I have around 13+ years of experience in software development, from last 5 years mostly into system design/architecture and leading/guiding engineers. I was wondering how does Engineering Manager or Staff Engineer roles at my level works at Google and Facebook. Do they require these people to code with the team, or rather look into big picture, review code, coach and guide others, and get the project delivered with collaboration with other teams. I feel like I should not be doing lots of coding now, rather use my broad experience to lead engineers, since I can clearly see I have much broader view and experience, is my thinking flawed? Or at this level people still doing coding. Cheers,
I am in the same boat. 14 years experience, 8 year coding and 7 years as Eng manager (Non fang companies, not Bay Area). Heard from all friends that as a SW manager or engineering manager must do coding as ~70% of the time, mandatory. And rest time goes for management. Hence i decided to move as TPM for faang which is little technical and more managerial. Not sure it is a right decision to move from Eng manager to TPM, but that seems the best choice.
70% looks very high though,
It depends on the team, but for Google this is what i heard from 2-3 friends.
EM at LinkedIn generally donāt need to code and arenāt evaluated based on whether they ever write a line of code, although many front line EMs write a bit of code here and there to keep a sense of the teamās pain points with tooling, deployment etc. I think itās a good practice just to stay in touch with the teamās struggles.
L5 TL-M will code a bunch, but L6 EM and above donāt *need* to code. I have 12 reports and have barely coded anything L5/L6 IC will be expected code
It depends on the team and the need.
Only TLMs are expected to contribute as IC ~50% of their time
EM and staff engineer are very different roles.
Do any of them require lot of coding?
Staff Engineer is essentially the full dev package: coding, architecture/design and mentoring. EM should only be coding in an emergency.