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I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

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Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#221

Post by kazinator »

carlisle_ wrote: post #170
kazinator wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't find someone else's anecdotes untrue. Reverse sexism is completely real, just like "regular" sexism. It doesn't compensate for it in any way, of course. Reverse sexism helps some women, some of the time. It doesn't help women, as such, in the big picture.

>You can't find someone else's anecdotes untrue. Sure I can when they're filled with obvious and apparent cognitive biases.

But that's what personal anecdotes are. They are not something like "objective observations providing raw data, without any selection or interpretation".

Anecdotes might not support the conclusions they are intended to support, but that doesn't make the anecdotes per se false.

Anecodotes are, well, "anecdotal".

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#222

Post by lucasmullens »

cldellow wrote: post #58
jbay808 wrote: post #6

Kind of frustrating to see this framed as a "demotion". But it's great to see someone starting over in a new career track that suits them better.

> demotion (n) - a reduction in rank or status But it is a demotion! I think perhaps we view that as a negative thing when it's done as a punishment, or due to factors outside one's control. But in this case, she chose it (indeed, worked for it!), so she must think it was worth it. Her rank is literally demoted. She went from being high on the job ladder ("Director") to low on the job ladder ("Associate"), reflecting…

If you're a manager at a McDonald's, and you switch to being a programmer, were you demoted then too? I think every time I've heard the word 'demoted' it was in the context of staying on the same ladder. It just doesn't seem like the right word choice, even if it is arguably correct.

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#223

Post by rebyn »

ignoramous wrote: post #89

Reminds me of a "self-demotion" that worked out well: That of a certain Allan Vermeulen [0] who, by some accounts, was the chief architect of Amazon S3 [1], and by all accounts, an engineer extraordinaire. Vermeulen managed the Platform Services group when he joined [2], and later moved to a CTO role with focus on the then very nascent Web Services initiative [3], but eventually "demoted" himself to an "AWS Engineer"…

Being a Distinguished Engineer is the highest there is for an engineer. He moved away from management and max'd out on the engineering track.

https://college.lclark.edu/programs/entrepreneurship/firesid...

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#224

Post by dbrueck »

geophile wrote: post #65
smileysteve wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, I loathed management. Even as a team lead, meetings made me literally sick to my stomach, I don't know that you should use this criteria as the sole deal breaker. Managers should be shielding teams from unproductive meetings and pushing for productivity (action items) from the meetings that happen - holding their peers to a degree of standards. Now, if you hate 1:1, org planning, and successful m…

Everything about it. Every moment spent organizing, planning, reviewing, coordinating, is just torture. If, at work, I am doing anything but working on code, or preparing to (researching, reading, etc.), I feel like I am wasting my time, and it is just draining. At the end of a work day, my mood is completely determined by how much time I spent on code.

Exactly this! A couple of times in my career I've stepped over into management, and regretted it each time, in large part because I can never get to the point where the manager-y stuff "counts" as work; instead it's stuff that gets in the way of doing "real" work, so the job is constant misery.

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#225

Post by jedberg »

100011_100001 wrote: post #175
ballenf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a big mistake as a manager can cost the company a lot more than a big mistake as an individual Engineer, Architect or Developer, especially if you consider that the latter roles will catch many of each others' mistakes. The manager level can result in entire teams quitting, failing to support each other or an atmosphere where catching each others' mistakes is discouraged. Some jobs are paid based (roughly) on…

This is factually not true. Developers can make big mistakes to bring entire companies down with them. Of course it depends on the definition of "mistake". However I can claim that a single defect caused by a developer can cost the company money and downtime, if nothing else a bad user experience. Managers don't generate defects. Developers do. Not to mention that a lot of the times it's much harder to reverse an eng…

You sound like someone who has never been a manager or has no idea what a manager does.

Yes, you're right that defects are made by developers. But you'd be hard pressed to find an example of a software defect that destroyed a company. Even if you as a DevOps engineer cause your company to be down for a day, it probably would have little effect on your company's bottom line.

I was in charge of Reliability for Netflix. Our whole site was down for Christmas Day one year. No one was fired, and it barely affected anything. That was a pretty major defect.

