u/No-Fishing2755

Hey everyone. Our CTO ran a small and interesting "experiment" recently, and honestly, it was very useful for the entire engineering org. I'm curious how people here would feel about something like this, and how it might go at the place where you work.

Every engineering manager responsible for at least one full team of devs got the same assignment:

"Ask your tech lead for a simple coding ticket, one that a relatively new engineer on the team could comfortably finish in a sprint. It should be something that makes you go through most of the normal workflow: run the app locally, debug, write tests, ship it, and make sure it works properly after the release."

The idea wasn't to see whether the managers could suddenly go back to being senior ICs again or not. It was more to make them better feel what the engineers are dealing with, especially when those same managers spend half their week in meetings and then wonder why a "small" ticket is blocked.

I gave my manager a very simple change: remove a field from a JSON response returned by a specific internal API endpoint. He finished it in about half a day, which wasn't surprising. I enjoyed nitpicking his PR a little, but of course I wasn't expecting perfect code or anything. The funny part was more seeing him get the same comments we usually get.

But in other teams, it turned into a much bigger mess than anyone expected. It became clear that some managers are genuinely disconnected from the day-to-day work their teams do. Not just forgetting syntax or being unfamiliar with the repo, but confused about basic things like how local debugging works, what a breakpoint is, where the logs go, how tests are usually run, and so on.

So now the CTO is clearly reviewing how we interview engineering managers and looking at the bigger picture, which is honestly kind of funny, but probably should have happened a long time ago.

What do you think about this? Could something like this be useful at your company, or would it just create chaos?

A salary. I applied for a "Content & Community Lead" role at a "purpose-led wellness startup." The ad literally said: "We value people properly for the work they do." So I thought, okay, maybe someone finally discovered that rent exists.
They got back to me after 3 hours. I did an intro call, and it was easy and painless. We talked about brand voice, audience growth, community stuff, and the usual warm startup talk. In the next interview, the founder showed up. He was wearing a huge sweatshirt that said "Kindness is capital." Honestly, that was probably the warning sign.
After about twenty minutes, he said:
"We need someone who's motivated by impact, not income."
I laughed because I thought he was doing some kind of founder comedy bit. Turns out he wasn't joking.
Then he said: "We're not offering traditional pay at this stage, but what we can give you is far more valuable: access to an incredible network."
I told him: "Nice, but my electric company doesn't accept incredible networks." He kept staring at me for maybe 7 seconds and then said: "Right... I'm sensing this might not be the right culture match."
A few hours later, I found a post by him on LinkedIn titled "Why Most People Aren't Built for Startup Energy."