Ask HN: Lead developer but I just don't enjoy management

It depends on if you want to continue to grow your income above inflation. As a salaried employee, to grow your income (salary - we're not talking about flipping houses), you need to be 'promoted'. Promotion works by taking responsibilites beyond your current role. For a lead dev, those additional responsibilities are things like people (clients and more junior technical staff), operational (making sure that someone is there when the system falls over at 3 a.m.), and others (e.g. taking on responsibility for information security, compliance). In a small business, the biggest need is for people-project-task management.

Assuming you don't want to suck it up and keep doing management you have three options:

* You can choose not to be 'promoted', where you'll be happy in your job, but your salary stagnates.

* You can hoose to move to a larger organisation, where you can be 'promoted' and add significant value without all the management stuff that you don't enjoy, but those jobs are in short supply and competitive.

* You can keep job-hopping as a senior dev, and keep pushing your salary up with each jump.

You just don't want to be in the position you are in now to start. I am currently in a similar position that you are in. Where you get spread really thin due to your specialist role in just about anything. If you don't want to be in management long term you need to let them know that and get your role changed. I find it is hard to do this though because as long as you are at the same company you will always get requests that are unique to you and distracting. The only way to truly dismiss that is to leave.

Spending a lot of time doing things like you are doing causes your marketable development skills to decay over time. If you did spend the 5 years of your life like that, and decided you wanted to move on and wanted a staff engineer/lead position you would be up against people that are doing mostly software development most of the time.

Same boat as you, tried for a decade to figure it out, tried many of the suggestions here, eventually gave up and switched to starting small startups and then when they start to grow past a certain point, transitioning to someone else and then moving on to a new company.

A lot of people are just really good at different stages of a company's growth. Me, I'm good at starting from scratch and going until we've shipped the first few major versions of a product or service and have a small but significant number of paying customers. I like the chaos, the blank slate, and I'm not overwhelmed by analysis paralysis on what we should do. I love being involved in everything and wearing lots of hats, and being knee deep in both architecture and development.

Other people are far, far better than me at taking it from there and growing it to "enterprise" level and having 1000s of paying customers. They are good at taking things that were owned by one person and growing a team around it, filling in the feature gaps, etc. They are good at maturing the company's organizational structure as well as the product offering.

Once I had the lightbulb moment that (a) I wasn't very good at those later stages and that (b) I had zero interest in becoming better at them, it allowed me to choose a more compatible career path and made me way happier. Thinking of it as a relay race has also helped me do better at planning ahead for the eventual transition. Just one example: I do much better now at preserving documentation around a lot of our original thinking/planning, especially tradeoff discussions of now vs later things.

Have you talked to upper management? If they value you and your work, they will probably allow you this (though likely with some cut in pay). My former manager actually went through the same issue. He was one of the earliest employees and as the company grew the CEO reached out to him to take the lead. He took it, but more out of wanting to help out. Fast forward 5 years since then and our company has grown from a 20-odd to 100+ employees, and found all the meetings draining. And since he is so awesome at his job prior to management, and our company is still going through some growing pains, people still count on him for some work.

He confided with me that he was beyond stressed and out of his element with management. He hates telling people what to do - he wants others to tell him what to do and he knows he's a rockstar at that. He finally said screw it and had a meeting with the heads, a heart-to-heart, and accepted to take a pay cut and basically self-demote himself. He did have a side hustle though, so the pay cut wasn't so bad for him.

I've had two iron rules for the last 24 years:

- Never work with jerks (either boss, customers, coworkers...) - Never be anyone's manager

It has worked out great! I've gotten to work on a steady stream of hard problems, working right at the middle of what I'm good at, what I love, and what people are willing to pay for. And for/with great people.

The guarantee you have in choosing to write code is that you get to write code!