Posting some general questions to get this community going…

I recently moved from a software architect to an engineering manager position after I was asked by my company leadership a few months ago. Mixed feeling about the move. I really like technology and being deep into the code but I am also pretty good at being a manager.

Anyway, why did you make the jump? How has it been?

  • @dukerutledge
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    1 year ago

    The more time I spent in software the more problems I saw rooted in org decisions, strategic motions, team dynamics, and engineers lacking sufficient context. I have a mentor mindset and I gravitated towards these problems. I took a chance on management to see if I’d enjoy it. The possibility of force multiplication was intriguing. Turns out I enjoy helping people learn to be more effective. There are downsides, but I have since moved into a director role so I can understand that layer of abstraction and learn how to improve people’s day to day and impact from a more systems thinking approach.

    • jeff 👨‍💻OPM
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      11 year ago

      Thanks. This really resonated with me. At a certain point solving problems in the code became easy and I noticed that projects had breakdowns or failed because of organizational issues and I want fix problems there. And I do really like helping people and making sure everyone is happy and fulfilled.

  • 𝕊𝕚𝕤𝕪𝕡𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕟
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    51 year ago

    I was a manager for 2 years in my mid-twenties. My most honest answer to your question is that I was young, lacked self-esteem and desperately wanted to prove myself, so I said yes when my boss asked me if I wanted to become a manager.

    But I realized what I loved the most was creating, so I applied for a developer position at another company, and I’ve been working as a developer since then.

  • mesamune
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    41 year ago

    Two years ago, I became a lead then manager. The real answer is more money and being in the position to protect/unblock/grow my team. It was successful in my opinion, but I’m biased haha.

    It was definitely a mixed bag. The top level at my old company was basically mia for years, so we had to figure it out on our own. Political capital was spent to make sure my team had what they needed. I rusted a bit on the tech side, but given that I have two offers within two weeks or so since the company imploded, maybe I still have it.

    • Clangbang
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      21 year ago

      Sounds like it’s been mostly a positive outcome. Have you considered jumping back in to the technical side again or do you want to continue as a manager?

      I’m trying to move in to management mostly because my salary potential as a technical engineer definitely feels capped and I’m at the ceiling for my line of work.

      • mesamune
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        21 year ago

        I’m getting a job as a developer again. More $$ for less responsibility. TBH I’m burt out on the manager role. It didn’t matter of my team did good or bad when upper management went and got in trouble with the law and shut the whole business down.

  • @fabian
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    41 year ago

    I haven’t personally, but I’d like to share a quote from Richard Hamming on that matter:

    When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management.

    • @valence_engineer
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      21 year ago

      I would say at larger companies you can also move to Staff+ positions to gain greater impact without taking on the people management side.

  • @absurddoctor
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    41 year ago

    At a previous company, one day the owner setup a meeting with myself and two other colleagues and said “You three are now management”. Until then there had been no official management beyond the two brothers that owned the company, but the three of us had taken on informal leadership roles, so it made some sense. This change came with no additional compensation, no training, and no particularly well defined plan on what the change meant. I really enjoyed the work we did, and I had an inexpensive life style so I hadn’t cared that much about the low compensation up to that point. I didn’t have kids and didn’t expect that to change, so I didn’t make noise about increased compensation. I’m still not sure if that was really a mistake, but not making noise about training definitely. I was confident in my abilities to figure things out along the way. That’s a terrible approach when it comes to managing other people, because those other people get to pay the price while you are learning on the job. That is inevitable to some degree, but the price was much higher than it had to be since I made a lot of avoidable mistakes.

    Eventually an opportunity came up for a development position at another company and I jumped on it. It was another small company, and I was essentially a team of one reporting directly to the owner. Being only responsible for myself again was awesome! The increased compensation was also awesome (by now, I had kids and needed to care more about financial issues for their sake). After a few years it was decided that we needed to expand the team quite a bit; by then a second person had changed teams to work with me. There wasn’t really anyone else in the company in a position to take over growing and managing the team, so I was given the choice of helping to bring someone in from the outside of taking on the role myself. I have been involved in a few cases where a new management position was created and someone was brought in from the outside, and it has never gone well, so I chose to take on the role myself (That isn’t to say bringing in someone from the outside will always fail, that has just been my luck so far, and I wasn’t sure I had learned enough in those situations to prevent a similar failure here).

    I think it’s been a bit over two years now and things seem to be going well. I think by typical standards it is somewhat of a hybrid role; I still get to do some development work, but I try to delegate anything that is likely to require larger chunks of focus time, since that is hard to come by now. I handle all of the people management and the project-management type work. It’s great to see lots of things that I wanted to do actually getting done, and the tinges of ‘sadness’ that I didn’t do them directly myself are becoming more and more rare. It feels weird now when I run into parts of the codebase that are team is responsible for that I don’t know much about; I end up feeling a strange combination of frustration and pride. Frustration that I don’t know everything, and pride that the team can implement things with little to no input from me. I’m not sure either emotion is really appropriate but here we are.

  • @invicticide
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    31 year ago

    I was frustrated by certain aspects of how my team was run, so when that position became available, I applied for and moved into it, thinking I could make some changes that would make the team function better.

    I did make some of those changes and they have helped, but I’ve also found it really challenging to carry responsibility for delivering things that I can’t work on directly. I used to solve problems by writing code; it’s much different to solve problems by coaching people.

    I do have stronger relationships with my colleagues now, since I spend more time communicating with them vs. being head-down in code all the time, and that’s kind of nice, but I’m definitely missing the hands-on work

  • Clangbang
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    31 year ago

    Not a manager currently but considering it as a growth pathway. I’m an engineer but not in software. In my area of focus there is very much a cap on how much money I can make as an engineer and management seems to be the only obvious route to increasing my pay. I love the technical work but I’m hoping I can carry that over in to management if I find the right role.

    • jeff 👨‍💻OPM
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      21 year ago

      Yeah, that makes sense. Software isn’t as much like that, at least depending on the organization. It’s pretty common to hear of Staff or Principal Software Engineers making more than management.

  • codemonk
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    21 year ago

    As for me, my manager changed position and his position was vacant. As I moved from senior dev to project lead a few month before, my choice was between continuing as a project lead or become a manager. I like helping people grow and assumed that I could do that much better as a manger. In retrospect, this was true. There is more responsibility and less coding. But there is always something you have to give uo, either way. I don’t want to go higher than were I am know, though. I closely in touch with the ones that do tech, and I love tech.

    As a side node: I am in R&D. Things are different there compared to production. Also: I enjoy coding as a hobby, so I am not detached from what brought me into the industry.