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Ask Slashdot: Transitioning From Developer To Executive?
First time accepted submitter fivevibe writes "I'm about to switch from a position where I did hands on development to one where I will be building and managing technical team. I will be responsible for designing and implementing the company's overall tech strategy. I am excited about this move but also nervous. It will require a different focus than I had up to this point, different skills, and different orientation. What should I be learning, reading, thinking about in order to make this transition successfully and avoid growing pointy hair?"
(Probably not the sort of ignorance you're thinking of, though.)
Start practicing saying "I don't know." You know a lot of technology right now, but in 5 years you'll know less, and in 10 the young kids will roll their eyes when you talk about how it "used to be." Set a big organizational goal ("double our storage space for next year") and then ask the technicians how to make it happen. Resist the urge to do anything more than "suggest" things or vaguely hint at solutions. Know how little you know.
What you shouldn't ever forget is how technology "really works." You know, "fast right cheap pick 2." If your company wants to go with a cheap solution to their problems, make sure you've prepared properly for it.
All the successful technician-to-manager folks I've worked under have suggested solutions, listened when technicians explained problems and tried to get managerial roadblocks out of their way. On the plus side, the best managers I've worked for were promoted techies. Good luck!
Ack!
1) find a mentor you can use to get advice and bounce ideas of of
2) contact some counterparts and see what professional pegs the belong to and join them and go to local meetings
3) and now the hardest part. While the developers are your friends you now have new responsibilities and may have to make some tough decisions. Be fair, but make the tough calls. If you don't, your team will suffer and do will you.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
First of all, read "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks, if you haven't already.
Be realistic and conservative on your delivery dates. Defend them to the death.
Avoid micromanaging people, if possible, and insist on clear communication and concise documentation.
My personal suggestion: don't give up completely on being a developer. Keep a small, but important task to yourself. You will gain an even better view on how your team is working.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Hi,
A difficult thing will be: you have to trust people doing the job, even though you know that they are not good as you. You will get back solutions, that are not the same you would have delivered or may even not be up to the standards you expect. You must take a step back and ask "Does it suffice?" and not "Do i like it?".
There are two big dangers:
a) Trying to do your previous job in addition to be a manager. This will kill you. The result will be abysmal performance in both jobs.
b) Having no reserves in your schedules to talk to people. This will get you disconnected and you may not realize problems until they bite you in your posterior.
The most difficult thing for me was, that i learn things about people i never wanted to know. You have tragedies (child/husband/parent dying of some illness), relationship problems (both sides being in the company more often than you think), all kind of quarrels (If n is the number of persons you manage, the number of conflicts is O(n)) and so on.... You have to develop a thick skin concerning this. If you cannot, step back. Otherwise it will break you.
Another lesson learned: If you make a decision, never postpone it. Pull it through with max burn ;-).
After 8 years i had enough of that job and went into sales....
Good luck, Martin
Welcome to a whole new world. Get Michael Lopp's "Managing Humans", start thinking about the business value of what you are doing instead of just the technology, and at some point you may want to read Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline". You have 3 priorities you need to keep in balance: 1) your financial responsibilities to the company, 2) taking care of your people, and 3) doing the right thing for the customers.
Good luck,
After 13 years as a systems guy/programmer, I ended up as manager of 12 similar people. The University had gone through a restructuring and a few resignations and I thought it would be the right thing to do, since I was recognised as the most capable in the team (no false modesty here!).
Four years later, I left the University to go back to being a systems/guy programmer, working for a small Swiss proprietary fund (my current employer). Reasons:
1. Meetings. Endless. Bloody. Meetings. I'd been to fortnightly team meetings as a programmer. As a manager there was at least one sort of meeting with someone in the University every other day. Protestations that email or other collaborative software would save everyone time, mileage and money were met with indifference - other managers seemed to enjoy the stupid things.
2. Stress and Responsibility - two sides of the same coin. When you're in charge of a group, the buck stops with you. This can wear you down after a while. It certainly did with me. Whilst I was immensely proud of the team and what we accomplished, occasionally things do go wrong and for some reason the customers never remember the good times.
3. Health issues. My underlying, but previously unobtrusive OCD was exacerbated by 1 and 2 above. I grew afraid (shaking, uncontrollable fear) of meetings, eventually getting to the stage where I would leave them mid-way, or invent excuses not to go in the first place, or just not turn up. Whilst my managers were sympathetic, I became unhappy with the way I was doing my job, which of course reinforced the "bad thoughts"-side of my OCD. I was off sick from work repeatedly, sometimes for days at a time. I received professional help and medication for the OCD and got back on a somewhat even keel, but realised that I would never be happy in my job. When the opportunity to get back to programming and systems work arose, I took it enthusiastically.
Now obviously your mileage may vary and my comment may be utterly useless. I guess the point is that a good programmer may not be a good manager. A person who enjoys working directly on problems may not enjoy giving the problems to others to solve. And a person with any sort of mental issues may find them more exposed when working as a manager!
