Probably as an Eng manager because I remember Eng managers did jack shit. I’d just flex on the rest by showing up in my Ferrari. What are they gonna do? Fire me?
I’d rather have an engineering manager who does nothing rather than one who wastes everyone’s time and runs around trying to get credit for everything under the sun while throwing people under the bus if anything goes sideways.
Once you move beyond a mid level developer [1], line level managers are more or less useless in my experience. They don’t control raises, promotions, budgets or strategies.
I worked at two companies before I got into consulting where I was recruited to lead major hairy initiatives, the conditions of employment for both was that I wanted to report to the director/cto - someone who controlled budgets.
[1] no matter what your title is, if you are just pulling well defined tasks off the board, you’re a mid level developer.
