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This is honestly one of the few things I miss having moved into management after coding for the first 12 years of my career. I actually don't miss the coding it

This is honestly one of the few things I miss having moved into management after coding for the first 12 years of my career. I actually don't miss the coding itself much (though I still do a bit of it as a hobby). But that feeling of working on one problem for hours at a time, wholly absorbed. There really is something amazing about it.

hi41 5y ago
Don’t tasks such as project planning, resource allocation, coordinating with people in team meetings let you get into a flow state?
- binkHN 5y ago
  Yes, but, for me, it's no where near the same. When coding, I feel like I'm very heavily leveraging working memory in my brain and, at times, this becomes almost zen like. I don't get this way with project planning.
- solipsism 5y ago
  I'm not the OP but I couldn't agree more with them. To answer your question... no they don't. Or perhaps very, very rarely. It doesn't make sense to spend hours at a time on any of those tasks, and you can't anyway because someone always needs something from you.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  No, you don't feel like you are accomplishing something difficult. I've been on both sides, coding and managing coders. To the extent that the team is doing something difficult, there's often no specific point that is "job done". When you're coding, there's a specific thing that you're trying to do that gives a certain satisfaction: there are stages of completeness that you hit (eg all the tests pass) which feel like natural checkpoints. Passing them makes you feel good. You struggle with nature, you prevail, you feel good. Before you did your thing it was broken, now it is fixed. When you're arranging stuff for a team, the actual thing you're doing doesn't provide satisfaction in the same way. Arranging meetings, setting goals, that sort of thing is a softer level of completeness. For one, there's no real failure: the meeting will happen sooner or later, the goals are kinda obvious even though they are vague (grow revenues, make a roadmap). You can't mess this up, so you can't succeed. Yes there are reckonings when you're a manager, but they're not little ones that come every day on a timescale of a few hours. With flow you need to feel like the thing you're doing is challenging. You need to be strong to break your PB in weightlifting. You need to be smart to fix that bug. There's nothing in powerpointing a slide deck where you are challenging yourself, it's mostly grind.

hi41 5y ago

Don’t tasks such as project planning, resource allocation, coordinating with people in team meetings let you get into a flow state?

binkHN 5y ago
Yes, but, for me, it's no where near the same. When coding, I feel like I'm very heavily leveraging working memory in my brain and, at times, this becomes almost zen like. I don't get this way with project planning.
solipsism 5y ago
I'm not the OP but I couldn't agree more with them. To answer your question... no they don't. Or perhaps very, very rarely. It doesn't make sense to spend hours at a time on any of those tasks, and you can't anyway because someone always needs something from you.
lordnacho 5y ago
No, you don't feel like you are accomplishing something difficult. I've been on both sides, coding and managing coders. To the extent that the team is doing something difficult, there's often no specific point that is "job done". When you're coding, there's a specific thing that you're trying to do that gives a certain satisfaction: there are stages of completeness that you hit (eg all the tests pass) which feel like natural checkpoints. Passing them makes you feel good. You struggle with nature, you prevail, you feel good. Before you did your thing it was broken, now it is fixed. When you're arranging stuff for a team, the actual thing you're doing doesn't provide satisfaction in the same way. Arranging meetings, setting goals, that sort of thing is a softer level of completeness. For one, there's no real failure: the meeting will happen sooner or later, the goals are kinda obvious even though they are vague (grow revenues, make a roadmap). You can't mess this up, so you can't succeed. Yes there are reckonings when you're a manager, but they're not little ones that come every day on a timescale of a few hours. With flow you need to feel like the thing you're doing is challenging. You need to be strong to break your PB in weightlifting. You need to be smart to fix that bug. There's nothing in powerpointing a slide deck where you are challenging yourself, it's mostly grind.