---
title: "Engineering leaders going hands-on and who keeps the team"
description: "The current advice to engineering leaders is get hands-on and do less people management for now, and the second half quietly drops the stuff that makes a team a team."
url: "https://michael.zazon.us/notes/engineering-leaders-going-hands-on-and-who-keeps-the-team"
published: "2026-10-14T12:00:00-04:00"
kind: "take"
subject: "leadership"
tags: ["careers","team-design"]
---
Accept that you will probably do less people management for now. This is not really the time. ICs don't expect it as much. We don't even know what that career looks like. We will figure it out. We will get back to it.

I agree with probably 50% of this advice and would endorse it today. Leaders who disengaged from hands-on work had a bad year. [The Great Engineering Leader Career Break](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-great-engineering-leader-career-break) reports many CTOs and VPs of engineering quit their roles, largely because of founders' unrealistic expectations around AI.

Some founders are pushing you to fire half the team. The other are pushing you to show revenue going 2x when AI is going to go 2x and so on. It's unrealistic expectations.

That all lands on the people whose job is to protect the team from it.

With smaller teams, you need fewer leaders. A lot of smaller teams come with middle management being cut as well.

As the layer that does the people stuff thins out, the advice to the leaders left behind seems to be to temporarily stop doing as much of the people stuff too, until things settle down and someone figures out what that career even looks like.

People go on vacation. They create energy with each other. They inspire each other. They hold a high bar. They keep each other accountable. This is not going anywhere.

This is management work, or at least what good management quietly protects week after week. No one's agent is holding your team's bar.

Two people and a bunch of agents, that's not going to be a team. That will be a one off project maybe.

I agree. And that's what makes it so hard for me to accept "for now".. you're telling me that teams are a thing that last, but you're also telling the people who help glue those teams together to step back.

Hands-on: I support it. You can't lead work you don't understand, and work shifts too quickly to lead from a distance. But "for now" can become permanent without anyone noticing if no one's responsible for going back. This all came out of [a talk at LDX3 New York](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru99FGJ_yuE).. imagine a team of 5 people, with agents, and a lead who's shipping code all day. Who's going to notice if one of those five people is burning out?