However, the way that management handled that outage had a huge effect on the company surviving that incident. Making sure we focused on the right problems to solve to prevent it from happening again. Creating entire new groups of engineers and then hiring them to solve specific problems of moving traffic between regions.

So yeah, management is really important, and a good manager is definitely more effective than a single engineer. And management decisions can destroy a company, but I doubt you can find even one example of a single engineer's decision that took down a company.

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#226

Post by cldellow »

munk-a wrote: post #219
cldellow wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> demotion (n) - a reduction in rank or status But it is a demotion! I think perhaps we view that as a negative thing when it's done as a punishment, or due to factors outside one's control. But in this case, she chose it (indeed, worked for it!), so she must think it was worth it. Her rank is literally demoted. She went from being high on the job ladder ("Director") to low on the job ladder ("Associate"), reflecting…

I still disagree - I think there is too much of a conflation between managing people and rank/status. Once upon on a time master craftsmen were the pinnacles of their industries but mechanization has shifted the framing to place "doers" below "directors" - I don't think this is strictly accurate and prefer to think of people managers as peers that manage the interpersonal side of the business (which I think is quite…

I think I agree with almost all of what you said! I don't view ICs as below or above management, but as complementary to each other.

I don't actually know what her role was, but I'm not sure it matters too much. Typically, I've seen directors in two kinds of capacity: people management or strategic/technical vision. For both of them, there's a ladder. For example your career progression might look like:

- Manager, Senior Manager, Director - Product Designer, Product Design Lead, Director

In both cases, "Director" isn't an entry-level role. You don't get hired into it fresh out of school, for example, and your scope of influence is expected to be much larger (regardless of whether you're influencing people or vision) than someone at the "bottom".

By contrast, her new role (Associate Developer) _is_ an entry-level role.

That's where I think the "demotion" terminology makes sense. I also agree with other commenters who note that it's most likely meant in a tongue-in-cheek way to drive clicks. But for me, there's a bit more to it than just the cheeky clickbait headline. Have you ever wanted to change things up at your company, but felt constrained, knowing that others would perceive you based on your previous performance in a previous role? I definitely have. The allure of a demotion seems pretty real to me.

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#227

Post by mindfulplay »

It's great to see someone being able to dictate success on your terms and not by a career ladder imposed on by an imaginary committee.

Importantly she acknowledges that this is not all roses and fun (which makes it a proper job).

So kudos to her for taking a demotion in the minds of career ladderists but in reality this sounds like a great way to managing opportunity costs properly and having fun while getting paid.

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#228

Post by carlisle_ »

kazinator wrote: post #221
carlisle_ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't find someone else's anecdotes untrue. Sure I can when they're filled with obvious and apparent cognitive biases.

But that's what personal anecdotes are. They are not something like "objective observations providing raw data, without any selection or interpretation". Anecdotes might not support the conclusions they are intended to support, but that doesn't make the anecdotes per se false. Anecodotes are, well, "anecdotal".

I mean, you gonna stick up for the guy that just got banned?

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#229

Post by encoderer »

nottrobin wrote: post #215

Does "director" mean something much lower than it sounds like? Or does "associate" mean something higher? To me, a "director" is someone who understands the business deeply, knows how to lead, take initiative, communicate very well, has years of business experience under their belt... They want to be a dev. Sure, they need to learn git, python etc. But these are not that hard at all. The harder part of being a develo…

> They want to be a dev. Sure, they need to learn git, python etc. But these are not that hard at all. The harder part of being a developer is communication, making hard decisions, showing leadership. Things a director should be pretty damn good at.

This is really only true if you already know how to read and write code. For the vast majority of people, communication skills are easier to acquire than developer skills.

Re: I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

#230

Post by [deleted] »

TameAntelope wrote: post #101
CivBase wrote: post #70

Can someone explain to me why titles like Engineer, Architect, and Developer are perceived as having less value than titles like Manager or Director? Managing products requires a completely different skill set from managing people. Both skills are vital to the success of a business and neither are trivially developed or easily replaced. If you ask me, the "demotion" in this article is not going from Director of Desig…

When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force. As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's always "greater" (note: not better , just greater ). So in that sense, the "value" of a manager/director is "higher". IMO it…

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