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Your job is now about making the team productive, rather than just yourself. Switching between coding and managing is only possible IMHO if you started out as a

Your job is now about making the team productive, rather than just yourself. Switching between coding and managing is only possible IMHO if you started out as an individual contributor, became expert in the codebase and environment, and then moved up to lead. If you're producing project plans for business and management stakeholders - and you should be - do not assign coding and troubleshooting tasks to yourself. Regard yourself as contingency resource, and pitch in at crunch time. You can scratch your coding itch in between meetings by working on POCs, futures & prototypes that are not on the critical path for client deliveries. If those POCs etc end up on the critical path hand them off to ICs.

lnkmails 8y ago
I think this is a sensible advice and the one I personally follow. I manage around 10 people and as much as I love to write code and be involved in everyday engineering, the real success measure for me is to see everyone succeeding in the team. This requires a personal sacrifice and picking left overs which aren't in the critical path. Initially, I tried to over compensate by putting more stricter requirements on writing code equal to doing people management but when I got more people, it just turned out exponentially harder. If you aren't able to make this sacrifice in a few months time, you should reevaluate and maybe take a different role. You'd do yourself and your team injustice if you focused more on yourself than the team.
- fictorial 8y ago
  I agree with you and GP in that I'd gladly take on less coding and focus on delegation and mentoring which I'm finding I really like. However, it seems the founders see me sort of as superman of all things tech. This means, that I'm stuck for now in both worlds. It's a bit claustrophobic but I feel that many people must be in this boat with me.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    You need to explain this to your founders and get them on board.

lnkmails 8y ago

I think this is a sensible advice and the one I personally follow. I manage around 10 people and as much as I love to write code and be involved in everyday engineering, the real success measure for me is to see everyone succeeding in the team. This requires a personal sacrifice and picking left overs which aren't in the critical path. Initially, I tried to over compensate by putting more stricter requirements on writing code equal to doing people management but when I got more people, it just turned out exponentially harder. If you aren't able to make this sacrifice in a few months time, you should reevaluate and maybe take a different role. You'd do yourself and your team injustice if you focused more on yourself than the team.

fictorial 8y ago
I agree with you and GP in that I'd gladly take on less coding and focus on delegation and mentoring which I'm finding I really like. However, it seems the founders see me sort of as superman of all things tech. This means, that I'm stuck for now in both worlds. It's a bit claustrophobic but I feel that many people must be in this boat with me.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  You need to explain this to your founders and get them on board.