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by pmoriarty
3548 days ago
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"You might feel uncomfortable moving away from your vim window into the meeting room, but that's where the greater rewards are" Greater financial rewards, maybe. But not necessarily greater intellectual or emotional rewards. Not everyone's cut out for or enjoys management or running a business. There are people who just love getting their hands dirty in tech and hate meetings, power point presentations, kissing up to and hobnobbing with upper management, making up budgets and writing reports, herding cats, giving pep talks, dealing with HR issues, and the rest of the things that managers often have to do to be "successful". I'm happiest when I can just go nose down working on interesting technical problems, when I'm collaborating with other engineers on the same, or mentoring junior engineers, with all the corporate BS taken care of by my manager. |
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That type of thinking will do you in. If you can take technical resources and produce a functioning system, then you're cut out for management. The people problems you'll encounter are largely irrelevant. Learning your charges' quirks, dislikes and styles is like learning a new language or API.
And if you believe in Alan Turing's compelling philosophical argument that people are just fleshbound Universal Turing Machines, then it's easy to carry over from development to management. You just end up putting a fleshy, slower, intelligent computational layer between you and the dumb, fast calculators you normally solve problems with. Program the people to program the machines. Abstraction is a core concept in development.
At some point you'll see that you can create bigger things by commanding a team or department. A single person rarely ever makes a huge contribution on their own.