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For me its pretty simple: Pay me what I'm worth. None of this managerial shite, just dollars. I will be happy.
Sure, it is a bit of a new skill, but the ace engineer who can guide a team with his engineering wisdom is way more valuable than the engineer who just works by himself.
This is a problem not just for coders but almost any technical area. A loooong time ago when I was still in engineering I worked for Big Corp, Inc. and they had a designation for master technical talent, I forget the name, so let's just call them Jedi Masters. It was a non-management path for those who didn't want to go the management route but it recognized their value to the company. If you reached this level you h…
This is exactly the sentiment I was going for - people who want to stay engineers should be compensated for their badassery, and respected for it, which is usually all they want. That right there is exactly the "power to say No" I was talking about. And how do you know if an engineer wants to stay an engineer or not? By asking them.
Regarding respect; After this meeting technical colleagues praised me for bringing Fred in to get the problem resolved. Manager types praised ME for resolving the conflict. It was really a big deal and really advanced my career and Fred was happy to let me get the credit which is why he made me do the presentation but he got respect from the people "in the know" and that is all he really cared about.
One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money. Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before) Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary) Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's…
> Plus.. the director job is generally going to mean a > more relaxed job If you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.
This is a problem not just for coders but almost any technical area. A loooong time ago when I was still in engineering I worked for Big Corp, Inc. and they had a designation for master technical talent, I forget the name, so let's just call them Jedi Masters. It was a non-management path for those who didn't want to go the management route but it recognized their value to the company. If you reached this level you h…
Thanks for sharing!! Like this story a lot better than the linked blog article. A positive example of real evidence is so much more effective than an essay of meta.
For me its pretty simple: Pay me what I'm worth. None of this managerial shite, just dollars. I will be happy.
But what if you are worth more, managing a group of engineers? Sure, it is a bit of a new skill, but the ace engineer who can guide a team with his engineering wisdom is way more valuable than the engineer who just works by himself.
You can guide a team while "just" being a member of the team. Leadership and management are not the same skill.
I guess what you are saying sort of makes sense in teams with a high ratio of junior:senior engineers. But I'd question whether that is a good way to structure a team if you are working on complex tasks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's flawed reasoning in so many ways.
How is it flawed?
One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money. Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before) Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary) Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's…
This is why IBM created a separate path back in the 1950s so good technical people didn't have to become managers in order to be promoted. There are many ways to provide leadership, and not every manager leads much.
Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually? I go back and forth on if I want to pursue an MBA every couple years or so (though I doubt the education would be worth it, it'd be a stamp on my resume for wanting to go that direction). Working with brilliant people and managing people problems are very complex and interesting to me.
There's quite a bit of variety on "the business side", FWIW. Getting an MBA does not necessarily get one increased access to it, depending on what you want to do and where you want to do it. Dave McClure had a really good discussion once on starting a startup as the new MBA: far more interesting to hear you talk about how you sold $200k of sales than hear about how you read about someone doing the same. This also giv…
I did an executive MBA, and plan to move into people management at some point. I enjoy it and I love the feeling of empowering a team to be excellent. At the same time I feel that you need a solid base as a respected individual contributor, especially if you are leading the team technically rather than playing bug-assignment Tetris -- which is what I'm focusing on for now. Management can seem like a dirty word in engineering, but some of us like doing it.
The trick to it is to realize that it's not, actually, a skill, when you break it down. It's an opportunity to structure part of the operation of the company the way you want to structure it. You can take all those ideas you have about how to run the company better and put them into practice on a small scale. You do not have to give up engineering, you're just also engineering at a bigger level than just with machines. You can and should still program, and still avoid pointless meetings by bringing your laptop to them and working through them.
You're engineering human systems now too. There's no conflict with the other machine-type engineering, because the two are intended to work in concert. So don't create one where it didn't before exist. Humans are easier to engineer than machines in many ways. You can tell a human to do what you mean, humans are smart and machines are stupid, a machine will only do what you tell it to do. You can't tell a machine to exercise judgment or grant them power or flexibility, they wouldn't know what to do with it. But grant flexibility to a human and he'll make your job much much easier.
Power necessarily involves freedom and flexibility, if you've an expectation to meet a responsibility without giving yourself the latitude to meet that expectation your own way, including the willingness to put your foot down to ensure your turf is protected, then you are putting yourself through hell. It's simple, decide what you need to get the job done, then acquire the resources, then follow through. If the expectation is unreasonable, then change the expectation. It's not hard, all you have to do is explain to people that it's unreasonable and offer an alternative. As an engineer, you should have already learned the skill of dazzling people with techno-babble. As a manager, they have to take your arguments seriously and compromise with you. You can't promote someone to management and then proceed to ignore their opinions. That's the whole point of the promotion.
I go home after eight hours. My boss will put in ten hour days but I won't volunteer to. I fully expect my new report will go home after eight like I do. When I wanted to move to flex time I just started coming in later and when my boss noticed, I just said I was going to choose my hours from here on out. My boss insulated me from office politics until I was ready to deal with it and I will extend the same protection to the new guy. I was somewhat worried that the promotion would come with strings attached. If anything they're more worried that I'll get cold feet than they are that I won't measure up. So they've been kissing my ass extra hard lately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Plus.. the director job is generally going to mean a > more relaxed job If you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.
I suspect that the reason for the perpetuation of this myth is that, if a manager is doing their job really really well then all of that stress and BS is hidden from their directs.