16 ms·

Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)

313 points by spking 8y ago

dang 8y ago
Discussed, a bit, at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32752
the_arun 8y ago
Nowhere it says - we cannot program when we become a manager. What if managers continue to make 0s & 1s dance - half of the time if not full time? Wouldn't that be productive & fun? I would say world is changing towards this side. I have heard stories where VPs & SVPs in big enterprises write code & lead their teams by example.
- davidlinc1 8y ago
  The problem arises when you are evaluated based on your managerial responsibilities. The more time spent writing code, the less time you have to manage others. If they wanted you to build things, they probably wouldn't have put you in management in the first place.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I think this is a question of scale and hours in the day. In my experience when the team grows past 5 it gets difficult to do all the leadership things that “clear the road” for the team and also have enough focused time for effective programming. But at the same time, once you’re at that point, if you stop coding you can now handle another 5-10 direct reports. So you have to chose between keeping independent teams quite small with team leads who code, or with allowing bigger teams with a dedicated manager. The scaling characteristics of those two patterns are different, because inter-team collaboration is pretty much always worse than intra-team, so the small teams are more effective if they are as independent as possible. If not you end up needing an extra manager to coordinate amongst the small teams... and now you have managers who don’t code.
tracer4201 8y ago
I’m in a senior level engineering role at one of the big tech companies. I was more than happy to receive the promotion, but the time I spent coding has certainly decreased a large chunk. I spend a lot of my time now facilitating projects across organizations, providing guidance to more junior engineers on architecture, sending emails and status updates, etc. at least that’s the norm on my current team. Not long ago, I would be heads down in code all day everyday. My world was laser focused on getting out 1-2 code reviews a day, shipping small features. It paid substantially less, but I really wasn’t responsible for projects or deliveries. Business people want a feature? Great... here’s a t-shirt size estimate. Heh.
United857 8y ago
Thankfully, many if not most top tech companies in the valley realize this and have parallel management and IC tracks (at least for software engineers), with compensation the same. That said, even as an IC, at higher levels the scope of impact you're expected to deliver at some point exceeds what one person working alone can have, so there's still lots of people leadership skills needed to advance: working cross-functionally and setting direction, communication, and ultimately influencing others to jump onboard and help you out. (Note that this is different from people management -- e.g. formal coaching, performance reviews, dealing with HR/org/budget issues, etc.)
- opportune 8y ago
  Many in theory have parallel tracks but in practice it seems either the vast majority choose to go into management or that it takes a more exceptional individual to progress in the IC track (my money is on #2). IMO you don’t really need to be an above average person to reach the second layer of management, just put in your time and not fuck up, but everyone I know who hit the same level as IC was exceptionally bright and was like that long before they hit that level
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    In my company it's certainly the case that in order to progress on the technical track you need to be extremely good and more importantly on the right projects. I see a lot of mediocre people advance on the management track but only very few advance above a certain level on the technical track. Considering that salary is directly tied to a person's rank I think it's a very rational decision to go into management even if that's not your inclination.
    - twblalock 8y ago
      This really depends on the company. I know senior ICs who make a bit more money than the managers they report to.
rurban 8y ago
In my previous company all the senior engineers took a few juniors under their umbrella and had very informal one-on-ones with them, just to bypass the troubles with non-technical managers. Hereby I as senior could give practical advices, eg how to deal with politics, without having to go into politics, excel and powerpoint and meeting-hell by myself. This way the good senior devs didn't had to be promoted to management roles they didn't want, and the bad devs didn't get promoted to senior not to fuck up the juniors with bad advice.
- mk89 8y ago
  You kind of described a highly disfunctional company, where you as a senior sw engineer literally had the power and authority to choose who would get promoted and who wouldn't.
  - rurban 8y ago
    No, I never talked with my manager about anything I talked with my juniors. I only advised my juniors how to deal best with managers, but mostly we talked about code. It was a highly functional company until they changed the dev manager, then it went downhill immediately. Political middle managers soon took over everything, and all the seniors left.
  - JAT123 8y ago
    I think what he is saying is not particularly uncommon. Several of the orgs I have worked at have expectation that a senior developer will help juniors, whether that's formalized as a line management and 1 to 1s or informal mentoring. Tbh expecting to be a senior developer and not give any time towards leveling up the next generation of software practitioners is both selfish and short sighted.
revvx 8y ago
A solution for that is promoting the best developers that don't want to manage into technical leadership roles. They can still create things and impact the team positively, and will not suffer with managerial tasks. > if Willie Mays played for your baseball team would you promote him to manager? I don't know who Willie Mays is (not in the US), but I'm pretty sure elite athletes get top notch salaries, a lot of times bigger than managers or coaches. People shouldn't need hierarchy just to remain professional and follow someone else's lead.
ravedave5 8y ago
I've enjoyed the challenges that each level of promotion bring. That said my company has always allowed coding all the way up to top-level architect.
democracy 8y ago
You stay in the company long enough and you write less code and spend more time managing people and processes as now you own your projects as the most knowledgable person for these projects. You start hating it (I did) and look for a pure programming role. But you are not in your twenties any more and you have to align with and follow someone else's designs and decisions and you can't since you are experienced and know more and you have to push back and argue and end up going to lead/architect role again and writing less code again.
- deleted 8y ago
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- sigstoat 8y ago
  > you have to push back and argue no, you don't.
  - wolco 8y ago
    Exactly. Mistakes need to be made over and over again. Do not try to stop this force.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Then what is the point? Are you just there to gather your paycheck? I mean, to an extend, yes. But you need to be able to excert some positive effect.
      - billions 8y ago
        big companies do not innovate. (counter examples welcome!) unless you’re in a 1-20 person startup, your impact is -5% to +5% as a division. Essentially you’re stroking egos: yours or management’s. best to choose the latter and try your hand at changing the world in after-work projects.
        lugg 8y ago
dub 8y ago
This feels like a variation of the Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) The Peter Principle says people who are good at their jobs will keep getting promoted until they reach a role they're not good at. In this variation, people get promoted until they reach a role they don't enjoy and eventually leave.
wjossey 8y ago
I’ve been reviewing a lot of career path documents recently for different engineering orgs, and every one is fairly uniform in that you either progress into management, team leadership, or architecture (or some blend of the three). If not, you’ll stagnate at a pretty high level, but stagnate none the less. I’ve been noodling on this for a while, and I think maybe a fourth track at a lot of organizations should be special projects. Small teams (3 people max) given autonomy and clear objectives (revenue goals, user growth goals, etc). For a pre existing company, this likely means “hacking” on an existing product, experimenting on something new, tackling huge debt... Pick your poison. This is a fine middle ground for someone with a lot of experience who doesn’t want to manage, but still wants some growth opportunities. For many people who don’t want to manage or be an architect, autonomy is the number one thing I regularly hear. So, give them the autonomy and some ground rules, then let them loose.
