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

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

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

oceanplexian wrote: post #70
Jemaclus wrote: post #60

Director-level here. It's great that you gave it a shot, but management isn't for everyone! In fact, when most engineers come to me and say "I want to be a manager," the first thing I say is "No, you don't." Not in a judgmental way, and not in a mean way, but more as a warning system to say "You want more money or responsibility, and management is one of many ways to get those things." The other thing I say is, "At s…

> So with all of that said, management is NOT "a part of career progression." Legally, in order to be able to do certain things in a corporation you need to be a manager, director, or VP (i.e. sign contracts). A "Staff" is a made up term that is not recognized by any legal system or secretary of state, and that person will never be able fulfill vital corporate functions. Someone who is not a manager will never be pri…

> Legally, in order to be able to do certain things in a corporation you need to be a manager, director, or VP (i.e. sign contracts).

(1) you probably mean “e.g.”, not “i.e.”, since you said “some things”, but “sign contracts” is just one thing. Latin abbreviations may be convenient compared to writing out full English words, but they aren’t interchangable.

(2) In either case, this is wrong, since even with “e.g.” it would require “sign cobtracts” to be a valid example, and its not. To sign contracts for a corporation, you need authority from the board, which it is free to give to anyone (even a non-employee). There are a few individuals or combinations that people can safely assume have such authority as long as they don’t have specific negative information, but it is much smaller than the list you provide, and not germane to who can have signing authority.

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

#72

Post by anyfoo »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #37
bpicolo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staff engineers are not a monolith. Software engineering is a huge discipline. There are staff engineers out there that do more architect/solver types of work. https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes In any case, leadership skills tend to go with the territory.

> Staff engineers are not a monolith. In my experience, all it takes is your organization to go through one "re-structure", you randomly get a new manager one day, and they have a different expectation on what staff engineer means/should do. Next thing you know, you're being expected to stop architecting so much, spend more time mentoring interns who have never coded before and got hired randomly because ______. I wo…

That's not my experience. Granted, I've only relatively recently reached staff level, but I've been working with other staff engineers (and higher) for a rather long time, including through some re-structuring. Their role seems to have stayed similar, and they still "architect".

But more generally, I think what you describe can always happen, whether you have the "staff" label attached or not. Especially when you get a new manager or management chain, they can always have a different idea of what you should be doing. If anything, I feel that as a staff level engineer I'd have more pull in resisting those changes (if unwanted) than otherwise.

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

#73

Post by grumpymouse »

zellyn wrote: post #14

I recently switched from being a manager back to the IC ("individual contributor") role. It's not an uncommon switch here where I work (Square). It wasn't an easy decision, and it took many months, but I became much happier with my job almost overnight. We're in a window—not sure how long it'll last—where the FAANG's and mid-size tech firms have well-defined and well-trodden paths for being a senior developer and _no…

I used to work for another company where it's acceptable for people to move from management to IC roles (and I wish it were possible everywhere).

They're going to do it anyway, whether it's going back to being an IC at the same company or by leaving to do it elsewhere. If it's not possible to stay they're just going to go (and presumably these are the people considered good enough to promote into management).

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

#74

Post by oceanplexian »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
oceanplexian wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So with all of that said, management is NOT "a part of career progression." Legally, in order to be able to do certain things in a corporation you need to be a manager, director, or VP (i.e. sign contracts). A "Staff" is a made up term that is not recognized by any legal system or secretary of state, and that person will never be able fulfill vital corporate functions. Someone who is not a manager will never be pri…

> Legally, in order to be able to do certain things in a corporation you need to be a manager, director, or VP (i.e. sign contracts). (1) you probably mean “e.g.”, not “i.e.”, since you said “some things”, but “sign contracts” is just one thing. Latin abbreviations may be convenient compared to writing out full English words, but they aren’t interchangable. (2) In either case, this is wrong, since even with “e.g.” it…

It’s really irrelevant that a board can give signing permission to Joe Blow - Sr. Wizard III, because the counterparty would never accept such a contract. No bank, for example, is going to write a note to a corporation that unless the person in question is clearly an officer. I only mention this because I’m on my third corporation serving as an officer.

Ignoring the pedantic bits an above, an employee will never completely climb the career ladder without a management role. You can pretend that corporate officers don’t exist, or come up with an arcane loophole that doesn’t reflect reality. It’s not really how corporations are run.

