How do I know if I should become a manager?

[regular_dev]

I am a software engineer in Amazon (L5). I have 10 years of experience in total and 2 in amzn. My question is how do I know whether I'll be a good manager and whether I should go for it. I see this question as a serious career choice and if I don't do well as a manager I eighter waste time that I could spend on working towards my promotion or just get frustrated. On the other hand what if I do great? I'm confused. I'm in darkness without a flashlight. I'm a lost soul.... Ok you got it :)

[greenyoda]

I'm an ex-manager who went back to being a developer. Here are some things I think you'll need to be comfortable with if you want to be a manager:

- Spending time in meetings. Everything from one-on-one meetings with your staff to meetings with higher management. The higher you get promoted, the more meetings you'll be expected to attend.

- Dealing with other company bureaucracy. One of your jobs as a manager is to shield your staff from bureaucracy so that they can get their work done.

- Not being an individual contributor anymore. Once you get promoted beyond being a lead developer, you'll be spending much less time on designing and writing code. You'll be judged based on the contribution of your entire team, not your own contribution. You'll need to start spending time mentoring your staff to make them more effective.

- Dealing with HR issues. You will be your staff's first point of contact when they want to ask for a raise or promotion, report problematic interactions with other staff, or ask for accommodations due to personal or health problems. You may need to fire some of your employees because their performance doesn't meet expectations. Even worse, you may need to lay off high-performing employees because the company wants to cut costs or cancel a project that they're working on. You may need to choose which of your staff get laid off. You'll need to be aware that certain actions you take could expose the company to legal liability.

- Because of the above, it will not be a good idea to be personal friends or drinking buddies with the people you now manage. For example, if the employee who socializes with you happens to be promoted while the one who doesn't gets laid off (even if the decisions were made completely fairly), it will be demoralizing to the rest of your staff and may result in your being accused of discrimination.

[regular_dev]

Thanks a lot!

[idunno246]

> I see this question as a serious career choice and if I don't do well as a manager I eighter waste time that I could spend on working towards my promotion or just get frustrated.

I've stayed on the IC track since I really don't want to deal with HR issues, but a lot of the other things greenyoda's listed are part of my job as well.

Promotions as you get higher in the IC track depend more and more on leadership. From what I see eng manager is like five roles, depending on the makeup of the team may be shared between tech lead and product/project managers(i'm infra focused so i dont get product managers). My manager and I are basically peers, and we split a lot of those roles up, but by doing both you can better understand why a manager is doing the thing theyre doing. If you really hate it, the skills you learn managing will still be extremely valuable as you move up higher up and not be a waste of time, whether it be empathy for a coworker's position, being able to sub in where needed on your team, or learning the bureaucracy outside your team to be able to push org/company wide tech initiatives forward better.

I'd suggest trying it if youre considering it, especially at a large company - I imagine there are a lot of experienced managers there who can provide mentorship, as opposed to a small company where many manager have little experience.

[xkcd-sucks]

Do you feel more limited by your own capability to Get Shit Done,or do you feel more limited by your colleagues'/bureaucratic organization's capability? If the latter, try management?

[keithchambers]

Let’s starts with the basics -

What interests you about being a manager?

[regular_dev]

Good question. 1. Being more on a business side rather then a tech one. Many times I find myself not giving a shit about how something is implemented. If it works it works (I know, I know, it does matter. Maintenance, scalability bla bla bla) 2. Trying myself in a leadership role. This could be a technical leadership as well but it's harder to get there and I don't have a strong bias towards that. I'm also not confident about being a good tech leader but maybe its just my fears.