- augbog 8y ago
  This sounds fucking awesome and would definitely make me want to stay as an engineer.
- heipei 8y ago
  Thank you for saying that, this was exactly my conclusion when reviewing my own goals and notes on how other companies build products. If your company doesn't have this special-projects track in place, then your only option at some point is to quit and start your own thing I'm afraid.
  - blub 8y ago
    ...or move into architecture or management. That seems like the more reasonable thing compared to playing the start-up lottery.
    - heipei 8y ago
      Yeah, but parent mentioned "autonomy" as the driving force for people who'd want this track, and I'm very much in the same situation. Management or architecture won't give you the same level as autonomy as working in one of these small "Tiger teams" (thanks to sibling for pointing out that term)
Aloha 8y ago
For many developers, they turn out to be good at project management, its not much different conceptually than being an architect, this issue is, once you 'level up' you're expected to stay there, rather than moving back to develop for some period of time, and letting the next guy get tapped for project management - It think more companies rotated those roles around, they'd see greater retention, greater employee happiness, and probably lower costs - as an engineer, I don't want to be a PM forever, but I might be happy spending 1/3rd of my time over a given long term period wearing that hat.
- orthoxerox 8y ago
  > its not much different conceptually than being an architect I don't know where you are from, but in my experience the roles are very different. As an architect you have to provide technical guidance over a domain that you know like the back of your hand. As a PM, you have to manage a project that straddles multiple domains, some of which are completely alien to you, and you are explicitly limited by the scope, deadlines and your budget. As a PM, you have to trust (and goad) multiple experts if you want to get anywhere.
burlesona 8y ago
I think it has a lot to do with wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have. One person can only hold so large of a program (or so many small programs) in their head, and if you are on a project that reaches a certain size you have to start working with other humans to maintain it, and thus the need for technical leadership and/or people management begins. One of the basic ideas of good management is that a good manager is a multiplier. Suppose you have a team of ten, and individually they can each ship 8 “points” of work in a week. If you turn one of those people into a great manager you lose 8 points of direct work, but everyone else now ships 12 points per week, and you’ve gone from 80 to 108 points in a week. You could now say the manager is responsible for the 28 point gain. Similarly with a technical leadership role, doing the architecture and teaching work can multiply the effectiveness of many other people, leading to greater impact than any one individual could have. When you look at it like this, it’s obvious why these higher impact “multiplier” roles get more prestige and pay than the best individual coders. And I think that’s the dilemma. The real question - for many of us, anyway - is do you gain more satisfaction from the higher impact role and the perks that come with it, or from the sheer joy of the hands-on work that got you into this field in the first place. Its really difficult. I saw some other posters talking about rotating the responsibilities around - ie. leading sometimes and working in the trenches sometimes, and I really understand the appeal of that. That said, I’m not sure if it’s practical beyond the first “rung of the leadership ladder” or so, because leadership is itself a very challenging craft that takes a lot of focus and effort to master. What appeals to me more, but I haven’t seen yet in practice, is for orgs to let their technical leadership (both on the architect and people management sides) take periodic “coding sabbaticals,” or something along those lines. The main idea being that periodic returns to the hands-on work will help keep you sharp, up-to-date, and effective as a technical leader. The biggest problem with that is that it’s not always easy to just plug a “substitute leader” into the org chart while you’re on sabbatical.
- deleted 8y ago
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- revvx 8y ago
  > Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have I'm don't see why a single person can't have a ton of impact merely as a coder. I mean, this whole website is dedicated to (mostly) discussing tech startups and how (mostly) software disrupts and help scale outdated business models. Isn't the software-making business model also ripe for that disruption, at least in a smaller scale? Couldn't a single coder (or a small team) help an organization get some competitive advantage when it comes to tools. Or even programming languages? Why does ALL the innovation has to come from outside in our industry? Fred Brooks talks about "The Toolsmith" it the "Surgical Team" chapter in Mythical Man-Month, and how "the tool-builder will often construct specialized utilities, catalogued procedures, macro libraries". Facebook made React, Apple made Swift, Google has dozens of those. And the teams doing those tools aren't that huge. Why don't we try new things instead of letting good coders go away or making them stop coding?
macando 8y ago
Every time this topic surfaces project management in the form of politics and pushing tickets through Trello is presented as the only option available to engineers. To me, a more natural progression is going into product management. It's a nice intersection of management, product design and engineering. From a job description: "We’re looking for a product leader to join a fast-paced and transformational start-up to manage various fraud and identity initiatives. While managing product development, The Director of Product, Fraud and Identity will analyze, investigate, and identify solutions to mitigate and prevent fraud and identity compromises. This individual is responsible for developing features, platforms, models, and capabilities to proactively identify sources and patterns of fraud and minimize the company’s total exposure to financial and reputational risk. The product leader will develop and execute a long-term vision that will establish Lyft, and its systems, as the industry leader in fraud management, mitigation, and identity-based capabilities and services." Are engineers not interested in product management? Or are those roles not available to them?
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Can’t say definitively, but know that these days if your resume has X and they are looking for Y it’s a no-go. Even when X overlaps Y significantly. Hard to even get a job as a programmer in one language with experience in another.
bartimus 8y ago
I'm surprised how these traditional organizational structures still exist so strongly today. It sometimes feels like the whole agile/lean revolution (with self-managed teams) never happened.
- jaabe 8y ago
  The agile revolution never happened because it’s just not how people buy things. Hell, I don’t even think it’s how we build them. I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries, because from a buyers perspective, that’s exactly how we want to buy software. We point out some items on the menu, and we expect them to be delivered together, on time and to our specified demands. The person taking our order, and making it happen is the project manager who makes the different cooks do their stuff in coordination and also the person who puts shit together on a tray. That’s exactly how people buy software, or at least how they expect to buy it. Only software is more complicated, and developers keep failing to deliver the ordered project on time. Agile was supposed to help on this, but it hasn’t. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but I work in the public sector, we track and benchmark the hell out of these things for a bureaucracy that probably never reads the reports. Anyway, agile suppliers fail as often as non agile suppliers, and they have the added problem of wanting to sell us promises. I mean, a true agile contract can’t specify requirements, cost and time at once, but how the hell can you ever enter a contract that doesn’t? So they typically end up mixing non-agile sales with agile development. I’d like to note, that we have actually entered into truly agile contracts. Being a digitisation unit in an organisation that largely doesn’t understand digitisation gives you a lot of freedom after all. Only agile wasn’t better, in fact it’s been a lot worse, every time. In our decade long experience, the only thing that truly works, is when management or project management knows how to make the damn burgers. Which unfortunately means that you need to promote a few developers into unhappiness.
