I’m at a spot where I’m headed towards technical leadership rather than managerial leadership.
I have a small team, and it’s up to me to use them to magnify my effectiveness with my work. It’s actually kind of a good spot, but I’m worried I’ll be asked to do more management stuff
Management is just making other people do your work 99% of the time. And it’s expected! I’ve run a few teams with good results and it’s always the easiest position in the group.
It’s only easy if the team is competent and motivated. I can literally hand some people on my team step by step instructions and they still come out wrong 50% of the time because they either think they know better (they don’t) or they’re just lazy. On top of that the HR policy here makes it take 6 months to replace a person and get us up to speed so if I get rid of the shittiest ones I’m still in a worse spot than I would be if I just deal with coaching them all the time. Working on jumping to a new role that isn’t a leadership position because I’m so tired of being responsible for other people’s performance.
The problem is that you’ll fall off the technical curve eventually. It’s almost inevitable. Even if you read and study every day and keep up with every bit of technical meta, your brain will slowly turn to goo and you’ll find it hard to stay ahead of younger engineers purely on technical competence alone. At a certain point you need to develop some form of leadership skills so you can turn your experience into a multiplier.
My hope is to stumble into some role that is common today but will be niche in the future, like cobolt devs today. I’ll be some kind of java streams expert in 30 years or something lol
Literally. I saw the title, thought it was interesting, tried to read it, found out it was not interesting unless you're a boy scout or you really like the Foxfire series.
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.
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.
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