Engineering managers are paying the price of rising expectations

Something is already getting less of your attention. The question is whether that's deliberate or accidental.

Most conversation around expanding engineering manager (EM) scope treats it as a workload problem. The real issue is that nobody's helping you decide which things get less of you.

Three tensions that keep coming up:

Depth vs. breadth. Are you in the design reviews, or working three levels up on alignment? Both are legitimate. The frustration comes when your engineers expect you in every technical conversation while your manager expects you operating strategically — and you haven't said which one you're actually doing.

Urgency vs. importance. The important stuff — coaching the new tech lead, fixing the process generating fire drills — is always quieter than the incident or the exec ask. We tell ourselves we'll get to it when things calm down.

Presence vs. impact. Being in every meeting feels responsible. Past a certain point it's a tax on your judgment. The better question isn't "where should I be?" It's "where does my presence change the outcome?"

The move that helps: pick one tradeoff you're already making and say it out loud. Then ask your manager and team what breaks if that's true. Either way, you're designing the role instead of having it designed by whoever shouted loudest.

What tradeoffs are others making explicitly vs. just absorbing quietly?

https://leaddev.com/leadership/engineering-managers-are-paying-the-price-of-rising-expectations