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

#75

Post by granshaw »

justanother wrote: post #63
tomhallett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of your time is spent on the sales/marketing side of pitching your consultancy services? RFPs/proposals/pitches/inbound/outbound? Where have you found the sweet spot with respect to the length of an engagement? The reason I ask - most of what you hear out there are stories of people being "freelancers" where the work is somewhat of a commodity (wordpress, webapps, etc) and they have to differentiate t…

My wife spends some time keeping my Linkedin account active, and I spend about 15 minutes a day maintaining a 'pipeline' spreadsheet and replying to inquiries about opportunities. If something gets to the introductory-call stage, I'll try and space them out so that there's no more than one per day. Generally I find that it takes about 30 days from introduction to closing a deal (sometimes longer). At the moment, I ha…

Do you do mostly staff augmentation or do you have a true speciality/niche which you get brought in to do?

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

#76

Post by d3mony »

flashgordon wrote: post #58
dbrueck wrote: post #36

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…

Damn how does one find such gigs and do so in a sustainable way?

I've gotten a lot of gigs through this site. Sustainable? hahaha

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

#77

Post by wstuartcl »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #21
dotBen wrote: post #7

In FAANG/larger companies they outline the management track and the staff engineer track. It sounds like you simply want to do the latter - so no, there is nothing wrong or unusual with what you are wanting. The problem is those roles are harder to find and grow into in smaller and even medium companies. Eng pay tops out unless you gain management responsibilities whereas at those large companies they will pay staff…

> and the staff engineer track. It sounds like you simply want to do the latter - so no, there is nothing wrong or unusual with what you are wanting. I could be wrong but it sounds like the OP doesn't even want to be a staff engineer (if my understanding of staff engineer is correct). https://davidxiang.com/2021/01/19/staff-software-engineer-re... I'm pretty sure you're still expected to guide other engineers (co-wor…

It really varies from role to role -- staff engineers/principals/whatever nomenclature used can be just another manager/director or a pure dev with light mentorship/heavy resource for helping with hard dev problems and designs and anywhere in-between.

Also regarding nomenclature of the titles -- its all over the place in the wild some places call jr's "staff software engineer" sometimes its seniors or principals.

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

#78

Post by jareklupinski »

In your shoes I would have an earnest conversation with the top people on the team, and see if they have any aspirations for management.

Once watched a new position grow from a manager who wanted more hands-on time and an engineer who wanted to see what it was like to lead: the engineer became the new manager, and the old manager became the 'team lead'.

IMO it worked great because now I had two people to go to for specific concerns: technical stuff to the team lead, HR stuff to the manager.

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

#79

Post by dragonwriter »

oceanplexian wrote: post #74
dragonwriter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Legally, in order to be able to do certain things in a corporation you need to be a manager, director, or VP (i.e. sign contracts). (1) you probably mean “e.g.”, not “i.e.”, since you said “some things”, but “sign contracts” is just one thing. Latin abbreviations may be convenient compared to writing out full English words, but they aren’t interchangable. (2) In either case, this is wrong, since even with “e.g.” it…

It’s really irrelevant that a board can give signing permission to Joe Blow - Sr. Wizard III, because the counterparty would never accept such a contract. No bank, for example, is going to write a note to a corporation that unless the person in question is clearly an officer. I only mention this because I’m on my third corporation serving as an officer. Ignoring the pedantic bits an above, an employee will never comp…

> It’s really irrelevant that a board can give signing permission to Joe Blow - Sr. Wizard III, because the counterparty would never accept such a contract

For significant contracts, they’ll either want proof of the existence and scope of signing authority or, without that, accept only the specific officers that the law will bind the corporation for as long as the counterparty doesn't have negative knowledge, which (in CA) is:

Acting individually: no one at all, not even the Chairman/President.

Acting together: one each of either the Chairman, President, or any Vice Preisdent and the Secretary, Chief Financial Officer, or any Assistant Secretary or Assistant Treasurer. (See, Cal. Corporations Code, § 313)

I suppose its possible that some counterparties may take risks on less significant contracts by presuming lesser titles have some signing authority without specific evidence (why, though?), but I can’t imagine that anyone whose signature alone isn’t presumptively valid under applicable state law to bind the company would ever be preferred on the basis of their title versus someone with a less impressive title and documented signing authority.

> Ignoring the pedantic bits an above, an employee will never completely climb the career ladder without a management role.

I think you are confusing a “career ladder” (of which there tend to be multiple within an institution, including, in many areas, parallel “manager” and “specialist” tracks in the same domain) with the organizational heirarchy (of which there is one, and where the very top is definitively a manager). Yes, you will never be a CEO without being in a management role, that is trivially true.

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

#80

Post by nitwit005 »

I, unfortunately, have to disagree with some of the people here suggesting being honest with management. Unless your management is surprisingly open minded, you'd probably need to look at joining another company.

People have a very hard time understanding the idea of wanting a "demotion". Even saying no to a promotion to management can permanently damage your relationship, as many people have the idea that good employees will be go-getters seeking promotion.

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