Was I a Good Manager?

Becoming an engineering manager at Google — the near-absolute authority, the rights that check it, and why the role barely exists in Korea.

Almost twenty years ago now, I became a manager for the first time — an engineering manager, to be exact. I had never been the node sitting above someone else on an org chart. For ten years in Korea I had worked more or less as a lone wolf: heads-down, no one reporting to me, no structured chain I reported into either. Then I moved to the US, joined Google, and was handed a small team.

A detail that stuck with me: at headquarters, even hosting a single summer intern required the host to take manager training first. That alone told me how seriously the role was taken. What follows is what I learned about the job — and, having worked with Korean companies since, where it looks completely different. Companies differ, teams differ, so take none of this as a universal law.

The manager’s authority — power over a career

The authority an American manager holds struck me as close to absolute — something near the old phrase power over life and death, applied to a career. I first heard that phrase years earlier, in a graduate school interview: my advisor, the late Professor Sang Lyul Min, used it in our very first meeting. Back then it landed as something closer to fear — the sense that I’d now have to do whatever I was told. I remember being embarrassed, more than once, at falling short of what was expected.

The counterpart to a manager is the direct report — the reportee. From what I learned in the US, the job starts with one thing: helping your reports do well and succeed. You know what level each of them sits at and what they’re paid, and you push to adjust it when you need to. You take the top-down announcements that roll downhill and translate them into something a person can actually act on. Every review season you prepare to brag about your reports — and then you deliver the result to their face, good or bad. You write the quarterly plans and the growth plans with them. When something breaks, you own the gap and fill it. If a former report sues the company after leaving, you’re part of the response. And when it’s time to hire, you’re in it — which sometimes means quietly reaching out to a strong engineer on another team.

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Looking back, so much was happening at once that I think I avoided saying the word “team” too explicitly. At Google, a dedicated engineering manager — someone who only manages — was generally an L6-and-up role. Below that you were a TLM, a tech lead manager: seven or eight people, half your energy spent managing them, the other half still writing code and carrying technical leadership as an individual contributor (IC). There was a brief era with lower-level dedicated EMs, but as you climbed the ladder usually forked — a pure technical track (the “uber tech lead”) and a pure management track (senior engineering manager and up).

The reportee’s rights

For all that authority, the reportee holds real rights too. Across Google — across the industry, really — the biggest one is the ability to change managers simply by moving. Concretely, a report can:

• Fill out the manager survey— periodic feedback on whether your managers are doing their job.
• Answer Googlegeist — the company-wide annual survey, roughly a third of which collects feedback on managers.
• Go over your head — to the skip-level manager.
• Change managers — switch teams, or transfer out of the org entirely.

From a manager’s chair, a report leaving is a warning light. Which is exactly why headcount — the number of people who stay under you — quietly turns into a personal performance metric.

The manager in Korea

In Korea, by contrast, the engineering manager is a rare sight. Several reasons stack up. Most companies have a separate HR department that owns much of what a US manager would own directly. Employment works differently — hiring and letting people go don’t carry the same mechanics. There’s the Confucian habit of ranking by age, which sits awkwardly on top of a reporting line. And a small company sprinting to survive has its own reasons to skip the role for now.

The flip side is that reportees end up sourcing the support they need from communities, mentoring, or somewhere outside the company — and that breeds a different kind of conflict. I’ve watched someone invoke Google’s “20% time,” which they’d picked up from a YouTube video, to announce they simply would not work one day a week. I’ve watched someone cite Netflix’s postmortem culture, drop a bomb in a company-wide email, and quit. Every time, I caught myself wishing they’d had a manager close by — someone actually looking out for them.

The manager in the AI era

Big tech, now aging, has been thinning its middle. “Flattening,” the term goes: cutting middle managers, pushing EMs back into IC roles, trying to lower the height of the org tree. And as more jobs start to look replaceable, there’s an open argument about which disappears first — the EM or the IC. Startups often hire their first dedicated EM late; the role shows up late in the job market for the same reason. It is, frankly, a position that causes a lot of trouble for what it returns — a chicken rib, as the old Chinese phrase goes: too meaty to throw away, too bony to be worth eating.

So — was I a good manager? Twenty years on, I still don’t have a clean answer. But I know the role mattered, and I know who felt its absence: the people who never had one.

Over a working life you pass through a lot of managers. Here’s hoping I find a good one on the road ahead, too.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. [See the full series →]

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: https://brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/166