  - bartimus 8y ago
    > I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries I would like to argue that the burger joint is actually very agile. The person taking the order isn't the project manager. He just has the role of placing the order on the kanban board. From hereon the rest of the people all take their self-managed roles to fulfill the order. You can point out such agile (lean) processes throughout the entire delivery chain. > Agile was supposed to help on this, but it hasn’t. My experience has been exactly the opposite. Those companies that managed to achieve a true agile process (or achieved an agile bubble inside a structured organization) were making the best progress. What I do see, however, is many companies misinterpreting agile. Especially Scrum. They see Scrum as a method for ticking off the to-do list provided by the product owner. I've seen project managers posing as scrum masters and project managers posing as product owners. It's still top-down management and the team is expected to follow orders. They don't seem to understand the principles of the sprint goal or how it's actually the development team that ought to own the sprint backlog. They never really did scrum. > I mean, a true agile contract can’t specify requirements, cost and time at once This is indeed a challenge. You can - at most - sell sprints. With agile you say: "You have the dev team for this amount of time". It's an uncertainty for the client. But in my experience this has always led to the most bang for the buck. I'm surprised you haven't experienced these results? > Which unfortunately means that you need to promote a few developers into unhappiness This perhaps is an argument in favor of agile. Those project managers indeed need to know how to make those damn burgers. Then why not just make them your lead dev (chef-cook)?
qetuo13579 8y ago
My boss is engineering manager at our company of 60 people (he leads 16 engineers) and still finds time to get down in the weeds solving tech problems in addition to managing us. I’m his number 2, based in another country and am responsible for managing/supervising 7 engineers. I too am expected to do development work AND management of the team.
deleted 8y ago
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eight_ender 8y ago
I wrote code like a madman and then went into management. I like management, but I understand what the author of this article was getting at. I had an identity crisis early on doing management. I liked to tell people what to do, because I had a big map in my head of where things should go. Because of this developers sort of organically gravitated to me for guidance even before I had the official job. However, I also liked to write a lot of code. Once I was promoted to management I quickly realized just how much "not coding" that job requires. I struggled with not coding as much. I struggled with wanting to micro manage my staff. I struggled with wanting to write their code for them. I had juniors on my team and I wanted to snatch the keyboard from them and write their code for them. The defining moment for me was one day, while watching one of my developers deploy something magnificent, that I realized I don't necessarily like to "build things", I like to "see things built". I like to see people succeed. I like to see a scribble on a napkin become a tangible piece of software. Code was a means to an end for me. I won't lie and say I don't miss coding full time. I still get right in there when I can, but I step aside when I know my management duties are going to let the team down. One thing I don't feel is guilty about not coding as much anymore.
- ramraj07 8y ago
  So how DO you deal with people under you writing code under you that just boils your blood? Especially if you instinctually see that their contributions are always more counterproductive than not, but everyone else (including their people manager) thinks they're alright?
  - jklm 8y ago
    There are a couple ways you can look at this situation: - There generally isn’t an ‘optimal’ solution, but there are a lot of solutions with tradeoffs. - Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and gravitate towards different molds. - People aren’t born perfect, but what they can do is grow. How can you help them do that?
  - jupp0r 8y ago
    Try to mentor them. If all the code you see is like that you’re in the wrong spot.
yaniv_aknin 8y ago
I think it's pretty common to talk about "management career path" and "tech lead / architect career path", and I think it's a mistake. I think there should be three paths: manager, TL/architect, and individual contributor. I wish Google (I work there, opinions my own) had three ladder flavours for engineers, not two. If we did that, in Google terms (ref. http://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi), I think: - the IC ladder should go from L3-L6, maybe L7 - the TL/architect ladder should go from L5-L11 (note overlap with IC) - the Management ladder should go from from L5-SVP/CEO (I don't know the numbers for SVP, but I'm guessing ~13 or so...).
- deleted 8y ago
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netmonk 8y ago
This is what happens when management is valuated more glorious than any other activity. Systems and hierarchies therefore tend to reward good performances with what they considers as good recompense: management position. This mindset bias is everywhere, first i noticed it in my european university, where the good teachers were promoted to high responsabilities position, meaning more and more administrative workload and far lesser time for teaching. Leading to the vicious situation where the teacher was not teaching anymore and not happy with his position, and studend loosing a good teacher and having to face less capable teachers. Using management position as a reward should be only used for wanabee managers.
- mooreds 8y ago
  > This is what happens when management is valuated more glorious than any other activity. Why might management be more valued by the organization? Perhaps because it produces more value for the organization? A manager who enables 10 developers to achieve a goal (as mentioned in the post) is going to be more valuable to the organization than the same person who cranks out a bunch of code. That's the reason for the prestige and money. Now, there are two answers to my argument. Either the organization is correct in valuing managers more highly, in which case if you want to stay an individual contributor, you should accept less pay and prestige. Or the organization is incorrect. The costs to the organization of people being unhappy or leaving are such that the additional value from them leading a project evaporates (in the long run). In which case this should be revealed and hopefully good organizations will make adjustments. As other people have pointed out in other thread, Google does something like this.
giorgioz 8y ago
The author Rob Walling co-hosts the podcast Startups for the rest of us: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com which is the best podcast I know of about bootstrapped startups.
billions 8y ago
When you understand how few lines of code create the business you work for, you realize the value is in taking risks on new product lines, which, are politically discouraged by most companies. for example, google.com could fire all employees tomorrow and still dominate search $ for 10 years based on an idea from 1999.
ianrathbone 8y ago
I remember starting as a developer wanting to be respected by my elders, and just looking to become senior as soon as possible. I got it and didn't feel very different. I jumped at an opportunity to manage the software department and enjoyed the managerial side and representing the team within the rest of the company. I didn't like the politics and I didn't like knowing what I started to know about the company itself. A pretty big weight that took it's toll. Most of all I missed coding, I wasn't doing it enough and I started to fall behind on the industry. The idea of a Lead role is something I courted but then realised it may not be rewarding. I'd like to know how other lead's find their role...
- ido 8y ago
  When I worked as a lead most often I would: * sit in a lot of meetings with management/other departments * try to filter company politics from my team (thus absorbing it myself) * would try to find what work would be most suitable and rewarding (considering interest & future growth) for each of my developers, thus in practice ending up with the most boring bug-fix & other maintenance tasks myself * participating in a lot of project-management as well as people-management of my direct reports (weekly one on ones, conflict resolution, planning career growth, etc) In practice I found the role of Principle Developer much more rewarding.
Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
