Slashdot Mirror
Tech Or Management Beyond Age 39?
relliker writes "So here I am at age 39 with two contractual possibilities, for practically the same pay. With one, I continue being a techie for the foreseeable future — always having to keep myself up-to-date on everything tech and re-inventing myself with each Web.x release to stay on top. With the other, I'm being offered a chance to get into management, something I also enjoy doing and am seriously considering for the rest of my working life. The issue here is the age of my grey matter. Will I still be employable in tech at this age and beyond? Or should I relinquish the struggle to keep up with progress and take the comfy 'old man' management route so that I can stay employable even in my twilight years? What would Slashdot veterans advise at this age?"
Over the long haul, following your passion is the way to go.
I have been at a similar crossroads, and went the management route. I am currently re-eavluating that decision since I get much more joy out of being hands-on and much less joy out of the routine administrivia that comes with being a manager.
If you get more joy out of managing than you do as a tech, then that's likely the way you should go.
Diversify to stay alive. Move into management, but keep current on tech. You will be much more valuable and more employable.
... back to the Technical Side. Management is a task that has no upside. If you suck at managing people, they're fire you. If you're great at managing people, they will increase your responsibilities, inching you closer to your Peter Point. (See "The Peter Principle" for context.) If you handle the heightened expectations, they will raise you to a higher management level, thereby eliminating your chance to contribute in your old way, or they will reassign you to fix some ailing project.
If you have made it this far in the technical world, it means you are competent at it. If you were a bozo, they wouldn't be discussing an alleged promotion. By all means get into management if you hate the technical stuff. That is your choice. But I would say--if you're hankering for management--that you take the safe road: become a software architect. This involves so much politics and human engineering that you might as well be a manager.
In most companies you can get by with being a mediocre manager.
;) ).
:).
;) ).
;) ). So most of them can barely be competent with existing stuff much less keep up with the latest tech.
:).
It's hard to be a good manager but a good middle manager is very valuable to a company (even if not valued by it
For example, say the manager is managing a project and a team of programmers.
1) When the Big Bosses ask the manager - hey when will the project be finished?
A crappy manager might just pull a date out of thin air and give that to the Big Bosses.
A mediocre manager might ask the programmers, and then give the resulting date to the bosses without any processing or safety margins.
Whereas a good manager would know which programmers tend to underestimate and which overestimate, come up with the Manager's actual expected date, and then add a big safety margin and then give that to the bosses.
A good manager will need to keep up with stuff enough to know when someone might be bullshitting him (and perhaps countercheck it with someone/a source he can trust).
2) Stuff happens and the manager has some misc extra stuff to do and assigns it to the team.
With a crappy manager, if the date was near ridiculous in the first place, some of the team might just start spending time preparing to leave (the top programmers can be quite re-employable). The project might then fail.
With a mediocre manager, it means the team have to put in extra hours. Savvy members of the team would now start padding their future estimates by a LOT (instead of just a bit), if they haven't been doing that already. Future projects would be estimated to take X years rather than X months, or the mediocre manager would have to start pulling figures out of thin air and hoping for the best
With a good manager, no changes. If the team starts trusting the manager's management skills more, they can start giving him/her less padded estimates.
People might say a top programmer is 10 to 100x more productive than an average programmer, but in the hands of a crappy/mediocre manager, the top programmer might be using his extra productivity doing more fun stuff like contributing to open source projects, writing some cool game, or just plain slacking off.
So with a good manager the productivity of a team can actually be far higher. Same team, different levels of productivity. Because the good middle manager can actually _manage_ the team and the bosses.
3) The bosses might then say, "hey can't you get stuff done earlier? We have to make an announcement to the press etc by Date XYZ, otherwise we'd look bad in comparison to the competitors."
A crappy manager would just push the date earlier and give that to the bosses.
A mediocre manager might do the same.
A good manager would negotiate (could we just announce the product rather than _release_ the product?) or see what he can get in return, for example in future he'd say to the bosses "Hey the team is overloaded already, we can't give them more stuff unless you want the project to slip".
If the big bosses are also good, after a while they will trust the good manager too - e.g. they can believe him when he says stuff can be done and by X, or it can't be done.
Whereas in the other cases, they'll just have to make stuff up and hope their Golden Parachute is well packed (as you can see, Golden Parachute packing skills are very important to Big Bosses
Note: most coders are crap. There'll be a few not so bad ones (not worthy of "DailyWTF"
So being a good manager is a bit like playing an RTS well, when:
1) you can't micromanage too much or you start having problems with your troops.
2) your troops are not that consistent, or reliable.
3) Most of your troops are crap, you have to figure out "which can do what", and which ones are just being lazy.
A good manager is very valuable (whether middle or upper management). An organization can do great things when it has good top management, good middle management and not too bad "grunts"