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?"

Comments

learn?

[polar red]

just buy a bullwhip. Easiest way to interact with us mere mortal programmers. And get a cat.

Re:learn?

[yog]

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.

Re:learn?

[Anonymus]

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.

Re:learn?

[Tiroth]

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.

Re:learn?

[jeffporcaro]

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...

Re:learn?

[carnivore302]

You're generalizing; there are plenty of people I know up close who were great developers and now great managers. One of them is my boss and I'll tell you what he did to get my utmost respect.

First of all, this guy was a brilliant developer. Both design and coding were always rock solid. Then when the boys from the board asked him to become a manager, we (the grunts) didn't really notice a lot. Sure, he started coding a lot less, and within half a year stopped doing that entirely. Often we wondered what he was doing all day, until one day I spoke to one the founders of the company and he was saying the guy was a bit of a pain in the ass for them. Turns out his day job was nothing less than constantly defending us, making sure we could do our job without being harassed by upper management, and creating support for any of the ideas we (the developers) came up with. In short, instead of being a manager to report to upper management, my boss focuses on ways to make us as productive and happy as we can be.

I can't thank him enough for that.

Start Being Ignorant Now...

[stove]

(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!

Re:Start Being Ignorant Now...

[radtea]

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

My mantra as a manager is, "Trust your people." In one of my first management positions I took over a team that was having a really hard time (they'd been leaderless for a year, had political issues with senior management, etc) that was in the midst of shipping a major new release. Things were chaotic and the urge to micro-manage was intense. Fortunately I knew how technically proficient they were, and was able to discipline myself to trust them across the board on technical issues while I started the (ultimately successful) process of dealing with the political and people issues.

Some tips

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Re:Some tips

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably the best post here, unfortunately Slashdot isn't a great place to ask this question as half it's membership are too young to have made it to this level succesfully and the other half are grumpy old gits who are bitter that they never made it to this level.

As such "Go ask peers who are already at this level" is about as good advice as can be given here, otherwise you'll just get a long wishlist from people as to how they wish their bosses would be from their inexperienced viewpoint, rather than how their bosses actually need to be to get the job done.

You don't have to become a jackass, but the people who don't get to this level are the ones who don't understand why you're making decisions that to them, seem stupid.

Re:Some tips

[nine-times]

While the developers are your friends you now have new responsibilities and may have to make some tough decisions.

This reminds me of something: understand that you might not be able to be friends with the people you're managing. You can be on friendly terms with them, but in my experience, friendships are pretty hard once that power imbalance exists. As their manager, at some point, you might need to call them on some kind of bad/irresponsible behavior. If you're like me, you won't really want to, but it'll be your responsibility.

Re:Some tips

[delcielo]

Think of the managers you have respected, and analyze what made them great managers for you. Some common things that have served me well:

1. Don't try to change your people. They are who they are. Work with their strengths. If you can't deal with who they are, you'll need to work on getting them off your team.
2. Pay attention to your employees' careers. You should be training them to see the broader aspects of what they're working on. You should have a career path in mind for them. Some may want to do what they're doing for the rest of their lives. But you should be looking for the ones who will eventually want to move up or sideways, and you should help prepare them for that.
3. Remember that if you're successful, it's because of the work they do. Don't forget that. You aren't successful all by your little lonesome.
4. When you give them something to do, give them a result. Don't micromanage the way they do it. Certainly standards have to be applied, regulations complied with, etc. But as much as possible, let them work toward the goal.
5. Your authority is in your title. It's in black and white. You don't need to prove it all the time. You don't need to fear challenges to your authority: they're stupid and you can't lose them.
6. Finally, this one is tough, but be aware of the difference in your relationship now. There are some jokes that will not go over like they used to, because although you are still who you are, you are now also boss. Neither you nor they can forget that, and shouldn't. Otherwise what would be the point of making you boss?

Give correct estimations

[zr-rifle]

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.

Re:Give correct estimations

[Intron]

Awesome list. I'll just add one more: block "minor enhancements that shouldn't affect the schedule" no matter who suggests them.

Re:Give correct estimations

[kbdd]

The comments above are very good indeed, that is exactly what I was able to do for a long while.