Funnily enough, it's the same thing in academia/research. You get into it because you like doing research and you (think you) are good at it. And if you are really good (and have a healthy dose of luck), eventually you progress to being a professor, you are principal investigator of some projects, and you find out that your job now consists mainly of managing a group of people -even if you aren't especially good at management and haven't been trained for it- and writing grant applications, and you have almost no time for actual research. The difference is that in academia is not an explicit promotion that moves you from research to management, but more of a boiling frog kind of situation where you gradually do less and less research and more and more management - or at least this has been my experience.
Jach 8y ago
The machine is a companion and safeguard against swallowing too much of my own BS, or the BS of others that I get involved with. I'm unhappy without that level of feedback being frequent. Even declaring for Crocker's Rules doesn't get you really honest feedback from humans. It's really gross that the higher you go up the tech IC ladder the less you code. Your opinions also somehow matter more even though you're furthest removed from knowing if they're valid.
GnarfGnarf 8y ago
I've been writing code since 1965 and have been fortunate to have evaded management. I'm still writing code and it's the funnest job there is.
biofox 8y ago
Whenever this topic comes up, I'm always reminded of James T. Kirk after his promotion to admiral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL9Dl0i1Ef8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL9Dl0i1Ef8
cryptica 8y ago
I cannot relate to this article at all. It's the polar opposite of my experience. I've been desperately trying to get into a management position for years. I started programming at age 14 and am now approaching 30. I created projects using basically every major programming language, created and maintained a complex open source project which now has over 5K GitHub stars and several tens of thousands of weekly downloads. I have experience managing the community around the source project and doing peer reviews. Feedback from the community is overwhelmingly positive. I can't even make a consulting business around the project because it works too well, the documentation is good and the community is very helpful. I got passed up for promotion many times - In spite of consistently delivering beyond all expectations and despite my background as a long time open source developer. I've had people younger and less experienced than me get promoted above me twice! First time this happened, I quit the company about 1 month later (they were very upset/regretful when I handed my resignation). Then it happened to me again at my current company - In spite of the fact that they are using my open source software as the core of their product (since before I joined). Even the biggest competitors of my current company started using my OSS project. Still no promotion. WTF do I have to do to get promoted? I've told the CTO multiple times that I want a promotion so it's not like they don't know.
- option_greek 8y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, why do you want to be a manager ? Aren't there promotion opportunities in dev track ? PS: Please do go with the support plan route for your open source project. You wouldn't know how it will turnout unless you try.
  - johannes1234321 8y ago
    > PS: Please do go with the support plan route for your open source project. You wouldn't know how it will turnout unless you try. But mind that there are more scenarios than "works out" and "doesn't work out". It might also for instance be that you get some customers, but too few to pay the bills, but too many to switch of the light. It might also be that suddenly paying customers demand the project to go a different route than you (and the contributing community) envision. Both of these can bring major tension to something, which had been fun before ... Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, but be prepared for it, to keep it on a track you're happy with.
austincheney 8y ago
I actually enjoy management even when it means more administration at sacrifice to writing code. What I don't like is when I am mentoring a junior on best practices or techniques to increase their performance or the performance of their code and they get defensive to the point of becoming an insubordinate ass. I understand there is a lot of defensiveness in development, but in the corporate world I expect everyone to be an adult. I also expect junior developers can read, write, and follow simple instructions but I have been surprised by that as well.
- badfrog 8y ago
  It sounds like you're not a very good manager, unfortunately. One of the most important things a manager does is understand how to communicate productively with each of their reports. If you have reports whom you believe cannot "follow simple instructions", your first response should be to re-evaluate the way that you provide guidance to that person, not to decide that they're "an insubordinate ass".
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Should I use crayons and coloring books? That was actually a half serious question. For what developers are paid basic literacy is a safe assumption.
    - option_greek 8y ago
      Just trying to be helpful: You come across as a know-it-all and patronizing in the above two comments alone. May be you can start by recognizing that developers are not your extra sets of arms to code stuff. You should limit your self to clearly communicating objectives and measuring them rather than guiding devs (micro-managing ?) at every step.
alkonaut 8y ago
I have rejected any calls for leadership positions which would mean I’d code less than 90% of my time. It might have cost me some money but it sure means I can do what I love and I have less than 1h of meetings every week. I still try to do technical leadership (architecture, coding standards, evaluating new products etc) but not people management.
jrochkind1 8y ago
What do people think about "technical lead" roles?
dugluak 8y ago
OP should consider working on some coding side projects and keep his passion alive. Consider the day job as just a means to pay bills.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  In my experience, this works when you're younger, but as you age, you tend to accumulate responsibilities that take up a lot of your remaining energy. YMMV though.
zerr 8y ago
But eventually he jumped into marketing.
narnianal 8y ago
If you are a good developer, you are probably smart, right? So why would a smart person let something happen to him that he can't fix? Would it be possible for a dev manager to apply as senior dev in another company? I think they are not unhappy. They just don't want to admit it. Either they really enjoy this additional human interaction, or they actually really found coding stressful or meaningless. But of course it helps them bond with their engineers more if they can show that despite their +120% income and despite their more beautiful house and wife, and despite having more power they actually suffer because they are not a fellow developer anymore. One can also argue that the developer who stays developer his whole career is actually not someone who was overlooked at promotions, but someone who really enjoys the coding grind, the low amount of visibility and the low amount of responsibility. But the bonding with their friends is much higher if they can hate on the management together instead of admiting that they actually like what they do and how they do it. Altogether these realizations made me more relaxed about life. In the end it's not that the world is full of suffering, but we actually choose the suffering that makes us most happy.
2sk21 8y ago
Make a lot of money doing boring management work for a large company. Save as much of it as you can and retire early. Then code as much as you want - thats my plan at least :-)
makecheck 8y ago
“Promote developers who demonstrate management skills instead of top notch development skills.” Instead of? No, that would just make developers think that software skills aren’t valued at all. There should be multiple equally-prestigious paths so that there is some way to publicly recognize star developers without turning them into managers.
gumby 8y ago
Some companies specifically work to avoid this by having two "tracks": a management track and a technical track. The management track has many titrated ranks (manager..assistant director...) while the technical one still has salary increases and fewer ostensible title "promotions". So an IBM fellow is as prestigious as being a Sr VP or maybe GM, yet the holders didn't climb the "greasy pole" required of traditional management. I believe IBM was the originator of this approach, but could be wrong.
giant_g2 8y ago
I call BS - you make too much sense to be a manager.

