What makes an engineering management hard?

Engineering management is hard primarily because management is hard. There is only one major engineering-specific reason why engineering management is hard. Management itself is hard because humans aren`t evolved for management. There are several basic management behaviors that humans don`t naturally do. Here are some of them: Relating to people in an ego-less collaborative manner. Making decisions out of logic or data. Blending logic and data with intuition. Criticizing people only in private. Criticizing people at all. Firing underperformers. Favoring people for objective performance rather than friendship/familiarity. Integrating unpopular criticisms into a balanced worldview. Rather, humans tend to be evolved to do the following things: Relate to others either in a dominance/submission pattern. Make decisions due to emotion or fear. Avoid criticizing people. Criticize people in public in order to shame/hurt them. Take care of the weak or needy. Promote/favor people familiar to them (nepotism) Ignore inconvenient information. If you think of poor managers you`ve known, they`ve probably done some or most of the second list. The reason they do is because humans naturally do those things; in particular, they are most prone to establishing dominance/submission hierarchies and tribal groupings that favor insiders rather than treating each other as collaborative equals or creating boundary-less meritocracies. Doing the things in the first list requires systematic and conscious training against one`s natural inclinations and the willingness to engage in repeated practice. Very few people have the conscious desire to do this - many people want to be managers only because they consciously or subconsciously wish to establish a dominance relationship over their peers. Regarding engineering management, the primary thing that makes engineering management uniquely hard is that engineering typically attracts introverted personalities, and skilled management necessarily requires quite a bit of human interaction and active emotional empathy. This can be difficult (rather: tiring) for someone with an engineering background. However, typically the abovementioned evolutionary inclinations dominate. So if you are a manager, keep the following in mind: You were not born to be a manager. No one is. It is 100% a learned activity, and you have to study hard to become good.