Why Engineering Managers Need Context, Not Another Resilience Lesson

I used to think the hardest part of managing a development team would be making difficult decisions. Some days, the harder part was being expected to answer for decisions I had not been included in.

A team member would ask a reasonable question about a project or a change in direction. I wanted to give them a useful answer. Often, all I could say was, “I’ll get back to you.” Then I would go and find the person who had been in the conversation, try to understand what had been decided, and bring the answer back to the team. It sounds like a small delay. Repeated often enough, it made me feel less like a manager and more like a middle person passing messages between rooms.

I knew that asking for time was more honest than pretending to know. Still, I felt incompetent. The people asking me were not wrong to expect their manager to have context. I needed that context too. Being included earlier would have spared everyone the back and forth, and it would have let me do the part of the job that actually required judgement.

The lack of context became harder when plans changed. We could begin a week with a rough balance: time for feature work, time for technical debt, and some room for bugs. Software rarely respects a tidy calendar, and I never expected it to. What wore me down was a different kind of change. Someone could decide that the week was now entirely about new features, then later ask why the bugs had not been fixed. The work had not disappeared. We had simply stopped making room for it.

I could make choices about how I showed up for my team. I could try to keep the drama away from them so they could get on with their work. I could listen, explain what I knew, and follow up when I did not know enough. But I could not decide how every project was run or which technical choices had already been made. I was still held responsible for projects I was assigned to after those decisions, sometimes without having had a chance to shape them.

At one point I was asked to fight a fire on a project I had never been involved in. I could also see trouble approaching on two projects I did know, where earlier attention might have helped. It was difficult to leave the work I understood in order to react to an emergency I did not. By then, the company was fighting so many fires that we rarely seemed to stop and ask what kept starting them.

That is the part I think about when I hear that managers need more resilience. Of course a manager needs to cope with uncertainty and make decisions under pressure. But coping cannot give someone authority they do not have, information they were not given, or time that has been reassigned. If the role is designed around absorbing every change while remaining accountable for the original plan, the strain is not just a personal problem to solve.

There were times when I felt useless and frustrated, as if I were talking to a brick wall. I left things unsaid because I believed saying them would create more problems. I was also tired of fighting the same fight. Staying quiet did not mean I thought the situation was fine. It meant I had run out of faith that another round of the conversation would change it.

Eventually, I decided to leave. Nothing had shifted enough for me to see a different way of doing the job there. That decision did not make the years I had given meaningless, and it did not turn every difficult moment into proof that someone had failed. It did make the limit clearer to me. A person can care about their team, work hard to protect them, and still be unable to make a role function when responsibility and authority keep arriving separately.

When I think about making management more sustainable, I think first about who is in the room when decisions are made. I think about whether priorities can change without anyone naming what must give way. I think about whether managers have enough authority and context to answer the people who rely on them. Those are ordinary questions about how work is arranged. They would have mattered far more to me than another reminder to be resilient.