313 points by spking 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Discussed, a bit, at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32752

Nowhere it says - we cannot program when we become a manager. What if managers continue to make 0s & 1s dance - half of the time if not full time? Wouldn't that be productive & fun? I would say world is changing towards this side. I have heard stories where VPs & SVPs in big enterprises write code & lead their teams by example.

davidlinc1 8y ago
The problem arises when you are evaluated based on your managerial responsibilities. The more time spent writing code, the less time you have to manage others. If they wanted you to build things, they probably wouldn't have put you in management in the first place.
burlesona 8y ago
I think this is a question of scale and hours in the day. In my experience when the team grows past 5 it gets difficult to do all the leadership things that “clear the road” for the team and also have enough focused time for effective programming. But at the same time, once you’re at that point, if you stop coding you can now handle another 5-10 direct reports. So you have to chose between keeping independent teams quite small with team leads who code, or with allowing bigger teams with a dedicated manager. The scaling characteristics of those two patterns are different, because inter-team collaboration is pretty much always worse than intra-team, so the small teams are more effective if they are as independent as possible. If not you end up needing an extra manager to coordinate amongst the small teams... and now you have managers who don’t code.

tracer4201 8y ago

I’m in a senior level engineering role at one of the big tech companies. I was more than happy to receive the promotion, but the time I spent coding has certainly decreased a large chunk. I spend a lot of my time now facilitating projects across organizations, providing guidance to more junior engineers on architecture, sending emails and status updates, etc. at least that’s the norm on my current team. Not long ago, I would be heads down in code all day everyday. My world was laser focused on getting out 1-2 code reviews a day, shipping small features. It paid substantially less, but I really wasn’t responsible for projects or deliveries. Business people want a feature? Great... here’s a t-shirt size estimate. Heh.

United857 8y ago

Thankfully, many if not most top tech companies in the valley realize this and have parallel management and IC tracks (at least for software engineers), with compensation the same. That said, even as an IC, at higher levels the scope of impact you're expected to deliver at some point exceeds what one person working alone can have, so there's still lots of people leadership skills needed to advance: working cross-functionally and setting direction, communication, and ultimately influencing others to jump onboard and help you out. (Note that this is different from people management -- e.g. formal coaching, performance reviews, dealing with HR/org/budget issues, etc.)

opportune 8y ago
Many in theory have parallel tracks but in practice it seems either the vast majority choose to go into management or that it takes a more exceptional individual to progress in the IC track (my money is on #2). IMO you don’t really need to be an above average person to reach the second layer of management, just put in your time and not fuck up, but everyone I know who hit the same level as IC was exceptionally bright and was like that long before they hit that level
- deleted 8y ago
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- maxxxxx 8y ago
  In my company it's certainly the case that in order to progress on the technical track you need to be extremely good and more importantly on the right projects. I see a lot of mediocre people advance on the management track but only very few advance above a certain level on the technical track. Considering that salary is directly tied to a person's rank I think it's a very rational decision to go into management even if that's not your inclination.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    This really depends on the company. I know senior ICs who make a bit more money than the managers they report to.

rurban 8y ago

In my previous company all the senior engineers took a few juniors under their umbrella and had very informal one-on-ones with them, just to bypass the troubles with non-technical managers. Hereby I as senior could give practical advices, eg how to deal with politics, without having to go into politics, excel and powerpoint and meeting-hell by myself. This way the good senior devs didn't had to be promoted to management roles they didn't want, and the bad devs didn't get promoted to senior not to fuck up the juniors with bad advice.

mk89 8y ago
You kind of described a highly disfunctional company, where you as a senior sw engineer literally had the power and authority to choose who would get promoted and who wouldn't.
- rurban 8y ago
  No, I never talked with my manager about anything I talked with my juniors. I only advised my juniors how to deal best with managers, but mostly we talked about code. It was a highly functional company until they changed the dev manager, then it went downhill immediately. Political middle managers soon took over everything, and all the seniors left.
- JAT123 8y ago
  I think what he is saying is not particularly uncommon. Several of the orgs I have worked at have expectation that a senior developer will help juniors, whether that's formalized as a line management and 1 to 1s or informal mentoring. Tbh expecting to be a senior developer and not give any time towards leveling up the next generation of software practitioners is both selfish and short sighted.

revvx 8y ago

A solution for that is promoting the best developers that don't want to manage into technical leadership roles. They can still create things and impact the team positively, and will not suffer with managerial tasks. > if Willie Mays played for your baseball team would you promote him to manager? I don't know who Willie Mays is (not in the US), but I'm pretty sure elite athletes get top notch salaries, a lot of times bigger than managers or coaches. People shouldn't need hierarchy just to remain professional and follow someone else's lead.

ravedave5 8y ago

I've enjoyed the challenges that each level of promotion bring. That said my company has always allowed coding all the way up to top-level architect.

democracy 8y ago

You stay in the company long enough and you write less code and spend more time managing people and processes as now you own your projects as the most knowledgable person for these projects. You start hating it (I did) and look for a pure programming role. But you are not in your twenties any more and you have to align with and follow someone else's designs and decisions and you can't since you are experienced and know more and you have to push back and argue and end up going to lead/architect role again and writing less code again.

deleted 8y ago
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sigstoat 8y ago
> you have to push back and argue no, you don't.
- wolco 8y ago
  Exactly. Mistakes need to be made over and over again. Do not try to stop this force.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Then what is the point? Are you just there to gather your paycheck? I mean, to an extend, yes. But you need to be able to excert some positive effect.
    - billions 8y ago
      big companies do not innovate. (counter examples welcome!) unless you’re in a 1-20 person startup, your impact is -5% to +5% as a division. Essentially you’re stroking egos: yours or management’s. best to choose the latter and try your hand at changing the world in after-work projects.
      - lugg 8y ago

dub 8y ago

This feels like a variation of the Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) The Peter Principle says people who are good at their jobs will keep getting promoted until they reach a role they're not good at. In this variation, people get promoted until they reach a role they don't enjoy and eventually leave.

wjossey 8y ago

I’ve been reviewing a lot of career path documents recently for different engineering orgs, and every one is fairly uniform in that you either progress into management, team leadership, or architecture (or some blend of the three). If not, you’ll stagnate at a pretty high level, but stagnate none the less. I’ve been noodling on this for a while, and I think maybe a fourth track at a lot of organizations should be special projects. Small teams (3 people max) given autonomy and clear objectives (revenue goals, user growth goals, etc). For a pre existing company, this likely means “hacking” on an existing product, experimenting on something new, tackling huge debt... Pick your poison. This is a fine middle ground for someone with a lot of experience who doesn’t want to manage, but still wants some growth opportunities. For many people who don’t want to manage or be an architect, autonomy is the number one thing I regularly hear. So, give them the autonomy and some ground rules, then let them loose.

