I think one of the big problems is that a good engineering manager needs to understand the engineering discipline. I'll be honest, the best leaders/managers I've ever had were engineers themselves. (And I don't mean the "I was a Software Engineer 7 years ago" people, I mean the ones that are trying to get in code whenever they have a chance)

I'm going through this myself right now, promoted to lead and spending most of my time making sure tasks are detailed and my team is happy and guarded from Producers and upper management. The problem I've seen so far, is that non engineers need documentation to validate shit's getting done, but documenting what's being done wastes an INCREDIBLE amount of engineer productivity. It IS necessary documentation, for auditing purposes, as far as I know so far anyways. I'm taking it in stride and using this as an opportunity to be a lead and learn about the role, the challanges and opportunities it provides.

When the time comes that I've decided I've had enough, I can just up and leave and go find a Sr. Engineering position somewhere else. In the meantime though, as much as I don't like most of what I do, I'm doing the best I can and trying to learn as much as I can from it. I hope one day I'll fully understand this problem domain and maybe write a blog on it or something, but for now I'm just taking it in.

I feel so far, that it mostly boils down to trust issues. When you're small, it's easy to let engineers go about getting shit done as best they can, because at the end of the day, if the work isn't done you know who didn't do it and why (way less distractions in a smaller company) and because you're working so closely with people you don't need 3 chains of abstraction on what works is being done.

Once you have 100~ people all working on the same thing and you need that same level of confidence, you need to hire other people to watch what's going on for you. The problem is, most of those people you hire aren't good enough themselves to relay an accurate image of the state of the project and your confidence falls. Confidence falls, trust falls and the team is aggravated because now they have to document every 4 hours of work to justify the delays that happen, while upper management never realizes that engineers are spending half their fucking time writing down updates and informing 2 different people about what they just said in the daily update that morning.

/rant