I did the same thing many moons ago and recently went back to being an engineer (with great satisfaction).

The issue is: while it is relatively easy to describe what a good engineer is, in abstract, in a way that will work for most companies, it is much harder to define what a good manager should be because it all depends on the expectations (and the organization) of the company you work for.

In my case, I believe I was doing a fine job for 10-15 years of it as a manager (while still being hands-on on some aspects of the job) under the old definition, and having fun in the process, at least some of the time.

Then the company was acquired and the definition of what was a "good" manager changed. A "good" manager was not to do technical work, just to generate schedules and budgets, do personnel management (reviews, hiring), make sure processes were followed and go to meetings, lots of them, many off-site. Engineers need not apply.

These were not the favorite parts of my old job, but under the former organization, I was able to do that because it was not full time and I still had the technical side to keep me interested. However, under the new definition, I was no longer a good manager (or even an acceptable one) and I was utterly miserable. However, because I had been able to not stop being an engineer, I was still a pretty good engineer, so I was able to go back as an engineer

There are many managers meeting that description in that company and some of them do not have strong technical background and yet are apparently doing the job. It is my opinion that those that were strong technically and have been put in these positions do not enjoy their jobs very much, but it is just my opinion. I certainly did not. In many regards, I otherwise consider this company to be enlightened compared to most, they have done many of the right things for the right reasons so there is absolutely no bashing here. I just want to highlight the differences between what many perceive their job to be, and what management expects.

I was fortunate that while I was struggling as a manager under the new definition, this company developed a reasonable technical ladder as an alternative to the management ladder, so going back as an engineer had no downside on my salary or prospects.

So my recommendation is: while you should strive to do what is expected (and I cannot tell you what that is), don't completely abandon the technical aspect and let your skills go stale because if you are any good at it (and you probably are since they offered you this opportunity) that is something you can always fall back on. If you are expected to not do any technical work at all, think twice before taking the job, you probably won't be happy.

Also, in your new management responsibilities, you will have an opportunity to make sure that the company has, or develops, a technical ladder so that good engineers are not offered the choice of either becoming managers (where they may suck) or go somewhere else. That may be you :)

And one more thing: do not abandon your values. If you believe something is wrong, it is wrong. It does not matter if you wear the engineer's hat or the manager's hat. You will be the most visible technical person in the organization, that comes with responsibilities. Speak your mind in a respectful way, be yourself and represent the interests of your staff and the customers. You will be under a lot of pressure to cut corners and push your better judgement under the rug in order to meet impossible deadlines and budgets. Honestly try to make the best of it. Make friends in the management structure. You will need them one day. You were made that offer because you are smart, never forget it. You have an obligation to speak the truth.

Take the journey with your team

[anchovy_chekov]

• remember what you already know
• acknowledge what you don't
• talk to the specific interests of both business and technical staff
• be honest

It's a pretty exciting time to be able to doing what you're doing - lines are blurring all over the place between the artificial divisions within organisations. I'd be reading as much about Lean Management as I can (as the wellspring from which Agile comes), but only if it makes sense in your context.

Good luck!

Hints

[mseeger]

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

Re:Hints

[dbIII]

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.

School Headmasters (among many others) have managed to do that in a lot of places over the last couple of centuries and leading craftsmen over a much longer period than that. The answer is not to do it as two full time jobs but one job with many elements.

Congratulations!

[porsche911]

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,

Consider whether you really want to do it

[ratbag]

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!

Remain as you are

[eulernet]

Here are some advice:

1) Read the Theory of Constraints, and use it to organize your team
2) Read about Emotional Intelligence
3) Do not try to do everything, find what has value for your position, and concentrate on this
4) Do not micromanage. If you don't know agility, try to follow a Scrum certification, I know it's dumb, but the concepts are very important. The aim is to let people self-organize, and your role is to verify their throughput.