augbog 8y ago
This sounds fucking awesome and would definitely make me want to stay as an engineer.
heipei 8y ago
Thank you for saying that, this was exactly my conclusion when reviewing my own goals and notes on how other companies build products. If your company doesn't have this special-projects track in place, then your only option at some point is to quit and start your own thing I'm afraid.
- blub 8y ago
  ...or move into architecture or management. That seems like the more reasonable thing compared to playing the start-up lottery.
  - heipei 8y ago
    Yeah, but parent mentioned "autonomy" as the driving force for people who'd want this track, and I'm very much in the same situation. Management or architecture won't give you the same level as autonomy as working in one of these small "Tiger teams" (thanks to sibling for pointing out that term)

Aloha 8y ago

For many developers, they turn out to be good at project management, its not much different conceptually than being an architect, this issue is, once you 'level up' you're expected to stay there, rather than moving back to develop for some period of time, and letting the next guy get tapped for project management - It think more companies rotated those roles around, they'd see greater retention, greater employee happiness, and probably lower costs - as an engineer, I don't want to be a PM forever, but I might be happy spending 1/3rd of my time over a given long term period wearing that hat.

orthoxerox 8y ago
> its not much different conceptually than being an architect I don't know where you are from, but in my experience the roles are very different. As an architect you have to provide technical guidance over a domain that you know like the back of your hand. As a PM, you have to manage a project that straddles multiple domains, some of which are completely alien to you, and you are explicitly limited by the scope, deadlines and your budget. As a PM, you have to trust (and goad) multiple experts if you want to get anywhere.

burlesona 8y ago

I think it has a lot to do with wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have. One person can only hold so large of a program (or so many small programs) in their head, and if you are on a project that reaches a certain size you have to start working with other humans to maintain it, and thus the need for technical leadership and/or people management begins. One of the basic ideas of good management is that a good manager is a multiplier. Suppose you have a team of ten, and individually they can each ship 8 “points” of work in a week. If you turn one of those people into a great manager you lose 8 points of direct work, but everyone else now ships 12 points per week, and you’ve gone from 80 to 108 points in a week. You could now say the manager is responsible for the 28 point gain. Similarly with a technical leadership role, doing the architecture and teaching work can multiply the effectiveness of many other people, leading to greater impact than any one individual could have. When you look at it like this, it’s obvious why these higher impact “multiplier” roles get more prestige and pay than the best individual coders. And I think that’s the dilemma. The real question - for many of us, anyway - is do you gain more satisfaction from the higher impact role and the perks that come with it, or from the sheer joy of the hands-on work that got you into this field in the first place. Its really difficult. I saw some other posters talking about rotating the responsibilities around - ie. leading sometimes and working in the trenches sometimes, and I really understand the appeal of that. That said, I’m not sure if it’s practical beyond the first “rung of the leadership ladder” or so, because leadership is itself a very challenging craft that takes a lot of focus and effort to master. What appeals to me more, but I haven’t seen yet in practice, is for orgs to let their technical leadership (both on the architect and people management sides) take periodic “coding sabbaticals,” or something along those lines. The main idea being that periodic returns to the hands-on work will help keep you sharp, up-to-date, and effective as a technical leader. The biggest problem with that is that it’s not always easy to just plug a “substitute leader” into the org chart while you’re on sabbatical.

deleted 8y ago
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revvx 8y ago
> Supposing you literally “just write code,” there’s a ceiling to how much impact you can have I'm don't see why a single person can't have a ton of impact merely as a coder. I mean, this whole website is dedicated to (mostly) discussing tech startups and how (mostly) software disrupts and help scale outdated business models. Isn't the software-making business model also ripe for that disruption, at least in a smaller scale? Couldn't a single coder (or a small team) help an organization get some competitive advantage when it comes to tools. Or even programming languages? Why does ALL the innovation has to come from outside in our industry? Fred Brooks talks about "The Toolsmith" it the "Surgical Team" chapter in Mythical Man-Month, and how "the tool-builder will often construct specialized utilities, catalogued procedures, macro libraries". Facebook made React, Apple made Swift, Google has dozens of those. And the teams doing those tools aren't that huge. Why don't we try new things instead of letting good coders go away or making them stop coding?

macando 8y ago

Every time this topic surfaces project management in the form of politics and pushing tickets through Trello is presented as the only option available to engineers. To me, a more natural progression is going into product management. It's a nice intersection of management, product design and engineering. From a job description: "We’re looking for a product leader to join a fast-paced and transformational start-up to manage various fraud and identity initiatives. While managing product development, The Director of Product, Fraud and Identity will analyze, investigate, and identify solutions to mitigate and prevent fraud and identity compromises. This individual is responsible for developing features, platforms, models, and capabilities to proactively identify sources and patterns of fraud and minimize the company’s total exposure to financial and reputational risk. The product leader will develop and execute a long-term vision that will establish Lyft, and its systems, as the industry leader in fraud management, mitigation, and identity-based capabilities and services." Are engineers not interested in product management? Or are those roles not available to them?

mixmastamyk 8y ago
Can’t say definitively, but know that these days if your resume has X and they are looking for Y it’s a no-go. Even when X overlaps Y significantly. Hard to even get a job as a programmer in one language with experience in another.

bartimus 8y ago

I'm surprised how these traditional organizational structures still exist so strongly today. It sometimes feels like the whole agile/lean revolution (with self-managed teams) never happened.

