You want a place online where other engineering managers talk shop. The honest answer is that Reddit is thinner than you hope. There is no big, busy forum just for engineering managers. What exists is a handful of communities, most of them small or aimed at engineers, plus one that is genuinely active if you know how to read it.
Here are six subreddits worth a look, ranked by how useful they actually are, with a plain note on how alive each one is.
The one that is actually busy
1. r/ExperiencedDevs
r/ExperiencedDevs is the closest thing to a live engineering leadership forum on Reddit. It is meant for people with a few years in, and the threads often cover management: dealing with underperformers, going from senior engineer to lead, on-call, reorgs, and layoffs. It is well moderated and busy every day. Best for: real questions with real answers from people who have the job. The catch: it is not management only, so you will scroll past plenty of pure engineering posts to find the leadership threads.
Dedicated to managers, but small
2. r/EngineeringManagers
r/EngineeringManagers is built for exactly this audience. When a thread gets going, the advice is on point, because everyone answering is doing the job. Best for: manager-specific questions without the engineering noise. The catch: it is small and quiet. You may wait a while for replies, and some posts get none. Treat it as a place to ask, not a place to browse for hours.
3. r/EngManagement
r/EngManagement is a second, even smaller community with the same goal, a couple hundred members and running since 2020. Posts are occasional, and many are advice requests. Best for: an extra place to cross-post a question. The catch: with that few members, do not expect a fast or deep answer. It moves at a mailing-list pace, not a forum pace.
Useful next door
4. r/managers
r/managers is not about engineering at all, but management is management. The daily posts cover the parts of the job that have nothing to do with code: firing, hiring, difficult people, your own boss, burnout. It is active and blunt. Best for: the human problems every manager shares. The catch: no engineering context, so anything about tech strategy or delivery will not land here.
5. r/cscareerquestions
r/cscareerquestions is huge and very active, but it is written by and for engineers, mostly about pay, interviews, and job hunts. It is not where managers swap advice. So why read it? Because it is the clearest window into how your reports and candidates think. Best for: understanding what your team wants and worries about. The catch: the tone runs cynical, and it is easy to mistake loud opinions for the whole field.
6. r/leadership
r/leadership is broad, covering every kind of leader, and the quality is mixed. You will find some thoughtful threads and a lot of vague ones. Best for: the occasional good discussion on the general craft of leading people. The catch: little of it is specific to engineering, and some posts read like self-help.
How to get a useful answer
Small communities reward good posts. A few things help. Give real context in the first two lines: your team size, the person's level, what you already tried. Vague posts get vague replies. Ask one clear question, not five. Avoid names and anything that could point back to a real person, since these are public pages that show up in search. And cross-post the same question to r/ExperiencedDevs and one of the manager subs, because the busy sub gets you speed and the small sub gets you focus. Finally, remember that the confident top comment is one person's story, not a rule. Read three or four replies before you act, and weigh them against your own team.
Timing helps too. On the busy subs, the first hour after you post decides everything, since threads that get early replies rise and the rest sink. Post when the US and Europe are both awake, roughly mid-morning Eastern time, and check back once to answer follow-up questions. A thread where you reply to comments pulls in more people than one where you ask and vanish. And if a post gets no traction, do not repost the same thing an hour later. Reword it around a sharper question and try a different sub.
The honest takeaway
If you only open one, make it r/ExperiencedDevs. It is the only community on this list that is both active and close to the work. The manager-only subs are the right idea but too small to lean on daily. The rest are useful side doors, not a home base.
Where managers actually went
There is a reason the dedicated engineering-manager subreddits stay small. Many managers left public forums for closed rooms: invite-only Slack groups, paid communities like the one CTO Craft runs, and private company channels. The pull is obvious. In a closed group you can name the real situation without it showing up in a search result, and the people answering are vetted, not anonymous. So if Reddit feels thin, that is not you missing a secret sub. The conversation moved somewhere quieter. Reddit is still useful for the question you can ask in the open, and for reading the mood of the field. Just do not expect it to be your main room. It is the public square, not the back office.
This is the real gap: there is no busy, always-on room where engineering managers get quick answers to their specific questions. Forums are slow by design. You post, then you wait. And half the questions you have are not for strangers anyway. They are for the one teammate who knows the context, and that person is often the one who is off.
That last problem is the one StandIn is built for. You write a short brief at the end of your day, and while you are away it answers your teammates from what you wrote, with a source under each answer. When the answer is not in the record, it says so instead of guessing. Reddit is good for the general question. StandIn is for the one only you can answer, so your team is not stuck waiting for you.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.