Your role as a manager is to be sure that the work is delivered, and help the team to do that.
It means:
- communicate to your team and to your hierarchy. Everything should be clear for everybody. If it's not clear, you aren't doing your job.
- focus on your work. Stop trying to command people,. If they don't know what they have to do, it means that you didn't communicate clearly.
- remove all possible impediments to the team (you need to protect them from your hierarchy)
- be tough but fair with your team (do not let people abuse you)

Try to use the following values:
- clarity (everybody must know what they have to do, not how to do it, also act transparently)
- feedback (if something goes wrong, fix it as soon as possible. For example, detect bugs or specification inconstencies ASAP)
- trust (trust your team, let them do as they prefer, but check that the work is done correctly and in the time they promised, do not force your planning on them, let your team decide how they want to be organized, help them if they don't know)
- responsibility. Make people feel responsible about their work. If you take all the responsibility, your team won't care about your project. If you take no responsibility, the team will feel that you don't do anything for them.

Re:Micromanage or you will be disappointed

[somersault]

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.

Get a mentor and start reading

[CoryFoy]

I love the comments about finding a good mentor. Highly recommended. Next, pick up Mythical Man Month, The First 90 Days, Switch, Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and FruITion. Especially the 90 days book. You aren't just a dev with new responsibilities - you are learning something brand new. Imagine that you are now being asked to build apps in a language you've never seen. Mostly remember that your

Re:Simple

[sclark46]

I have found it is a very good exercise to let the programmers tell me how long it is going to take to get the job done. We do it in a group setting with all the peers involved. The programmers don't want to look bad among their peers so they usually set realistic dates and work hard to meet them. Each week we review progress in a group setting. This seems to work very well.

Engineers alternative

[dbIII]

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".

3 easy steps...

[Lumpy]

1 - give yourself a major head injury, you need to go from a educated professional to a brain damaged "visionary" who has "forward thinking" and "Paradigm Shift"
2 - buy a book on buzzwords and use them all wrong, typically in the wrong spots. "WE need to Empower the diversity of the SQL server! That way we can Achieve a Sea Change OF Spin up!"
3 - learn how to golf.

That is pretty much it.

Been There, Done That...

[Kr3m3Puff]

First off, while I don't know exactly your situation, it does seem that you aren't going to be moving as far away as you might have thought. I have gone from "developer" to "architect" over the first 15 years of my career and now I have moved onto what is clearly senior management, but I am part of a large organisation which means that I still am not that close to the top. I would be considered a CTO of a medium sized company though. I have full P&L responsibility for more than one area and am responsible for about 150 people and about £10 million in budget per annum, 1/2 of that being hardware/software. I have been doing the management role for about 2 years now and I can say, for me, I won't go back.

I think my people, mostly, don't think of me as PHB. That is in part by remembering your roots, but more than not it is building up trust that you are going to lead them the right direction and having proper "adult" conversations about risks and issues. As others have said, micro-management, especially in the West, is horrible. You have to delegate and trust your team, no matter how tough that can be at times. Respecting their professionalism, much as you would have expected in their place, is necessary. Do not shy away from tough conversations though. It is much better to be up front about issues and direct than it is to avoid the subject hoping that it just will take care of itself. I have seen many "good" people turned into "bad" because there was a minor issue that festered until it wasn't recoverable anymore.

As far as the Technology, ask a lot of questions. Having a good inbuilt "bullshit" detector is a must for effective Technology management. Don't know every detail, but know when people don't know what they are talking about.

Re:Simple

[Kjella]

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.

be smart, be different, learn fast

[X10]

I have done it, and it worked well. I've moved back also, which was a lot harder.

Developers want a boss who understands them and who thinks like them. So don't lose your developer mindset. Keep your knowledge up to date by sitting with a developer frequently and go through their code. You know that as a developer, you'd appreciate an executive to look at your code an actually understand it. For you as an exec, it'll keep you up to date, to a certain extent.

Trust the developers you work with. This only works if they're smart enough. Delegate stuff to developers. I've always found it extremely useful to have decisions made by the person or people who are knowledgeable about the subject. If you make decisions, talk to one or two people you trust, ask their opinion, challenge what they say, then take their advice. At the same time, if the advice turns out to be wrong, don't blame them. Once you've adopted their advice and opinion, it's yours, and you defend it to your boss. You make friends when people know that they gave you wrong advice and you took the blame. It will never happen again, I can promise you that. It won't get you fired, unless your boss is stupid, in which case you want to get fired.

