Engineering Managers
Using the commonly accepted definition of manager, I was never manager. I never wanted to be manager of anything. There is no creativity required for that. I wanted to create, invent. I was a project engineer. In fact, my first job right out of college with a BSEE was as a project engineer in RF hardware design (RF design being considered as black magic by engineers in other disciplines, especially software, because of their difficulty in understanding anything RF). That's very rare to get that level of assignment right out of school.
Project engineers act as managers part of the time as they are responsible for the technical productivity of all the engineers and technicians below them, and it is the project engineer's responsibility that schedules are met and hopefully under budget. Managers are responsible also, but only indirectly through reports from their project engineers.
Good managers will never work directly with the individuals reporting to a project engineer. If a design manager doesn't effectively use his project engineers, then he is a bad manager. Bad managers in the hardware design group of a good company are either laid off, tried out in a software group, or transferred to manufacturing where they might be able to contribute something, or maybe tried out in marketing or sales.
That begs the question of how he became manager in the first place. He started out as an engineer and failed at that and was pushed up the ladder because maybe he can do paperwork.
In other words, managers in the electronic industry are usually nothing more than paper pushers that fill the gap between project engineers and upper management. If they do well it's because they were good at receiving reports from their project engineers, consolidating them in multicolored charts and slides, and pushing that up the ladder. Having a great personality is not a requirement -- just get out of the way and let the engineers do the work, and get your dang paperwork done on time and push it up the ladder.
Why the emphasis on hardware engineers? Because it is relatively easy to find great programmers who have never graduated from college. And you know what? The best engineers, hardware or software, are very often the most difficult people to get along with, especially when the manager doesn't have a good grasp of the details of the technology. Good engineers don't have the patience for mentally sluggish managers that don't understand the technology. There is nothing that pisses off a good engineer more than having a manager who doesn't understand the technology and wont get out of the way. Those managers usually get fired. The bad manager calls it early retirement.
