In defense of ruthless managers

There are two kinds of engineering manager: empathetic and ruthless. I think ruthless managers are underrated for a few reasons.

Empathetic managers care. They are emotionally invested in their employees as human beings, and actively campaign to support their employees’ needs. Ruthless managers are there to do their job. They aren’t necessarily assholes, but they see their main role as communicating the company’s needs to their engineers and vice versa. They will almost never go out on a limb on an employee’s behalf.

Overall, having an empathetic manager is good. A manager has a reasonable amount of power over their engineers - though less than many engineers think - and it’s nice for that power to be wielded with forbearance and kindness. But I don’t actually mind ruthless managers.

First, ruthless managers still want their engineers to be happy, if both the manager and engineer are competent. All things being equal, happy engineers work better and are easier to manage. A purely self-interested manager will do things to make their engineers happy, so long as they’re not paying a substantial personal cost for it. For the same reason, ruthless companies want their (competent) engineers to be happy. It takes time for engineers to become useful at large tech companies. If you keep engineers happy, they’ll stay longer and produce more effectively. So “ruthless” doesn’t always mean “cruel”.

Second, empathetic managers are often in conflict with their own bosses, leaving them with little political capital. Large companies make managers do a lot of the dirty work around performance management, firing, imposing tight deadlines, and so on. Empathetic managers are constantly pushing back on this. That can be good if the pushback is effective, but it often isn’t. If your manager is always fighting with their own manager, they may not have the political capital left to push for the few things you really need (e.g. promotions). However, a ruthless manager will usually have a lot of political capital banked with their bosses. It’ll be harder to convince them to push for what you need, but if you succeed, they’re very likely to be able to make it happen.

Third, for the same reasons, empathetic managers are often unhappy. Suppose you have an engineer on your team who really loves writing Python, but it’s a dictate from upper management that they have to start writing in C#¹. Your manager will be the one who has to either pressure that engineer to write C#, or to argue with their boss about how the policy is foolish. A ruthless manager will (a) not agonize over the decision, and (b) pressure the engineer without feeling bad about it. If you’re not that engineer, this is better for you, because your manager won’t be sad and distracted.

Fourth, ruthless managers are often better at communication. Empathetic managers don’t like breaking bad news and may cushion it too much. In my experience, they can also sometimes drink the company kool-aid, and give you the party-line answer instead of a more useful (or cynical) truth. However, ruthless managers can fail at communication for different reasons: typically because they’re happier to deliberately lie to you, or because they’re unwilling to be fully honest in case spilling the truth comes back to bite them.

Fifth, ruthless managers are easier to predict. Ruthless managers always do what their own managers - and the company in general - values. If company executives set a priority, ruthless managers will always follow it. Empathetic managers have their own priorities, so it’s harder to know what they want or what behavior they’ll reward. It can be nice to work for a ruthless manager because they’re easier to understand (at least, their work persona is).

Of course, I’m talking about competent managers in a relatively healthy company (i.e. not a dying company or fatally dysfunctional one). If manager incentives do not align with their engineers at all, there is no advantage to having a ruthless manager. If your manager is incompetent, you don’t want them to be ruthless as well - that’s a recipe for needless destruction. And if you had to pick between ruthless or empathetic, you’d still probably pick empathetic. But since you don’t get to pick, it’s nice to be aware of the advantages either way.