The Need To Reinvent Myself As An Engineering Manager in 2025
Tech companies are conducting massive layoffs on middle management, and it is important to be ready.
If you have been checking the news, you'll be seeing news on big tech companies trying to reduce the amount of middle managers in their organizations:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search giant has slashed manager roles by 10%
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to 'flatten' middle managers in cost-cutting push: report
The list goes on.
Big tech companies tend to set the trend for other companies to follow. In recent years, the Technical Program Manager (TPM) has replaced the Scrum Master (and sometimes even the Product Owner role) in several organizations in the name of efficiency.
It is a watershed moment for the tech industry. Companies are reorganizing their structures for leaner and quicker decision-making processes, and the quintessential engineering manager role is facing similar changes.
I do not foresee the engineering manager role being massively redefined because of the mass layoffs against middle management. However, it is not surprising that the demand for tech lead managers will increase rather than engineering managers in the future and that there will be more opportunities for managers who are relevant to the industry as individual contributors.
Why flatten the management hierarchy?
Fiefdom is one of the reasons why companies want to flatten the management hierarchy:
What is fiefdom? An area over which someone exercises control as or in the manner of a feudal lord (Merriam-Webster).
If you have been working in a large corporation for some years, you may have heard teams not prioritizing your requests because they have 'other priorities.'
These 'other priorities' sometimes have an underlying meaning. It is not in the other team's interest to serve your purpose, even though we are supposed to work together for a common goal.
I remember being in a happy hour session with my ex-colleagues, and one of them said, "Someone warned me about you that you might take our lunch because your work might replace ours."
I was working on an iOS and Android tracking package where I could centralize all tracking activity and telemetry into one unit. It made absolute sense for the business to reuse tracking variables across different analytical solutions such as Adobe Analytics and ComScore since the data we send them is the same anyway.
The outcome is to reduce repetitive code and data and to have a single point of failure with unified telemetry.
However, my work worried the mobile teams since it reduced reliance on them to manage and maintain different analytical solutions separately.
This is classic fiefdomism that negatively impacts companies. I cannot count how often these situations happened to me.
Thus, I can understand why the big tech companies are removing middle managers to reduce fiefdoms.
What is a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) and why?
A Tech Lead Manager is required to contribute both as a technical lead and an engineering manager, where you'll have to split your duties as an individual contributor and team leader.
As the name "tech lead" suggests, you're supposed to be the most experienced and skillful in the team to ensure quality implementation and engineering standards.
TLMs typically do not manage a big team because management duties grow with more people under your responsibility. It is designed to stay small for nimbleness and quick delivery.
Why are TLMs preferred over quintessential engineering managers? Quintessential engineering managers are known for being out of touch with code and design after a few years because management and collaboration duties require full-time attention.
As an engineering manager, it is typical for my work days to have at least five or more hours of meetings, discussions, and planning. This can be psychological and emotionally draining, and there were moments when I felt no more capacity to think about code at work after a series of meetings.
How do I plan to reinvent myself as an engineering manager in 2025?
The quintessential engineering manager is here to stay in the tech industry for the time being because they are needed to maintain focus and order and reduce organizational debt within teams.
However, it is clear to me that the trend to reduce middle managers will persist in the coming years as tech companies aim to induce nimbleness and quick decision-making processes.
As much as I want to grow my management portfolio, it seems obvious that if I invested all my energy in this area, I would be swimming against the tide. Thus, it will be important for me to ensure that my skills and experience as an individual contributor make me relevant to the industry.
Thus, in the next phase of my career, I seek to:
Embark in personal projects for my enrichment and build repositories of code.
Share the tutorials and learnings of each personal project through my newsletter and other platforms.
Begin to build relationships and network through my newsletter and other platforms.
In the midst of it all, self-reflection and retrospectives are needed to ensure I'm still focused on what I set out to do and honest with my shortcomings and failures so that I can learn and grow.
Ultimately, the vision is to ensure I'm equally capable of being both an individual contributor and a team leader in data engineering, analytics, and science.
To achieve this vision, I have decided to reboot and trim some of my endeavors so that I can focus.
Rebooting my YouTube channel
I started my YouTube channel right after I completed my Masters degree in Business Analytics from NYU Stern.
At that time, several life milestones happened:
I got a girlfriend and was engaged in 2021.
In 2022, I joined PlayStation from CBS Sports and married in the next month.
My son was born in 2023, and I became a father. It was one of the most rewarding events in my life, and I was glad I could spend time with my wife and son.
In 2024, I frequently traveled between Singapore and Los Angeles with my family because my family is currently based in Singapore, while my work is fundamentally in the States.
Amid it all, I taught remotely in two data analytics boot camps at Arizona State University (ASU) and Denver University (DU), respectively.
In short, I barely had time to commit to my YouTube channel simply because I had no capacity. Video creation is time-consuming, and I'm still learning to manage the process.
I decided not to teach for the time being because it did not give me enough time to work on my projects.
To reboot my channel, I will be starting anew by:
Remove videos that look subpar.
Reboot and restart tutorials on data-related topics.
I won't commit to a regular upload schedule because my focus is on writing more code as templates for my learning and reusability. Videos will only be considered when I have the time to create them.
However, the YouTube channel is meant for my branding and socialization. Once I sort out the more important matters, I will create a cadence for building content on the channel.
Decommissioning Gefyra.co Site
When I started my Gefyra site over ten years ago, it was meant to be a freelancing site. Later, I tried to brand it as a tech content site, and now I've lost focus on what the site means to me.
Amid it, I uploaded notes for my ex-students when I taught at Denver University, and I used them as part of my teaching material.
Unfortunately, I will bring down the website and content as part of the decommissioning.
If I review some of the materials again, I will include them here as part of my newsletter content.
To my students who are reading this post, I'm sorry that I am going to remove the teaching material I have provided for you. If you want the notes again, please drop me a message on LinkedIn, and I will consider how to post the content.
Focusing on Level Up With Data
Moving forward, Level Up With Data will be my focus on all data-related and tech career topics. The focus will be on tutorials and deep dives since my focus is building up my skills while I work on my career.
Sharing my content will be part of branding myself, and I hope to be as relevant to the industry as possible at every opportunity.
What can you expect out of the newsletter?
The goal is for you to benefit from my experience and share it within the newsletter.
I'm making it as structured as possible for my benefit because I refer to my material whenever I'm rusty on any topic.
Feel free to connect with me on Substack for any questions and comments. Though I primarily write for myself at this juncture, I'm happy to hear from you if you prefer what you want to see in my newsletter. I might learn something from it.