Do they force you into it anyways? Two jobs ago I told them that all the time. They used to make us fill out a career advancement plan every year, and every year I said “I’m exactly where I want to be”, but every 6 months they’d stick me at the head of some team and I’d have to do that for a few months until I weasled my way out of it.
When I was studying for PMP, I remember there was even a term for this. Because you’re good at one thing, it was expected that you would be good at something else as well, not taking into consideration that managing people is completely different from the domain they were an expert on. Of course, sometimes it helps to have some previous domain knowledge to be able to lead a specific team, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatic.
What companies really need to realise is that there should be different promotion tracks, and some of them are individualistic, i.e. being promoted as an expert in their field, rather than being promoted to have to manage people.
It’s been tough switching from managing data and processes to managing people. But I make a LOT more money. It’s also nice not having to watch someone else make poor decisions all the time, but I guess now everyone else is now watching me make the poor decisions! 🤦♂️
Great. More responsibility and being the scapegoat for everything bad coming from the ones under you.
I’d need 150% of my salary to start thinking about doing that.
Yeah… I feel like I contributed so much more before but managing people, but this is where the money is sadly. I went from supply chain/purchasing/logistics manager to operations manager. I used to be a one man team and single handedly saved maybe $200k this year so far, and took our aged inventory from about $1M to basically nothing, all of our KPIs are primo. This is a company that pulls $10M/yr in revenue… small company.
I got rewarded with spending half my time babysitting the warehouse team, getting reamed by my boss when they’re not getting through things fast enough, and fixing their mistakes and bandaiding bad processes. But I got a 30% raise so I guess it’s worth it? I could be doing so much more.
It doesn’t necessarily matter that you make poor decisions. That’s all of us. At some point. It matters that you take ownership of it and don’t pawn it off on somebody else. And, that you make things right when necessary. Competence is important but integrity is way more important.
To anyone dreading this for real, there are places where you can get ahead as an IC and it’s considered a parallel career track to management. 0 direct reports. Maybe some mentoring, if you want, but that’s it.
Typically, but employers are getting wise. They don’t want to lose their best technical talent just because they’re on the spectrum or whatever. Or arguably worse: see them sputter out in a hybrid management/tech role that is more lucrative, but much less impactful than if they’d just stayed tech.
Staff, and architect are two other roles that are sometimes like that. Yet other places will just keep going up levels / pay bands, like eng I, II; senior eng I, II, III, IV, …, VII, etc
I’ve been avoiding people management for years - and about a year ago, I was apprached by a company I’ve worked with for an exec gig. Dream job that would have shot me forward 10+ years in my career.
I lost it because I haven’t managed people since I worked in retail. It’s held me back pretty seriously, and I understand now that it’s better me leading a team than most of the schmucks I’ve worked for.
Don't worry about it son, there was a little mishap and your mom shat the president.
Next thing you know thanks to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings and accordimg to Amazon a "malfunctioning Alexa" we had to get the federal government involved.
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