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I did more or less exactly this - after two years working as a developer, I pushed myself into a "team leader" position, managing a team of half a dozen people in one location and semi-managing a few others in a different location. I did this for about 18 months for a large (and fast growing) organisation. I managed to negotiate about 25% of my time for development (some of it quite high-level architecture, but often still writing actual code); the rest was personnel management, planning and organisation, liaising with sales and project management, sometimes attending sales pitches, and training other teams. I actually had a great time, met people from all over the organisation, got some travel out of it, and learnt a hell of a lot, almost all of which has been beneficial to me later in my career. Personnel management was definitely a real challenge - in ways I absolutely had not predicted (we had some, shall we say, "interesting" characters on the team, and I got to know the HR people very well by the end of it). After 18 months, I moved to another company to take a role which ostensibly should have been similar but ended up migrating back into a more-or-less pure development role as a technical lead. The skills I learnt then - especially anything to do with personnel, sales, and planning - are still extremely useful to me as a software consultant / small business guy today. I don't know if this route is for everyone - I was already naturally pretty confident and articulate, and for developers who aren't especially born that way, I think a lot of management tasks and managerial expectations are probably scary and unpleasant. But for me, at least, I enjoyed it and have few complaints. |