactive until the moment the solution ships. The second engineer often creates dramatically more value. But many organizations struggle to measure that type of leverage accurately. So they default to easier metrics.

The ticket problem

Modern engineering management increasingly relies on systems that measure activity instead of impact. That includes sprint velocity, story point throughput, ticket completion, meeting participation, and visible responsiveness.

Those systems work reasonably well for coordinating large groups. But they are often terrible at identifying exceptional engineers. Because exceptional engineers frequently:

• eliminate unnecessary work entirely
• simplify systems instead of expanding them
• reduce complexity rather than generate tasks
• solve problems before they become visible

Good engineering often looks invisible. Especially compared to organizational theater.

Why this matters now

AI is reducing the value of coordination-heavy engineering organizations. The market increasingly rewards:

• autonomy
• systems thinking
• independent execution
• technical judgment
• architectural clarity

Which means companies need managers capable of identifying and protecting those traits. Not suppressing them. The organizations that continue optimizing primarily for process visibility will increasingly lose strong engineers to companies with higher trust environments. Especially in remote work.

Closing

The future of engineering management is not more dashboards. It is better technical judgment.

Because the highest-value engineers in the next decade will not be the people easiest to manage administratively. They will be the people capable of reducing complexity at scale. And many organizations still do not know how to recognize them.

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