61–70 of 192 posts
A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot believe I'm not the only one! Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...
You're far from the only! I love programming and I'm more than happy to work with juniors and solve junior tasks. I feel like this industry puts so much pressure on people to be an engineer or an architect or something more than a person who writes a little script to fix something and moves on. Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
I feel this pressure a lot b/c of big-tech promo culture.
Wow, I sure hope no one who manages anyone agrees with this person.
I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with dema…
> met with demands for me to write PRDs > spend the rest of my time teaching better programming skills Are you an engineer or a product manager? If you’re a PM, sounds like you should switch roles. If you're an engineer, sounds like your manager/peers don’t know that. :) But in seriousness, it sounds like there may be a mismatch somewhere.
A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dea…
Honestly, this sounds to me a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want people to care about things, you have to listen to what they care about... I can influence some of what people care about as a manager, but it's long-term steering a spaceship a few degrees at a time. I think too many people see managing a team as "managing the people to do good work." When, in fact, managing is much more about managing th…
Ultimately we are all paid to solve the problems the business needs solved, even if the solution is boring and not 'exciting' or 'cutting edge' tech (which is often). The best people finds excitement and challenge in almost any work and are self-motivated. Sure, as a manager you should try your very best to shield the team from crap work and have a healthy balance, understand their interests and find opportunities that match (even outside your team), but ultimately also work is work and is not always, or even often, possible to have super exciting bleeding edge work that fits everyone's interests. Even harder when people have a very narrow set of interests or they don't even know, they're picky, etc.
> I very rarely tell people what to do, because ultimately, I don't have any power to change what they do.
Are you a manager? you very much should be able to change what they do if you are. If project x comes along with twice the value of the current project someone is working on, you very much should be able to preempt what someone is working on. It's not ideal and we all try to avoid project churn, but it happens and needs to be handled effectively by the manager.
> And they'll respect me, and the project, more if they think they're making the decision instead of me.
I mean, delegation and ownership are fine as a mechanism to boost engagement and career growth, but you can't delegate everything (otherwise what are you doing again?). Also, what's up with the "if they think" wording here. Are they making the decision or not, are you tricking them into thinking they're making the decision?
I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with dema…
A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dea…
Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn't put their money where their mouth is. Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored with a thank-you. Hell more than once I've been forced to spend an entire day in a conference room with all the other relevant devs to do a "Root Cause Analysis" of a given recent crisis, and we took it seriously each time and came up with genuine solutions. But said solutions required more hardware, more maintenance, more stuff that no one wanted to budget for.
You work in that environment long enough, you learn to clock in and clock out. If you allow yourself to give a shit you'll just be constantly tearing your hair out. Those of us with some objective sense of professionalism usually evolve into the functional elites you mention, but I completely understand those who go the other way.
(Context: Northern Europe) Switching jobs is quite hard as an (engineering) manager, at least if you're a bit introverted like me. Often you depend on the number of people who trust you from their experience working with you that have switched companies and have come into a trusted position there. My career: ages 20-30: Individual contributor. ages 30-45: (Engineering) manager, running product development teams of va…
thinking about making a move towards management, for a similar reason: I really enjoy programming, but after slinging code for 8 hours at work, I can't justify working on my hobby projects when I come home anymore... hoping that by using more of my "soft skills" and thinking about architecture at work, I'll be able to come home and work something like a solitaire solver without feeling like it's "non-productive"
I agree with every single reason.
There are some that might push you to be an manager though, and I've had some fun time with that in the past. The two main ones to me are
1. The technical side of managing, things like how do you organize work for the best, process, etc.
2. Helping people grow - which you can have as an IC but is your main goal as manager. That system of taking a step back when someone asks a question, and figure if it's a problem of skill or clarity.
Both of these cannot be done when most of your energy is sunk into useless bureaucracy, as is often the case in large companies.
I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with dema…
Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.