As an exec, you can get away with a lot, as long as you have your facts straight and you have an answer to every question. If you want to make a difference, be different. But then, you can only be different if you're strong enough to support it.

Know your facts, but know other peoples facts also. You can't talk to a marketing exec or a finance exec if you don't know their jargon. Read a book on business finance, read one on marketing. Talk to execs and listen carefully. What they talk about today, you should be able to talk about tomorrow. At the same time, don't make them feel threatened, as if you want to come into their area. Always keep saying "It's my opinion that everyone should do what they're good at, and leave everything else to experts".

Don't try to blend in to quickly. It doesn't hurt to dress a little different from the other execs. It's a sign to your team that you're still one of them.

As others have suggested, find a mentor. Someone senior who you know well and who you trust, and who doesn't have a conflict of interest with you in your new job. I've had a mentor, a woman who has been my boss for a year or so, we became friends, and while she moved to the top, she remained available to me as a mentor. She's been a great support to me for a period of about ten years.

Re:Dev to Exec

[jellomizer]

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.

Lead, don't pull

[sl4shd0rk]

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.

be a shield

[l3v1]

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.

Good luck

[delphigreg]

Five years ago I was fed up with incompetent managers, silly requirements, unrealistic deadlines, and unending piles of bad decisions. I thought I could do better. This year I had enough and are doing the best I can so bring down the pointy hair.

One key thing to understand is that right now you are great with technology, but management isn't about technology. It's about people. The people you manage, your peers and leaders in other areas of the organization. People can be a lot harder to figure out than technology.

My advice is this.

1. Read "Behind Closed Doors". Probably the best book I read as a new manager. Wish I had read it before I made the leap. http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Closed-Doors-Management-Programmers/dp/0976694026/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324299173&sr=1-3

2. The best part of my day was working with the techies I managed. Listen to them, make time for them, and stay as closed to what they are building as possible. But also remember you are their boss. You will have to force them to make bad technical choices to meet a deadline, and will have to ask them to work nights and weekends. Make sure it is mutual respect, but at the end of the day your word has to be final.

3. Understand how the company makes money. Not just selling a product or service, but really learn this. Because at the end of the day, if a company doesn't make money it will cease to be. This is valuable to learn because the more you can translate how your team fits into the revenue stream, the better leverage you will have. For example, there are two ways to look at how a team "adds value". You will either directly participate in the revenue stream, being on a product team, e-commerce, etc. Or you will be involved with "cost avoidance", meaning the company is spending less because of your efforts. This can be either time savings or accuracy improvements. The later is not too hard to quantify. If you know how many hours are saved in a process you write, add up the salaries of those who did that process, subtracting the salaries of your team. For example, if you save 100 people an hour a day with your process, with each person making minimum wage ($7.25). There are an average of 260 work days per year. This translates into 100 * 260 * 7.25 = $185,000 in savings per year. If you have one full time employee supporting the app, at 80k per year, your application is saving the company ~ 100k per year. Now of course this does not include hardware, software, training, donut expenses. It's not intended to. It is intended to get people's attention, justify funding for your team, and facilitate you getting more in next year's budget.

4. Keep good notes. You may become an Outlook operator in your new line of work. Be sure to keep important emails that record decisions. Send out your understanding of a meeting after the meeting to make sure everyone heard the same thing as you. Keep a notebook or tablet and take tons of notes in meetings. If you are in several meetings per day it can be very easy to forget who said what when. This can be important when decisions are questioned later on. Or if things go bad, accountability can be shared among the entire executive team and not focused as the new manager.

5. Hire really good people. Know that interviews are about finding the right fit for a team as well as their technical abilities. If you do this right, the rest of your work-live is exponentially easier. Ask good questions, do quizes and tech screenings. Listen to the questions a candidate asks. But trust your gut instincts.

Bottom line is remember to keep your sense of humor and humility. This can be one of the most challenging and rewarding things you will ever do, managing others. You are their boss, responsible for their work lives, and a major influencer of their personal lives and financial futures.

