That’s the case with my previous workplace before I left. There is pressure to move up. I just want to work in a standardised manner and have fewer responsibilities. Because I want to leave early or on time and do my hobbies after work instead of staying overtime. I will ask for promotion if I feel ready.
I’m at a spot where I’m headed towards technical leadership rather than managerial leadership.
I have a small team, and it’s up to me to use them to magnify my effectiveness with my work. It’s actually kind of a good spot, but I’m worried I’ll be asked to do more management stuff
Management is just making other people do your work 99% of the time. And it’s expected! I’ve run a few teams with good results and it’s always the easiest position in the group.
It’s only easy if the team is competent and motivated. I can literally hand some people on my team step by step instructions and they still come out wrong 50% of the time because they either think they know better (they don’t) or they’re just lazy. On top of that the HR policy here makes it take 6 months to replace a person and get us up to speed so if I get rid of the shittiest ones I’m still in a worse spot than I would be if I just deal with coaching them all the time. Working on jumping to a new role that isn’t a leadership position because I’m so tired of being responsible for other people’s performance.
The problem is that you’ll fall off the technical curve eventually. It’s almost inevitable. Even if you read and study every day and keep up with every bit of technical meta, your brain will slowly turn to goo and you’ll find it hard to stay ahead of younger engineers purely on technical competence alone. At a certain point you need to develop some form of leadership skills so you can turn your experience into a multiplier.
My hope is to stumble into some role that is common today but will be niche in the future, like cobolt devs today. I’ll be some kind of java streams expert in 30 years or something lol
I’ve been avoiding people management for years - and about a year ago, I was apprached by a company I’ve worked with for an exec gig. Dream job that would have shot me forward 10+ years in my career.
I lost it because I haven’t managed people since I worked in retail. It’s held me back pretty seriously, and I understand now that it’s better me leading a team than most of the schmucks I’ve worked for.
To anyone dreading this for real, there are places where you can get ahead as an IC and it’s considered a parallel career track to management. 0 direct reports. Maybe some mentoring, if you want, but that’s it.
Typically, but employers are getting wise. They don’t want to lose their best technical talent just because they’re on the spectrum or whatever. Or arguably worse: see them sputter out in a hybrid management/tech role that is more lucrative, but much less impactful than if they’d just stayed tech.
Staff, and architect are two other roles that are sometimes like that. Yet other places will just keep going up levels / pay bands, like eng I, II; senior eng I, II, III, IV, …, VII, etc
It’s been tough switching from managing data and processes to managing people. But I make a LOT more money. It’s also nice not having to watch someone else make poor decisions all the time, but I guess now everyone else is now watching me make the poor decisions! 🤦♂️
Great. More responsibility and being the scapegoat for everything bad coming from the ones under you.
I’d need 150% of my salary to start thinking about doing that.
It doesn’t necessarily matter that you make poor decisions. That’s all of us. At some point. It matters that you take ownership of it and don’t pawn it off on somebody else. And, that you make things right when necessary. Competence is important but integrity is way more important.
Yeah… I feel like I contributed so much more before but managing people, but this is where the money is sadly. I went from supply chain/purchasing/logistics manager to operations manager. I used to be a one man team and single handedly saved maybe $200k this year so far, and took our aged inventory from about $1M to basically nothing, all of our KPIs are primo. This is a company that pulls $10M/yr in revenue… small company.
I got rewarded with spending half my time babysitting the warehouse team, getting reamed by my boss when they’re not getting through things fast enough, and fixing their mistakes and bandaiding bad processes. But I got a 30% raise so I guess it’s worth it? I could be doing so much more.
When I was studying for PMP, I remember there was even a term for this. Because you’re good at one thing, it was expected that you would be good at something else as well, not taking into consideration that managing people is completely different from the domain they were an expert on. Of course, sometimes it helps to have some previous domain knowledge to be able to lead a specific team, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatic.
What companies really need to realise is that there should be different promotion tracks, and some of them are individualistic, i.e. being promoted as an expert in their field, rather than being promoted to have to manage people.
Do they force you into it anyways? Two jobs ago I told them that all the time. They used to make us fill out a career advancement plan every year, and every year I said “I’m exactly where I want to be”, but every 6 months they’d stick me at the head of some team and I’d have to do that for a few months until I weasled my way out of it.
I was in management before I moved to engineering full time. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed my team and watching them grow and develop their skills. I also learned a lot about things that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.
The key role of a good leader is to remove “log jams” and then get out of the way. But I was log-jammed out. An incredibly toxic workplace has a way of doing that. I fought hard for my employees. They deserved that. They had my respect and they earned it. If I had to go back and fight for them again, I would. But man, it’s been nice to get away from all that for the past few years.
So this is me a couple weeks ago when my boss tells me he wants me to take over as one of the team leads and on the outside I’m like, “Thanks for the opportunity! I appreciate the vote of confidence.” And on the inside I’m like, “…please no.”
I had been a servant leader for a number of years in a big corporation in a remote location where I could break away from their older 50’s style management structure. I had a great crew that was able to do wonderful things. The company took notice and wanted me to move to other locations. I wasn’t interested in moving so far away. I would be sent to train and show other locations how we streamlined so well. We eventually closed down our location as the largest customer *we served closed after 90 years.
I was going to walk away from it all then one of my old customers wanted me to come and help them grow, move, and re-invent themselves. I was able to bring in some of the old crew and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Having the ownership in the location didn’t make it easy as they were into the old 50s style mentality so it was a constant fight to implement all the great things they loved about my old location that served them. I was pretty burnt out by the end with being left to navigate Rona on my own with the crews when ownership went and hid in their homes. They didn’t take it seriously at first and then when they flipped it was left in my hands to deal with while they freaked out about the end of the world.
Eventually they sold to a larger company and I was excited for this change. Turns out the new company spouted everything that sounded good but they were so disfunctional and full of themselves it was tough. I was glad to go when they folded our location into another existing one.
I miss working with the people daily and helping them grow and remove those road blocks but I was tired out by the latest ownership disfunction especially when they drank their own Kool aid so much they couldn’t see how badly they were making it for the staff.
The only saving grace for this last ownership group was the previous ownership was so terrible, the new owners seemed like a good upgrade. They were in some ways. It wasn’t for those of us that had worked for structured and properly run companies. It’s been rough on the staff that remain and the steps backwards they had to endure in the process. The new owners are fairly certain they are doing great things. I wish them all luck and I’m glad to be out.
It’s an incredible paradox isn’t it? Someone up the ladder sees you getting results and they decide they want more of that. Then, when you try to show them what it takes to get more of “that”, they look at you like you have two heads. In my case I got sick of being told I needed to constantly micro-manage my people. I told my boss something to the effect of, “we pay grown-ass adults to do their job like adults. If you think I can’t walk away for two seconds and trust that they’re still going to be doing their job when I’m gone, then you need to fire them and hire someone who will.”
He turned white as a ghost. He knew damn well I was right, he just didn’t want to have to tell his boss (the Chief Micromanagement Officer) that. Good leadership isn’t that complicated. Empower people to do their job and feel like they own it and they will do it a hell of a lot better than if you’re standing over their shoulder all the time.
Yes this exactly. If you need to do this you have hired the wrong people and/or the mission is not clear.
I decided I wasn’t going to be a prison warden early on in my career after trying to be one for the company.
We got so much further as a team when I use to make sure they had their birthday cakes and whatever other supplies or tools and got the hell out of their way.
Not a lot of people can trust others this much. It also takes initiative to weed out those that are not going to fit into the team quickly. 1 bad Apple can make the bunch go bad quickly.
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