r/EngineeringManagers: rules, karma requirements and posting culture
A small, earnest room of about 35,000 where engineering managers and people who want the job talk through team problems. Text posts, light rules, few mods.
building high-performance teams of motivated engineers! · Open on Reddit
- Members
- 35k
- Created
- 2018
- New posts a day
- 5.4
- Comments on a typical post
- 13
- New posts removed
- 31%
The short answer
r/EngineeringManagers publishes no karma or account age requirement. The whole rulebook is three lines in the sidebar: be specific about a team problem, do not ask what a search would answer, and flair your post. About two thirds of posts stay up, and nearly all the rest are caught by Reddit's own filters, not the moderators. It is a text-post room where a concrete people problem gets long, considered replies.
Who posts here
Posts assume you work in a software organisation and know what PRs, on-call, OKRs and an IC are. Nobody explains them. Below that floor the room is forgiving: new managers, tech leads and engineers who want to move into management ask basic questions and get patient answers, often around 40 words each. Posts that are really student or general career questions stay up but get little attention.
- Working engineering managers, from first-time leads to managers of managers.
- Senior engineers and tech leads weighing a move into management, or recently pushed into it.
- Individual contributors asking how managers think about performance and promotion.
- Candidates preparing for engineering manager interviews at named companies.
- Founders and tool builders asking managers what frustrates them, sometimes with a product behind the question.
Karma and account requirements
What it takes to get a post through in r/EngineeringManagers.
| Karma | Not stated publicly. |
|---|---|
| Account age | Not stated publicly. |
| Topic and title | The post has to be about dealing with engineering teams or team members, with enough context in the title to see the problem.Mods' wording: “provide context - be specific” |
| Searchable questions | Discouraged. If a search would answer it, it does not belong.Mods' wording: “Avoid questions that can easily be answered by searching on the internet.” |
| Post flair | The sidebar asks for it. In practice no post in our sample carried one, so nothing appears to enforce it.Mods' wording: “Flair your posts.” |
What you can post
| Post type | Subreddit setting | Share of recent posts |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Allowed | 99% |
| Link | Allowed | <1% |
| Image | Allowed | 0% |
| Video | Not allowed | 0% |
| Poll | Allowed | 0% |
What happens to a new post
Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.
- Stayed up67%
- Removed by Reddit's filters30%
- Removed by moderators2%
- Deleted by the author2%
Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.
What happened when we posted here
We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.
- Stayed up
- 93%
- Removed by Reddit's filters
- 7%
- Removed by moderators
- 0%
- Period
- October 2025 to July 2026
The culture
r/EngineeringManagers is small and quiet: about 35,000 members and five or so posts a day. Nearly every post is text, typically around 160 words, and more than half the titles are questions. A post that stays up usually gets a dozen comments, and the comments are longer and more careful than on most subreddits.
The standard post is a people problem described in detail. A high-output engineer who is also a know-it-all. A principal engineer who barely takes part in peer reviews. A new manager unsure what the job even is. The other staples are interview prep for manager roles at specific companies and career questions from engineers looking at the management track.
The live topic is what AI coding tools are doing to teams. Thread after thread is about review queues that cannot keep up with the volume of generated code, non-technical colleagues opening pull requests, and how to interview when candidates use AI. There is also a quieter tension about who is answering: one post asked whether the people replying are managers at all, or frustrated engineers projecting.
What lands
- A specific management problem with the person's behaviour, your constraints and what you have tried. Two of the most-commented threads in the sample were about a strong engineer who is hard to work with: one a know-it-all, one a principal who skimps on reviews.
- A short, plainly argued opinion from experience, like the case that documentation dies when managers never read it.
- A question about AI and review capacity that describes what your own team changed.
- A first-person account of becoming a manager and what you got wrong early.
- Practical operating questions, such as how to show leadership where engineering time went last quarter.
What gets removed or ignored
- Moderator removals are rare, under 2% of the sample. Most of the ones we could see were bare link posts to essays and blog articles.
- Reddit's own filters removed about 30% of posts. Our data does not show why, and no rule or AutoModerator message explains it.
- By the sidebar, questions a search would answer and posts with vague titles are out of bounds, though we saw little sign of either being enforced.
The unwritten rules
- Write the situation, not the theory. The replies are from people who have managed the same problem and they answer the details you give them.
- Put your argument in the post. Link posts to your own essay were the main thing moderators removed, and comments almost never carry links, about 2%.
- Expect engineers as well as managers in the replies. Advice sometimes comes from the other side of the one-to-one.
- Tool pitches and research questions about developer tooling do appear and stay up. They read as outsiders' posts and sit apart from the threads people care about.
- Off-topic posts from students or non-software engineers are tolerated, not welcomed. The room is about running software teams.
