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This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is something I t
by nowarninglabel 12y ago
This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is something I think we struggled with for awhile at Kiva where we didn't make explicit that you could remain technical and still get promoted, so people would become Engineering Mangers only to then expect to still stay in their corner plugging away on code in the zone without interruptions. But when you are the guy tasked to train others and generally help people clear roadblocks (as managers generally are designated to do), then it hurts everyone when you instead try to hang on to a "coder only" mentality. You get frustrated cause you are getting interrupted and the people interrupting you get frustrated by getting brushed off or feeling like they are wasting your time.
Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.