Re:Simple

[Kagetsuki]

I set up schedules with the programmers, but we need to fit those schedules into client time frames so sometimes I do have to make assumptions or harder schedules. As for watching commits it's not about micro managing so much as making sure everyone is keeping up and looking out for developers straying from the design. When different modules are developed separately and need to be put together at later points you really need to make sure they are built in a way they will fit together. You could say it's my way of "making sure all your people are productive, clearing roadblocks". I don't deal with recruitment/staffing and there is no management reporting - I deal with a loose knit group of developers/designers/planners/creators mainly on paid OSS projects and I often am the one getting those jobs. I'm not in an office building and none of my developers are forced to come in on any project - they come in because they like to work with me and because I find interesting work for them.

Now if I were in a corporate environment I'd be a lousy manager, but not because I'm too strict but because I'm too lax. I once screwed up by not watching a coder closely enough - he ended up blowing about 2 months when he though he had a better idea of how to do something instead of using a library which I told him to use; which would have implemented the same functionality in a day. When I found out I actually gave him another month to fix things and he still didn't. That killed the project and cost me quite a bit of money - had I been stricter and micro managed more it would not have happened. Other times I've put a lot of time helping developers meet customer deadlines and not collected pay for my time. As you can guess developers really like that kind of management - but it's bad management and these are things you should avoid doing. To say the least I've made a lot of mistakes a "traditional project manager" would not have and those were the things I was trying to point out.

The Best Advice I Can Give

[Phoenix666]

I made this transition ten years ago. It hasn't been a smooth ride. The skills you need to be an effective manager are human ones, not technical. The goal is to build a great team, work with them to define the technical objective, put your stamp on that, and then do what you can to help them work effectively with each other and run interference for them with the rest of the organization.

There are so many politics involved with that; I guarantee you no one in sales, marketing, HR, finance, or anything else gives a crap about any technical goal or about what's best for the company or any of that sort of thing. They only know ego and the size of their Christmas bonus. So you have to deal with them strictly on that basis. But that's an entirely different discussion tangential to what you were asking.

As far as motivating your team, the best summation of how to approach it that I've ever seen is this video.

The second and last gotcha to be on guard for with the transition you're making is to embrace the exercise of your own authority. Human groups need authority to function well. It's how we're wired (unfortunately). You have to get over your natural reluctance as a programmer to exercise it. If you don't make firm decisions and stick to your guns, the team will begin to unravel. Some members may start to undermine you, and that will make it impossible for the team to accomplish its goals, to everyone's detriment. It's very difficult to make this psychological shift and you may experience a lot of feelings of guilt and self-doubt and it can really tear you down if you don't deal with it well. You might want to have a occupational therapist or somebody like that on hand to counsel you as you go through it. Otherwise you won't make it or you'll go full evil in reaction when the programmers stop doing their jobs.

Good luck!

Here are the 3 "R"s

[tomhudson]

Step 1: Report to surgery to have 50% of your brain removed (half the time they'll manage to get the part that governs common sense and ethics and you won't be handicapped in your new roll by that thing called a "conscience").

Step 2: Repeat "Knowing how to do the job isn't important - that's what we hire and fire people for" until you believe everyone under you is as replaceable as you are irreplacable.

Step 3: Register for every ridiculous vendor hand-out, symposium, or whatever. Vendors are your new friends. The more business you can hand them, the bigger YOUR empire becomes, and the more new-found allies you have.

The bonus:

Step 4: Remember all those jokes you made about incompetent management, because it'll make it easier for you to pry the keyboards from your former co-workers dead bodies when you realize that they're now saying the same thing about you.

Wisdom Management cliches

[nine-times]

If you want to avoid being the PHB, then don't read a bunch of management books or go to management seminars or get your MBA. Avoid taking a lot of the advice that you'll be given.

Really, it can be helpful to read about management, but the main source of PHBs is that it's some guy who has been thrown into management without being comfortable with it, and his response is to latch on to whatever random management self-help book he read. He reads something about how to motivate people or how to manage an IT department, and instead of thinking critically and applying his own experiences, he follows the quick-fix methods that he read about.