Self-promotion
There is no written self-promotion rule. The sidebar only asks for specific, on-topic posts. In practice moderation is light: in our sample an announcement for a self-built platform stayed up, while bare links to blog essays were the main thing moderators removed. The evidence is thin, so read it narrowly. If you have something to share, write the idea out as a text post and let it stand without the link.
How people write here
- Typical post length
- 157 words
- Typical title length
- 10 words
- Titles phrased as a question
- 56%
- Typical comment length
- 39 words
- Comments that include a link
- 2%
When people post
- 0:00 UTC, 12
- 1:00 UTC, 8
- 2:00 UTC, 13
- 3:00 UTC, 14
- 4:00 UTC, 7
- 5:00 UTC, 10
- 6:00 UTC, 16
- 7:00 UTC, 17
- 8:00 UTC, 18
- 9:00 UTC, 27
- 10:00 UTC, 25
- 11:00 UTC, 21
- 12:00 UTC, 19
- 13:00 UTC, 27
- 14:00 UTC, 36
- 15:00 UTC, 18
- 16:00 UTC, 22
- 17:00 UTC, 23
- 18:00 UTC, 17
- 19:00 UTC, 11
- 20:00 UTC, 19
- 21:00 UTC, 8
- 22:00 UTC, 6
- 23:00 UTC, 6
New posts by hour of day, UTC.
The regulars
The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.
Most active posters
- u/Appropriate-Buy-37395 posts
- u/gregorojstersek4 posts
- u/thegame87143 posts
- u/awayt17073 posts
- u/karolwojciszko3 posts
Most active commenters
- u/thegame871421 comments
- u/davy_jones_locket6 comments
- u/addtokart6 comments
- u/Educational-Elk82586 comments
- u/Perfect-Escape-39046 comments
Top keywords
The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/EngineeringManagers.
- engineering 117 posts
- team 137 posts
- engineers 64 posts
- engineer 60 posts
- teams 66 posts
- manager 64 posts
- code 74 posts
- engineering manager 22 posts
- leadership 35 posts
- lead 46 posts
- engineering managers 17 posts
- senior 38 posts
- em role 13 posts
- management 48 posts
- company 65 posts
- managers 30 posts
- role 46 posts
- engineering management 11 posts
- coding 38 posts
- prs 21 posts
- jira 17 posts
- tech 35 posts
- technical 39 posts
- review 37 posts
- design 34 posts
- ems 12 posts
- understand 46 posts
- career 32 posts
- become 36 posts
- slack 20 posts
- devs 18 posts
- level 31 posts
- experience 53 posts
- tech lead 10 posts
- interview 25 posts
- interviews 19 posts
- reviews 24 posts
- system design 11 posts
- developer 23 posts
- project 35 posts
Posts that did well
- I've seen this all over my social media feeds. Why does this fact surprise us now?381 upvotes · 114 comments
- okay this might be a hot take but hear me out111 upvotes · 14 comments
- How would you manage a high output engineer who is kind of a know it all?95 upvotes · 70 comments
- Has code review become the bottleneck for anyone else?41 upvotes · 57 comments
- How do you improve developer docs that still need an engineer to explain them?38 upvotes · 13 comments
- Principal Eng half-ass participation in Peer Reviews.32 upvotes · 94 comments
- My story as an Engineering Manager30 upvotes · 44 comments
- Handling non-technical teammates building features25 upvotes · 28 comments
Common questions
How much karma do you need to post in r/EngineeringManagers?
No karma or account age requirement is published, and our data contains no AutoModerator message about one. About 30% of posts in our sample were removed by Reddit's own filters, which tend to be harder on new and low-karma accounts, but the subreddit itself states no threshold.
Can I promote my product or blog in r/EngineeringManagers?
There is no rule against it in the sidebar, but it is not what the room is for. Link posts to essays were the main thing moderators removed in our sample. A text post that makes the argument in full, about a real team problem, is the format that gets read.
What kind of posts do well in r/EngineeringManagers?
Detailed text posts about a specific people or process problem on an engineering team. Threads about managing a difficult high performer, review bottlenecks caused by AI-generated code, and first-hand stories of becoming a manager drew the most replies.
Can individual contributors post in r/EngineeringManagers?
Yes. Engineers regularly ask how managers judge performance, how to move into management, and how to handle their own manager. These posts stay up and get answered, as long as the question is about working in or running an engineering team.
Data as of October 4, 2026. Numbers come from public Reddit data (the Arctic Shift archive and GummySearch) sampled on this date. Removal share counts posts taken down by moderators, AutoModerator or Reddit's own filters. Banner and icon belong to the community. Moderators change rules without notice, so treat the sidebar as the final word.
