Engineering video
2:04 · 3 October 2026
Engineering managers are increasingly required to be hands-on and full-stack while intensely aligning team vision, codebases, and products to prevent scattered experimentation and uncohesive software.
Hear it at 0:43 →what we've seen in the last couple of years is that the management track also became more teen. A lot of companies fired a lot of engineer engineer managers and a lot of tech leads. A lot of the clarification and alignment can be done with a central LLM. All the companies have this central LLM that you can ask things about this company's strategy. So a lot of the management work, it's also being replaced.
But again, when it comes to hiring people, making sure the culture is okay. You probably have a lot more conflict now as you mentioned between different people because they all overlap. It's very hard to set boundaries for responsibility if there's a live bug, who did this? And so, I do think you will need very good engineering managers and head of engineering. But again, the the sector is changing, a lot of those big companies have been letting people go and what Amazon and a lot of other companies did is that they forced their engineering management to become hands-on, which is closer to the senior full stack goal or the lead developer.
So all in all, this is to say that the engineer manager also needs to become a bit more full stack. I would advocate that now that everyone it's building and building and shipping, I I feel like alignment of the product. Alignment of the team, alignment of the code base, it's something that someone has to do a lot more intensely. Then they used to do a few years ago because you just have a lot more staff and it's easy for teams probably to go in different directions to be like, let me build this, let me ex everybody has a an experimentation mindset right now.
And I think they forget about the the vision, right? And probably an engine manager. Role is to align the tank vision just more intensely, like before because there's more staff being built. Align the product managers behind it and align the management behind it. So, if I would be an engine manager right now in the market, I would specifically talk about my my ability to steer teams in the right direction when they're building and shipping so much.
Exactly. So, it's easier than ever to just go into 100 different directions and you'll see products that are not cohesive at all in terms of how they behave. I'm not only talking about CSS, but also like the interaction patterns. screens look like and what happens in the back end. It will all look different.