jaabe 8y ago
The agile revolution never happened because it’s just not how people buy things. Hell, I don’t even think it’s how we build them. I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries, because from a buyers perspective, that’s exactly how we want to buy software. We point out some items on the menu, and we expect them to be delivered together, on time and to our specified demands. The person taking our order, and making it happen is the project manager who makes the different cooks do their stuff in coordination and also the person who puts shit together on a tray. That’s exactly how people buy software, or at least how they expect to buy it. Only software is more complicated, and developers keep failing to deliver the ordered project on time. Agile was supposed to help on this, but it hasn’t. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but I work in the public sector, we track and benchmark the hell out of these things for a bureaucracy that probably never reads the reports. Anyway, agile suppliers fail as often as non agile suppliers, and they have the added problem of wanting to sell us promises. I mean, a true agile contract can’t specify requirements, cost and time at once, but how the hell can you ever enter a contract that doesn’t? So they typically end up mixing non-agile sales with agile development. I’d like to note, that we have actually entered into truly agile contracts. Being a digitisation unit in an organisation that largely doesn’t understand digitisation gives you a lot of freedom after all. Only agile wasn’t better, in fact it’s been a lot worse, every time. In our decade long experience, the only thing that truly works, is when management or project management knows how to make the damn burgers. Which unfortunately means that you need to promote a few developers into unhappiness.
- bartimus 8y ago
  > I love the analogy of a burger joint and ordering a burger with fries I would like to argue that the burger joint is actually very agile. The person taking the order isn't the project manager. He just has the role of placing the order on the kanban board. From hereon the rest of the people all take their self-managed roles to fulfill the order. You can point out such agile (lean) processes throughout the entire delivery chain. > Agile was supposed to help on this, but it hasn’t. My experience has been exactly the opposite. Those companies that managed to achieve a true agile process (or achieved an agile bubble inside a structured organization) were making the best progress. What I do see, however, is many companies misinterpreting agile. Especially Scrum. They see Scrum as a method for ticking off the to-do list provided by the product owner. I've seen project managers posing as scrum masters and project managers posing as product owners. It's still top-down management and the team is expected to follow orders. They don't seem to understand the principles of the sprint goal or how it's actually the development team that ought to own the sprint backlog. They never really did scrum. > I mean, a true agile contract can’t specify requirements, cost and time at once This is indeed a challenge. You can - at most - sell sprints. With agile you say: "You have the dev team for this amount of time". It's an uncertainty for the client. But in my experience this has always led to the most bang for the buck. I'm surprised you haven't experienced these results? > Which unfortunately means that you need to promote a few developers into unhappiness This perhaps is an argument in favor of agile. Those project managers indeed need to know how to make those damn burgers. Then why not just make them your lead dev (chef-cook)?

qetuo13579 8y ago

My boss is engineering manager at our company of 60 people (he leads 16 engineers) and still finds time to get down in the weeds solving tech problems in addition to managing us. I’m his number 2, based in another country and am responsible for managing/supervising 7 engineers. I too am expected to do development work AND management of the team.

deleted 8y ago

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eight_ender 8y ago

I wrote code like a madman and then went into management. I like management, but I understand what the author of this article was getting at. I had an identity crisis early on doing management. I liked to tell people what to do, because I had a big map in my head of where things should go. Because of this developers sort of organically gravitated to me for guidance even before I had the official job. However, I also liked to write a lot of code. Once I was promoted to management I quickly realized just how much "not coding" that job requires. I struggled with not coding as much. I struggled with wanting to micro manage my staff. I struggled with wanting to write their code for them. I had juniors on my team and I wanted to snatch the keyboard from them and write their code for them. The defining moment for me was one day, while watching one of my developers deploy something magnificent, that I realized I don't necessarily like to "build things", I like to "see things built". I like to see people succeed. I like to see a scribble on a napkin become a tangible piece of software. Code was a means to an end for me. I won't lie and say I don't miss coding full time. I still get right in there when I can, but I step aside when I know my management duties are going to let the team down. One thing I don't feel is guilty about not coding as much anymore.

ramraj07 8y ago
So how DO you deal with people under you writing code under you that just boils your blood? Especially if you instinctually see that their contributions are always more counterproductive than not, but everyone else (including their people manager) thinks they're alright?
- jklm 8y ago
  There are a couple ways you can look at this situation: - There generally isn’t an ‘optimal’ solution, but there are a lot of solutions with tradeoffs. - Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and gravitate towards different molds. - People aren’t born perfect, but what they can do is grow. How can you help them do that?
- jupp0r 8y ago
  Try to mentor them. If all the code you see is like that you’re in the wrong spot.

yaniv_aknin 8y ago

I think it's pretty common to talk about "management career path" and "tech lead / architect career path", and I think it's a mistake. I think there should be three paths: manager, TL/architect, and individual contributor. I wish Google (I work there, opinions my own) had three ladder flavours for engineers, not two. If we did that, in Google terms (ref. http://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi), I think: - the IC ladder should go from L3-L6, maybe L7 - the TL/architect ladder should go from L5-L11 (note overlap with IC) - the Management ladder should go from from L5-SVP/CEO (I don't know the numbers for SVP, but I'm guessing ~13 or so...).

deleted 8y ago
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netmonk 8y ago

This is what happens when management is valuated more glorious than any other activity. Systems and hierarchies therefore tend to reward good performances with what they considers as good recompense: management position. This mindset bias is everywhere, first i noticed it in my european university, where the good teachers were promoted to high responsabilities position, meaning more and more administrative workload and far lesser time for teaching. Leading to the vicious situation where the teacher was not teaching anymore and not happy with his position, and studend loosing a good teacher and having to face less capable teachers. Using management position as a reward should be only used for wanabee managers.

mooreds 8y ago
> This is what happens when management is valuated more glorious than any other activity. Why might management be more valued by the organization? Perhaps because it produces more value for the organization? A manager who enables 10 developers to achieve a goal (as mentioned in the post) is going to be more valuable to the organization than the same person who cranks out a bunch of code. That's the reason for the prestige and money. Now, there are two answers to my argument. Either the organization is correct in valuing managers more highly, in which case if you want to stay an individual contributor, you should accept less pay and prestige. Or the organization is incorrect. The costs to the organization of people being unhappy or leaving are such that the additional value from them leading a project evaporates (in the long run). In which case this should be revealed and hopefully good organizations will make adjustments. As other people have pointed out in other thread, Google does something like this.

giorgioz 8y ago

The author Rob Walling co-hosts the podcast Startups for the rest of us: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com which is the best podcast I know of about bootstrapped startups.

billions 8y ago

When you understand how few lines of code create the business you work for, you realize the value is in taking risks on new product lines, which, are politically discouraged by most companies. for example, google.com could fire all employees tomorrow and still dominate search $ for 10 years based on an idea from 1999.

ianrathbone 8y ago

I remember starting as a developer wanting to be respected by my elders, and just looking to become senior as soon as possible. I got it and didn't feel very different. I jumped at an opportunity to manage the software department and enjoyed the managerial side and representing the team within the rest of the company. I didn't like the politics and I didn't like knowing what I started to know about the company itself. A pretty big weight that took it's toll. Most of all I missed coding, I wasn't doing it enough and I started to fall behind on the industry. The idea of a Lead role is something I courted but then realised it may not be rewarding. I'd like to know how other lead's find their role...

ido 8y ago
When I worked as a lead most often I would: * sit in a lot of meetings with management/other departments * try to filter company politics from my team (thus absorbing it myself) * would try to find what work would be most suitable and rewarding (considering interest & future growth) for each of my developers, thus in practice ending up with the most boring bug-fix & other maintenance tasks myself * participating in a lot of project-management as well as people-management of my direct reports (weekly one on ones, conflict resolution, planning career growth, etc) In practice I found the role of Principle Developer much more rewarding.

Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago

Funnily enough, it's the same thing in academia/research. You get into it because you like doing research and you (think you) are good at it. And if you are really good (and have a healthy dose of luck), eventually you progress to being a professor, you are principal investigator of some projects, and you find out that your job now consists mainly of managing a group of people -even if you aren't especially good at management and haven't been trained for it- and writing grant applications, and you have almost no time for actual research. The difference is that in academia is not an explicit promotion that moves you from research to management, but more of a boiling frog kind of situation where you gradually do less and less research and more and more management - or at least this has been my experience.

Jach 8y ago

The machine is a companion and safeguard against swallowing too much of my own BS, or the BS of others that I get involved with. I'm unhappy without that level of feedback being frequent. Even declaring for Crocker's Rules doesn't get you really honest feedback from humans. It's really gross that the higher you go up the tech IC ladder the less you code. Your opinions also somehow matter more even though you're furthest removed from knowing if they're valid.

GnarfGnarf 8y ago

I've been writing code since 1965 and have been fortunate to have evaded management. I'm still writing code and it's the funnest job there is.

biofox 8y ago

Whenever this topic comes up, I'm always reminded of James T. Kirk after his promotion to admiral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL9Dl0i1Ef8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL9Dl0i1Ef8

cryptica 8y ago

I cannot relate to this article at all. It's the polar opposite of my experience. I've been desperately trying to get into a management position for years. I started programming at age 14 and am now approaching 30. I created projects using basically every major programming language, created and maintained a complex open source project which now has over 5K GitHub stars and several tens of thousands of weekly downloads. I have experience managing the community around the source project and doing peer reviews. Feedback from the community is overwhelmingly positive. I can't even make a consulting business around the project because it works too well, the documentation is good and the community is very helpful. I got passed up for promotion many times - In spite of consistently delivering beyond all expectations and despite my background as a long time open source developer. I've had people younger and less experienced than me get promoted above me twice! First time this happened, I quit the company about 1 month later (they were very upset/regretful when I handed my resignation). Then it happened to me again at my current company - In spite of the fact that they are using my open source software as the core of their product (since before I joined). Even the biggest competitors of my current company started using my OSS project. Still no promotion. WTF do I have to do to get promoted? I've told the CTO multiple times that I want a promotion so it's not like they don't know.

option_greek 8y ago
If you don't mind me asking, why do you want to be a manager ? Aren't there promotion opportunities in dev track ? PS: Please do go with the support plan route for your open source project. You wouldn't know how it will turnout unless you try.
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  > PS: Please do go with the support plan route for your open source project. You wouldn't know how it will turnout unless you try. But mind that there are more scenarios than "works out" and "doesn't work out". It might also for instance be that you get some customers, but too few to pay the bills, but too many to switch of the light. It might also be that suddenly paying customers demand the project to go a different route than you (and the contributing community) envision. Both of these can bring major tension to something, which had been fun before ... Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile, but be prepared for it, to keep it on a track you're happy with.

austincheney 8y ago

I actually enjoy management even when it means more administration at sacrifice to writing code. What I don't like is when I am mentoring a junior on best practices or techniques to increase their performance or the performance of their code and they get defensive to the point of becoming an insubordinate ass. I understand there is a lot of defensiveness in development, but in the corporate world I expect everyone to be an adult. I also expect junior developers can read, write, and follow simple instructions but I have been surprised by that as well.

badfrog 8y ago
It sounds like you're not a very good manager, unfortunately. One of the most important things a manager does is understand how to communicate productively with each of their reports. If you have reports whom you believe cannot "follow simple instructions", your first response should be to re-evaluate the way that you provide guidance to that person, not to decide that they're "an insubordinate ass".
- austincheney 8y ago
  Should I use crayons and coloring books? That was actually a half serious question. For what developers are paid basic literacy is a safe assumption.
  - option_greek 8y ago
    Just trying to be helpful: You come across as a know-it-all and patronizing in the above two comments alone. May be you can start by recognizing that developers are not your extra sets of arms to code stuff. You should limit your self to clearly communicating objectives and measuring them rather than guiding devs (micro-managing ?) at every step.

alkonaut 8y ago

I have rejected any calls for leadership positions which would mean I’d code less than 90% of my time. It might have cost me some money but it sure means I can do what I love and I have less than 1h of meetings every week. I still try to do technical leadership (architecture, coding standards, evaluating new products etc) but not people management.

jrochkind1 8y ago

What do people think about "technical lead" roles?

dugluak 8y ago

OP should consider working on some coding side projects and keep his passion alive. Consider the day job as just a means to pay bills.

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
In my experience, this works when you're younger, but as you age, you tend to accumulate responsibilities that take up a lot of your remaining energy. YMMV though.

zerr 8y ago

But eventually he jumped into marketing.

narnianal 8y ago

If you are a good developer, you are probably smart, right? So why would a smart person let something happen to him that he can't fix? Would it be possible for a dev manager to apply as senior dev in another company? I think they are not unhappy. They just don't want to admit it. Either they really enjoy this additional human interaction, or they actually really found coding stressful or meaningless. But of course it helps them bond with their engineers more if they can show that despite their +120% income and despite their more beautiful house and wife, and despite having more power they actually suffer because they are not a fellow developer anymore. One can also argue that the developer who stays developer his whole career is actually not someone who was overlooked at promotions, but someone who really enjoys the coding grind, the low amount of visibility and the low amount of responsibility. But the bonding with their friends is much higher if they can hate on the management together instead of admiting that they actually like what they do and how they do it. Altogether these realizations made me more relaxed about life. In the end it's not that the world is full of suffering, but we actually choose the suffering that makes us most happy.

2sk21 8y ago

Make a lot of money doing boring management work for a large company. Save as much of it as you can and retire early. Then code as much as you want - thats my plan at least :-)

makecheck 8y ago

“Promote developers who demonstrate management skills instead of top notch development skills.” Instead of? No, that would just make developers think that software skills aren’t valued at all. There should be multiple equally-prestigious paths so that there is some way to publicly recognize star developers without turning them into managers.

gumby 8y ago

Some companies specifically work to avoid this by having two "tracks": a management track and a technical track. The management track has many titrated ranks (manager..assistant director...) while the technical one still has salary increases and fewer ostensible title "promotions". So an IBM fellow is as prestigious as being a Sr VP or maybe GM, yet the holders didn't climb the "greasy pole" required of traditional management. I believe IBM was the originator of this approach, but could be wrong.

giant_g2 8y ago

I call BS - you make too much sense to be a manager.