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Management (beyond "team lead") is a fundamental shift away from being primarily a "build things" person to a "help everyone build things better" person. It's n

Management (beyond "team lead") is a fundamental shift away from being primarily a "build things" person to a "help everyone build things better" person. It's not just an advancement down a killer contributor path--it's a different path altogether. It comes with the shift in perspective that helping everyone on the team do better dwarfs your ability to do things yourself. You also take on the task of making sure everyone's individual skills and aspirations line up with the company's, that teams are developing well in parallel toward a unified vision, and so much more. Do you really want that job? If what fired you up most was your ability to kill it as an individual contributor, why not stay in that role and help hire someone else to take on the management side?

nilkn 13y ago
It sounds like he was worried that in the best case the manager would (perhaps unintentionally) get credit for his killer work and in the worst case the manager would actually hamper his work by trying to control him too much. It sounds somewhat petty, but I can sympathize because the company I work for is going through a similar transition and I've seen the strains that even a single extra manager can have on communication. If the CTO is the one who approves your raises, and now the CTO's opinion of you is not shaped by you but by reports of you created by an intermediate third-party, a lot of somewhat complex interacting variables just got introduced into the equation. If you start out at the bottom of a huge company like Google, you get used to that from the beginning. If you join a company with <=25 people and watch it grow, then you can really feel the transition sometimes.