Moving from a development to a manement role

BrokenArrows

So im currently a Senior Software Engineer.
The development manager informed me that world wide they are looking to take on a whole bunch of junior devs early next year and was just giving me the heads up they there would be manager roles appearing to manage them.

I've never really considered my career moving into a management position before now.

Has anyone else here moved from dev to management and what are your experiences and challenges?

seamus

Haven't moved from dev specifically to manager, but from engineering to management with some engineering.

I don't hate it, but it becomes very difficult to keep yourself immersed in the engineering world without a significant amount of time spent doing it at home. You can keep up-to-date reading, definitely, but you don't get a lot of time to get practical experience. You end up getting dragged into meetings scattered about your day, doing up reports and planning, all of which destroy your ability to sit down and do a few solid hours of development work.

And being on the lookout for work right now at a senior engineer/50:50 management role, I found that I am just that little bit rustier on the technical stuff than I was this time six months ago.

My advice would be that if you really like the engineering part, then a management role in a big company will inevitably become a PM/Planning/Admin/Reporting role, with very little hands-on work. In smaller companies it can work a lot better because the higher managers (CTOs, etc) take care of the boring business-ish stuff, while you only have to look after the simple things like holidays, training, mentorship, etc.

Engineering Team Lead or Principle engineer is the better path in a large organisation because they are implicitly engineering roles with only the slightest bit of management in them.

bpmurray

This is the problem with many tech companies: they don't see the importance of senior devs. If you look at the more successful like IBM, Oracle/Sun, etc. they all have technical execs, i.e. the career path goes all the way to the top. Old-fashioned companies still have the idea that you need to move to management to move up, and it sounds like that's what's happening here.

Evil Phil

BrokenArrows wrote: »

So im currently a Senior Software Engineer.
The development manager informed me that world wide they are looking to take on a whole bunch of junior devs early next year and was just giving me the heads up they there would be manager roles appearing to manage them.

I've never really considered my career moving into a management position before now.

Has anyone else here moved from dev to management and what are your experiences and challenges?

In my experience it's about the people in management, although understanding the technology is vital. Nothing worse than having a manager that doesn't. But it's all about people skills.

My advice if you make the move is find a mentor. Someone who is not in your reporting line, maybe not even in your company if you can help it. Vital for those first 6 months until you find your feet.

moycullen14

The whole career management thing - technical vs managerial career path - is very tricky.

A few things:

Management can be incredibly stressful - all the responsibility with very little real ability to affect things. You can easily end up as a punch bag. If you get caught between aggressive stake-holders and developers who are, shall we say, demotivated, it can be pure hell.

If you want to stay on the technical route, your career progression can be limited and you may find yourself being compared to kids out of college. A 40 year old developer doesn't have - or is not perceived to have - skills that warrant paying him or her 3 times as much as a 28 year old.

You may go down the contracting route, which has a lot of positives but a lot of negatives too. Unless you are really into technology - languages, systems, etc. - you will find it increasingly difficult to keep your skills up to date as you get older. Legacy skills mean you will be marginalised and have limited mobility options.

Then there is the dilbert principle - the manager ends up being the guy you least want to have working on code - promote him to a position of harmlessness. As an experienced developer, working for one of these bozos (and we've all met them) is very frustrating. :eek:

Ask yourself this, 'What will management involve?' Mentoring, filling in spreadsheets, making sure the air-conditioning is working, IT strategy? Will I enjoy it? Will I be any good at it? Is it what I want to do?
One thing for sure, if you lose your technical skills, you will end up as an administrator which is not for everyone.

Your technical skills are more transferable than management skills. In general, managers tend to get tied to particular companies and industry sectors whereas good technicians are more mobile.

In a lot of years in IT, I've come across great developers, great technicians and great administrators. I have never come across anyone who is good at all 3.

Whatever you do, you have to enjoy it and, if you do, chances are you'll be good at it. An expert in any field rarely starves.

Nothing worse than seeing a 40 year old manager who is crap at the job and hates it, who is only doing it because it was the only way to 'progress' his career. Nothing, except, of course, the 40 year old contractor, scratching a living with some legacy skill that is rapidly going out of date. Avoid these pitfalls at all costs.

Eugene Norman

moycullen14 wrote: »

The whole career management thing - technical vs managerial career path - is very tricky.

A few things:

Management can be incredibly stressful - all the responsibility with very little real ability to affect things. You can easily end up as a punch bag. If you get caught between aggressive stake-holders and developers who are, shall we say, demotivated, it can be pure hell.

If you want to stay on the technical route, your career progression can be limited and you may find yourself being compared to kids out of college. A 40 year old developer doesn't have - or is not perceived to have - skills that warrant paying him or her 3 times as much as a 28 year old.

You may go down the contracting route, which has a lot of positives but a lot of negatives too. Unless you are really into technology - languages, systems, etc. - you will find it increasingly difficult to keep your skills up to date as you get older. Legacy skills mean you will be marginalised and have limited mobility options.

Then there is the dilbert principle - the manager ends up being the guy you least want to have working on code - promote him to a position of harmlessness. As an experienced developer, working for one of these bozos (and we've all met them) is very frustrating. :eek:

Ask yourself this, 'What will management involve?' Mentoring, filling in spreadsheets, making sure the air-conditioning is working, IT strategy? Will I enjoy it? Will I be any good at it? Is it what I want to do?
One thing for sure, if you lose your technical skills, you will end up as an administrator which is not for everyone.

Your technical skills are more transferable than management skills. In general, managers tend to get tied to particular companies and industry sectors whereas good technicians are more mobile.

In a lot of years in IT, I've come across great developers, great technicians and great administrators. I have never come across anyone who is good at all 3.

Whatever you do, you have to enjoy it and, if you do, chances are you'll be good at it. An expert in any field rarely starves.

Nothing worse than seeing a 40 year old manager who is crap at the job and hates it, who is only doing it because it was the only way to 'progress' his career. Nothing, except, of course, the 40 year old contractor, scratching a living with some legacy skill that is rapidly going out of date. Avoid these pitfalls at all costs.

Yes. However the only way to a real senior position is via management. You can't code past a certain level. The 40 year old manager may be on a track upwards.

It's an odd industry that age matters so much although I expect that some of that is due to the fact that there was a pyramid of people entering the industry with increasingly younger people.

It would be great to stay as principal engineer or architect or software fellow but those roles are only available in large corps and not necessarily transferable.

Skrynesaver

Was recently(ish) moved to Tech. Lead role I spend a lot more time in Excel and Word than I'd like to but I get a buzz out of helping people and the mentoring aspect of the role does make up for the administriva. I'm also fortunate in that I've a PM to do the customer facing business discussions while I'm solely focused on agreeing specs with the customer's technical staff and delivering to them, so on balance I've adjusted to the change and don't hate the job.

I would suggest you outline (for yourself initially) what management functions you could see yourself enjoying/tolerating and discuss an outline of the resulting job spec with your manager/management team. That way you could define a role you'd enjoy before applying it... worth a try anyway.