Dear new developer,
This post from Charity about the choices you face as an engineer, and the challenges of technical management, is wonderful. As a new developer, you’re probably a few years away from thinking about that (but perhaps not. If you join a startup rocketship, it’s possible you’ll be managing people in months). But you have to manage your own career, and moving into management is one of the main career paths for a developer. (I’d say the others include: starting a business, becoming a senior developer, or becoming a consultant.)
Charity talks about how management is an entirely new skillset, and how being a technical leader plus a manager is a great way to get amazing things done. She also covers the negatives of “climbing the ladder” to ever more senior leadership. Charity doesn’t mince words:
Your job [as a newly minted technical manager] is to leverage that technical expertise to grow your engineers into great senior engineers and tech leads themselves. Your job is not to hog the glory and squat on the hard problems yourself, it’s to empower and challenge and guide your team. Don’t suck up all the oxygen: you’ll stunt the growth of your team.
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I mean, there’s a reason we don’t lure good people managers away from Starbucks to run engineering teams. It’s the intersection and juxtaposition of skill sets that gives engineering managers such outsize impact.
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One warning: Your company may be great, but it doesn’t exist for your benefit. You and only you can decide what your needs are and advocate for them. Remember that next time your boss tries to guilt you into staying on as manager because you’re so badly needed, when you can feel your skills getting rusty and your effectiveness dwindling. You owe it to yourself to figure out what makes you happy and build a portfolio of experiences that liberate you to do what you love. Don’t sacrifice your happiness at the altar of any company. There are always other companies.
I don’t tell you this now, new developer, because I want to scare you away from management. I’m an engineering manager right now and it’s a wonderful place to be. You have autonomy, you can help fix problems you see in your organization, and you get to recruit and help grow people into the best developers that they can be. But just be aware that when you get to a certain level, it’s a one way path away from some of the most fun parts of software development–building things, solving hard technical problems, and being a doer.
Please read the whole post from Charity: Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder
Sincerely,
Dan
Letters To A New Developer 