There's plenty to learn and plenty to study, but use your head. There's no metric to replace knowing the people you're managing. There's no procedure to replace good judgement. There's no magical workflow that replaces knuckling down and doing your job.

Re:Micromanage or you will be disappointed

[radtea]

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.

Almost completely false. Estimation is just not that hard in almost all cases, yet bring it up and people will focus on the 1% of cases that are genuinely hard rather as if that was the usual case rather than the rare exception.

Go read "Rapid Development" again for some simple and effective estimation practices. Invest in the discipline of reviewing your own work and look for objective metrics. During one phase of my career I was able to identify that creating a single fully documented and tested core model class in C++ took about a week. Based on that I could look at a UML diagram and give a pretty reasonable estimate of the time it would take to implement something. If you aren't designing or otherwise scoping features you're not in a position to make any claims about estimation anyway, because you have made no attempt to do even the most basic steps required to generate estimates.

This demonstrably false belief that "estimation is hard in the typical case" is just an excuse people use to avoid learning a new and valuable skill. That said, being able to estimate at all makes you the one-eyed person in the kingdom of the blind, which can be pretty damned uncomfortable, as well as frustrating.

Needs to understand the overall organization

[perpenso]

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.

As someone who recently graduated from business school I have to disagree with respect to "minimal amount of training". The more formal training the better. Especially since the poster seems to indicate an executive angle not just tech management. The MBA stuff would really help out since it offers a good overall understanding of all the pieces of an organization. Business school and MBAs are not what most around here think, I was just as guilty. One of the things that made business school lots of fun for me was seeing just how ignorant and biased I had been with respect to management, marketing, etc.

Re:Micromanage or you will be disappointed

[tompaulco]

Example, say Manager asks Developer how long he will take to do XYZ. Developer says 5 days. Manager tells Developer to do XYZ. But then Manager asks Developer to do PQR as well. Meanwhile Manager is asked to attend a few meetings, Manager drags Developer (and team) in for those meetings too. And the Manager _still_ expects XYZ in 5 days.
This is why I give my estimates on development time, not elapsed time. In Mid November, I was asked how long a project would take. I said 6 weeks of development. Now, 5 weeks later, there are about 4 weeks of development left, because in the mean time we have moved offices, dragged me off to look at network issues, and a hundred other things that resulted in me only getting to spend two weeks of development on the project during the last 5 weeks. Since it is not possible to anticipate how much of your actual time you are going to be allowed to spend doing your job, development time is the only estimate you can really give.

My advice for leadership transition

[Jim Hall]

I started my career as a systems administrator / systems programmer on Unix systems. Over the last 20 years, I went from a "hands on" role to a leadership role. I'm now the "CIO" of a small university (we don't have the title "CIO" at this campus, but that's basically my job.) Some of those transitions to a larger role were easy, others were more difficult.

I strongly recommend you read the essay "Taking on a new role" (PDF) from MOR Associates. In short, the essay gives this advice:

1. Share broad themes early: what general areas do you plan to address, what are your goals for the team, where are you headed?

2. Read the landscape: what does the culture of the organization look like, not just in the team you work with, but at the leadership level.

3. Build relationships: people who can help you in your new role, mentors, coaches.

4. Create a "SWOT" profile with your team, to understand the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

5. Assess the talent needed to get the job done: do you have the right people, and are the right people doing the right things?

6. Understand your financial situation: this is often the most-overlooked by new leaders.

7. Sketch out your priorities for the first 3-12 months: in particular, keep track of what you need to get done in your first 100 days.

I like do to the SWOT profile (see #4) without actually using the terms "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats." I find it's easier to start with a "plus/delta" profile. If you haven't done that before: Draw a vertical line on the whiteboard. On the left, label it "plus"; on the right, "delta". Draw a horizontal line across this, making 4 quadrants. Above the horizontal line, label it "now"; below the line, "future".

