Former Yelp Eng Manager on Management, Mental Health, and the Move Most Devs Get Wrong

<p>Ryan Murphy spent five years as an engineering manager at Yelp on the team that owned the infrastructure behind every dollar moving through the company. </p><p>He got the job the way a lot of people do, which is that his boss had no budget for a real engineering manager and asked if he&#39;d try it.</p><p>Most of this conversation is about the move from engineer to manager: what the job actually is, what he looks for before he&#39;ll move someone into it, and why he calls it a career change instead of a promotion. That last part is something I got told when I made the jump and completely ignored. I thought I was getting a bigger version of my old job.</p><p>He also runs EM Accelerator, a training program for engineering managers, and Crying on the Sofa, a set of free mental health events for people in tech. He talks about the night that started the second one, sitting on his couch holding his newborn son.</p><p><strong>What we covered:</strong></p><ul><li>The engineering manager archetypes, and how to spot which one a company is really hiring for</li><li>What he watches during a production incident before he&#39;ll consider promoting you</li><li>Why the strongest engineer on the team is often the wrong pick</li><li>Why management is a career change, not a promotion</li><li>Why there&#39;s so little real training for new managers, and what he teaches instead of one-on-one templates</li><li>Whether a manager has to be regulated themselves to lead well</li><li>Why he started Crying on the Sofa</li><li>Who should not become an engineering manager</li><li>His take on AI flattening orgs, and why he thinks people-focused managers matter more, not less</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>Find Ryan:</strong></p><p><strong>EM Accelerator:</strong> <a href="https://www.emaccelerator.com/">https://www.emaccelerator.com/</a><br><strong>Crying on the Sofa:</strong> <a href="https://www.cryingonthesofa.org/">https://www.cryingonthesofa.org/</a><br><strong>LinkedIn:</strong> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansmurphy1">https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansmurphy1</a><br><strong>Newsletter:</strong> <a href="https://www.softwareengineeringtimes.com/">https://www.softwareengineeringtimes.com/</a></p>