Coders often suck, especially at estimating effort of time
It's not necessarily that those coders suck, it's more that it's impossible to estimate the time to do some non-trivial new task, because there may or may not be hidden depths.
Even Donald Knuth can't estimate how long it will take him to do something, and he has a lot of experience with algorithms and coding. I think the numbers were that he expected TeX to take two years to write, but it actually took ten.
I think it's better for the manager to pad the numbers but not let the engineers know. Hold them to a tight-ish schedule, assuming that they will over-run sometimes. It's good to feel a little time pressure to keep you focused, but not so much that you get despondent. Allowing for explicit maintenance/refactoring time on the code would be important too if it's a project that has grown and morphed over the years and needs tidied up.
I don't think micromanaging is the answer. If you ask me how long overall something should take I will be happy to give an answer - but I don't like giving a schedule of every thing that I will be doing, because I simply don't know in advance. Sometimes things move way faster than I expect, and sometimes I'm banging my head against a wall for a couple of hours because of an oversight in my design.
which is totally what she said
Keep on reading those journals to know what is possible and ignore those losers that call themselves "Architects", "Engineers" or even "Gurus" without some professional group of peers that think they deserve the title. You don't have to have earned one of those titles, go with what you have earned and keep in touch with it enough so that no amoral contractor can bullshit their way into robbing you blind. You don't have to be a cutting edge expert but you do need to keep up enough to tell one from a confidence trickster.
It doesn't all stop when you leave school or even the "shop floor".
2. They are being paid, make sure they do the work they need to by the time it needs to be done. Stick to schedules. I can not stress how important it is to stick to schedules. If a programmer can't meet targets you feel were set fairly then you may have to fire him/her. (...)
4. Designate a planner. This will probably be you. The planner takes the goal and the design and makes it into a step by step development cycle programmers can follow. (...)
You may not know it, but the people working for you probably think you're a lousy manager. You're the traditional project manager coming up with an estimate based on how hard it sounds like doing without taking any input from the ones actually working on the code, then drive people hard to meet your imagined schedule. From the "watch every commit" it sounds like you're trying to be the supercoder micromanaging everything everyone under you is doing. Chances are that if you're trying to do that much at once, your quality will turn to shit too even if you could outperform any one of them individually. Particularly if you're doing any part of the managing bit, making sure all your people are productive, clearing roadblocks, dealing with recruitment/staffing/budget issues, management reporting and so on. If you're serious you should get out of management, quick.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What is wrong with dashboards?
They are fun to program (Compared to the other CRUD that you normally need to do), Management are human too and do not have the time to analyse all the data so dashboards give them a quick view on what is going on.
Now the smart managers will realize that these dashboards are mathematical models and you will still need to manage beyond that, some of those red spots are not so bad they are red for a reason, as well some of those in green may actually be more of an issue then the dashboard show.
The stupid manager will live on the dashboard and see it as the truth and manage strictly off of it. That is where problems occurred.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1) Do the sh*tty TPS report work yourself. Don't hand it out.
2) If the printer is a continuing problem, GET ONE THAT WORKS
3) Never, under any circumstance, take the stapler away from the mumbly Aspergers guy
(seriously...)
4) Keep the department a fun place to work. Good employees work best when they enjoy the workplace.
5) Don't dictate. Lead by example. It's really crappy to see the Manager leave at 5:30 on a Friday while everyone else toils on a late project. Even if you can't help, let everyone know you're willing and making yourself available wherever you can help.
6) Taking everyone out for lunch once a is a great appreciation strategy. Even if it means bringing in doughnuts. People appreciate managers going above-and-beyond once in a while.
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From my experience, the most important things a good manager needs to do are
- listen to everyone, and make (and I mean do make) the decisions, and not based on past friendships, but on the merits of the ideas,
- after the decisions, try to shield your team from everything that is above and/or beyond their work, they shouldn't know or care about administrative and or managerial stuff, you should do everything to provide a good working environment for them,
- to an extent, you have to forget you were a developer, don't try to solve everything and don't always try to come up with solutions and decisions before you listen to your team, because 1. after a while you're not qualified anymore to decide on every technical issue and 2. if you still do so, after a while nobody will even try to come up with ideas for solutions since they will see you don't listen and/or care, and you'll easily demotivate them.
There would be some more minor points, but I think the above are some of the more important ones.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Yes, I've seen several people "promoted" into a manager or VP of Technology type of position who were simply unprepared for the transition. It was felt by the (foolish, ignorant) top execs that the candidate would make a good manager since he was already such a good programmer or architect. The predictable result was catastrophe; the former star programmer became a stupid git who was hated and despised by everyone, and eventually was shown the door after having caused incalculable damage to the organization.
Unfortunately for all parties involved, software engineering and management are two completely separate skills. It's like saying a good surgeon would make a good hospital administrator--where do you pull that out of? They are unrelated and often oppositional jobs. Shoot-from-the-hip, cowboy programmers as well as "team player", 9-5 coders are equally unqualified to manage others, with the team players being slightly better simply because they're less likely to piss everyone off right away.
