4 ms·

I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it's your duty or you have no choice, but that's

I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it's your duty or you have no choice, but that's different from wanting it). Leadership is a huge burden.

ludicity 3y ago
I agree. I should probably clarify that I only developed this urge after getting sick of seeing people get treated poorly. But I've avoided it thus far despite a few offers because almost every manager who serves as what I've heard called an "umbrella" gets terribly burned out and it affects their personal lives. PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
isoprophlex 3y ago
What about the position of a technical team lead, who sits above 3-7 devs. working together with them but with mandate from The Powers That Be: to actually push back against the grind of moving tickets left to right ASAP, making sane architectural choices instead of "lol msft says we need this", and actually teaching people to write code instead of complexity tarpits? Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power. From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible. So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state. (I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)

ludicity 3y ago

I agree. I should probably clarify that I only developed this urge after getting sick of seeing people get treated poorly. But I've avoided it thus far despite a few offers because almost every manager who serves as what I've heard called an "umbrella" gets terribly burned out and it affects their personal lives. PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.

isoprophlex 3y ago

What about the position of a technical team lead, who sits above 3-7 devs. working together with them but with mandate from The Powers That Be: to actually push back against the grind of moving tickets left to right ASAP, making sane architectural choices instead of "lol msft says we need this", and actually teaching people to write code instead of complexity tarpits? Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.

sanitycheck 3y ago
This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power. From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible. So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state. (I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)