Now you're ready for your team to identify what's working well (plus) right now, and what's going to be a benefit to them after another 6-12 months. They can also help you identify what needs to be addressed/fixed/changed/improved (delta) right now, and what can wait for another 6-12 months. Congratulations, you've built a SWOT profile:

• S = plus, now
• W = delta, now
• O = plus, future
• T = delta, future

I find the SWOT helps me to identify the key issues to focus on. What you must do is identify a plan to address the right-hand column (deltas) that leverages what you have on the left (plusses). Your team is critical to help fill out the SWOT, and the great thing about this exercise is that it helps the team to identify with you on your new level. But while your team helps you with the SWOT, you must build your own strategy to respond to it; that's your job as a new leader.

If you're having trouble picking out your top priorities (see #7) you may also consider doing an "affinity" exercise with your team. You can do this in different ways, but here's what I find works best for my team:

1. Give each team member a stack of Post-It notes, maybe 5 or 6 each. Have them write down what they think are the top priorities - but only one item per Post-It note. Not everyone can fill out 5 or 6 Post-It notes, and that's ok.
2. When everyone has their notes, talk about them in front of the group. See if any overlap (or are the same) as someone else's note. Combine any that seem to match up.
3. Then, pass them around the table. Each person at the table gives an independent score (0-10) for how important they think that item is to the team or organization. You aren't ranking them in a list, you're just giving them an independent score. Everyone gives their own score, and passes the note to the next person around the table.
4. When every Post-It has been scored by everyone at the table (i.e. when a person gets their own Post-Its back) add up the scores for a total for each note.

You can now identify (by score) what are your top priorities. Maybe you have 5 or 6 "top" priorities. Or maybe you only have 4 top priorities, and there's a big gap (in score) between #4 and #5.

Re:Micromanage or you will be disappointed

[RingDev]

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

Role models, learn the business, live well.

[puppetluva]

1) Find a manager that is successful in your company and is generally admired. Get to know him/her and learn what they do right, what they do wrong, and what they know about the culture of the company. When you know them well and know their secrets well, find the next one.

2) Find a very successful manager that runs a similar department to yours in an excellent company reknown in your industry. Get to know them, figure out what they and their teams do right, what they do wrong, and how the culture of their company works and differs from theirs. Fix yours that way or have good enough relationships to join theirs. When your group is better than that group, find the next one.

3) Find out how your company makes money . . . really makes money -- what do they make, what do they sell, who do they sell to and how much of each thing do they sell to whom and how. Figure out how your department fits into that and how you can best fit those goals. Do those things. Figure out what doesn't make money (or worse wastes money at) -- aggressively try to eliminate those things.

4) Figure out what your team is good at and what it is bad at. Cross that with the results from #3. Focus on getting your team better at things that help the company make money and getting rid of things that make it lose money.

5) Respect people -- even those you don't like. You can learn something from _everyone_. Even if it is to just avoid making the foolish mistakes they make. Have enough respect for those people who work hard and pull things through for the company to let go those who slack off and basically leach off of their coworkers. Help those who aren't good at things, but really, really want to get there. Consider everyone's skillset as they are and reward each achievement and each step forward for people at their level.

6) Have a plan. From the details of #3, and the development of #4/5 and the examples of #1,2 figure out what goals get you closer to achieving those ideals in the the next 3, 6, and 12 months. Every quarter, reassess where you are and tune up your goals so they stay relevant and you measure your progress.

7) Measure your progress -- success or failure -- at every turn. How well do you work and how well do you create product? How good are the things you make and how good are your processes/tools for making them? Use your comparative analysis with external and internal teams to figure out how they operate as well and figure out how to measure it and improve it. Don't be a slave to numbers but don't be ignorant of them. If you pick the wrong metrics, then you learned that you need better metrics.

8) Act like the manager you wish you had. Don't be a jerk, and don't gossip. Talk to people face to face and act with integrity. Your group and peers are you community - treat them that way and build the community stronger.

9) Build your self and your group. Figure out what you all are weakest at (that matters) and get training and practice at getting better. Make it a quota to do this at least annually.

10) Manage yourself and your own stress. Have a todo list of the next top 3 most important things to do at all times -- do those next. Take care your health, sleep well, eat right and learn to leave work at the office enough to not bear the burden of your whole team's worries when you go to bed at night.