I've found in my professional experience, as have many others, that really great managers are born, not made. Some people seem to have instinctual abilities to see through the fog of war and focus on the goals, marshal their resources rationally, and avoid letting petty emotions, vindictiveness, oneupmanship, and all the politics that come with human interaction get in the way. You can call them out, tell them to their face that they're full of crap, challenge their assumptions, and they will calmly roll with the punches and adjust accordingly. Their bosses will lean on them, change their priorities, threaten them, etc., and they will push back, educate their superiors, win the time and money they need to achieve the objectives.
It's like sales. Great sales people seem to have an innate ability to close the deal, while crappy sales guys (the majority in the world, I think) piss off the customer, display their ignorance, and basically fumble the ball more often than not.
So, op, proceed cautiously. You are about to step off the cliff and hope you enjoy a soft landing. A few make it, but most don't. I would say, if you're pretty good technically, you should just stay in the tech field where you know you have a good future. But, if you want to learn from bitter experience, be our guest and delve in. Get back to us in a year and let us know how it's going.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Most "good" managers I've met are not good because of skills or training, but from simply being personable, intelligent, and able to solve problems (real world problems, generally very different from the types of problems programmers face). It takes a minimal amount of training to get a good manager, as long as you start with the right person, who possesses those innate abilities. There is plenty of management material to be found among software engineers, programmers, IT, etc. The problem is that, like you said, execs will often just assume someone good in one position will do fine managing that position, and promote them without any management training.
The truly unfortunate thing is that it generally takes much more skill and training to be a good software engineer than it does to be a good manager, and yet management pay generally BEGINS where every other job maxes out. My biggest problem with about 90% of all management I've worked with in my life is that I (or many other people I know) could do their jobs better than them with a week or two of training, and yet they're making twice what I make. At the same time, most of them also face less stress and work fewer hours.
Well, I think it is hard to generalize the way you have and be correct. I'm sure there are shops like the one you described - managers making much more than the devs, worrying more about their golf handicap than the project timeline. There are plenty of places though where the dev and manager payscales have quite a bit of overlap, where you'll find all of the senior devs making (much) more than the junior managers. I think this is right. At well-run companies there will also be quite a lot of pressure and stress put on the manager, simply because the manager is responsible for the success of every person on the team - so take all the things that can go wrong on the dev side (hit a snag and have to refactor, sick time, etc.) and multiply that by the size of the team. Good managers are also taking the heat for making the inevitable tradeoffs - "yes, we know big client X wants feature Y but we need to keep the release on track." Dealing with VPs several levels up trying to pull the project in different directions is also less than enjoyable.
Managers are also much more vulnerable to politics than individual contributors. You can be a great manager and still get canned if new upper management rolls in and doesn't like you or doesn't think you're the right person for their new policies - or if you get a tough project that doesn't go well and someone needs to be blamed. So, I think part of the compensation difference is because the job is simply riskier.
I recently had to make a similar change - from being in training to becoming one of two cardiologists running a private office, which means I'm responsible for employees.
Making technical decisions is the easy part - managing people is the hard part. You're simply treated differently when you have the ability to make decisions that can change people's livelihood and lives. The best resources I found on this were "Getting to Yes" and "Getting Past No," both touchy-feely pop-style books, but both with semi-useful information in them.
Friends gave me management books, like "The Essential Drucker" and a subscription to the Harvard Business Review - I found all this stuff to be almost useless. I've found that if I spend a few minutes every once in a while checking in with people, and trying to listen to the answers, that things work out well.
good luck...
It is not the doing of things that is difficult. What is difficult is getting in the right mood to do them. ~~ Brancusi
This is actually pretty common and any manager worth his spit aught to be able to tell the difference between "Effort" and "Duration" estimates and should have a rough idea of what percent of your time is targeted at the project.
For example, if you said it would take you 240 hours to complete the project (effort), and I know that you're only going to be able to put about 50% of your time towards the project, that the total duration is likly going to be around 12 weeks.
If I really need that project done in 8 weeks, it means I've got to find ways to get 50% of your non-project time removed from your plate. If that means getting someone else on the team to look at the network issue or finding ways to mitigate the impact of the move on you, so be it, but I, as a manager, need to find a way to get you up to 75% of your time as project time.
This is actually pretty challenging. By default, under best circumstances, assume that any average employee is only going to have 90% of their time available. The other 10% goes to checking email, answering phone calls, bathroom breaks, etc... Typically, I like to estimate 80%, especially for people who have to bounce between projects or are on user-centric projects as there will inevidibly be delays and thrashing.
Even with that 80%, you're going to lose some portion of it to meetings. Heck, most folks have atleast 2 hours of meetings a week for status updates, tech reviews, performance evals, planning, etc... Each two hours of meetings is another 6 1/4% off that 80% number.
So as another Sr Dev/Jr Manager individual, I'd say keep making sure that your manager is aware that your estimates are for Effort, not duration, and make sure he/she is knoledgable about your schedule and other responsibilities.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs