
Interviews with developers who became managers - siddhant
https://devtomanager.com/
======
ep103
The moment I saw this link, I clicked it. I'm pretty lost for advice at the
moment, and hoped this would help. But it looks like it is just a collection
of interviews with people who became managers about what they've learned?

One of the quotes on the page was:

"Moving from dev to manager is NOT A PROMOTION. It's a CAREER CHANGE."

This is what I'm having a problem with.

I look at my team, and the entire office is happier than I've seen it in 5
years. I'm watching people train, and actively grow under my management. It is
incredibly rewarding, and much, much better than before I moved to my current
position.

But I've also spent the last 9 weeks doing nothing but reading resumes, phone
screens, and interviewing candidates. Staring at an excel spreadsheet mix of
engineers I could out-code, great developers I can't afford, internal
politics, and emailing recruiters all day, isn't what I went into engineering
for. Being judged on my projected demeanor in meetings, ability to navigate
politics, and clear bureaucratic hurdles for my team isn't itself enjoyable...
its soul-sucking and stressful.

I wake up every morning and don't want to get out of bed. I've started setting
aside a (very) small portion of time for coding, just because I miss it so
much. Ever wake up and realize you are going to spend the first two hours of
the day rescheduling meetings... again?

But most days, something will happen among the team, where, before I leave,
I'll realize "That wouldn't have happened here before you rose up the ranks.
You've made all of these people's lives better." and it'll bounce me back a
bit.

Your website says that the transition to management is difficult and nuanced,
but things like the above are what I need help with.

~~~
phereford
Believe it or not, _you_ and you alone can fix this. DELEGATE! Delegate enough
to get back SOME of that coding time. Block off 2 hours a day as "Free Time"
or "Creative Space" a la Michael Scott from _The Office_. People will respect
that.

At my prior place of employment in which I grew the team from 0 to 25 in 3
years, I eventually delegated all the stuff I did not like and empowered my
team to own it. It sounds like you can do something very similar with the
culture you have there.

An example: At first I loved phone screens and getting to know candidates. I
refined and built that process from scratch. Once that process was up and
running, it was no longer the best use of my time to be hammering the phones
and scheduling screens. There was a better use of my time and someone else
that REALLY enjoyed that aspect of team building stepped up. I was able to
move myself to the end of the recruiting funnel which freed up 70-80% of my
time allocated to that function. The opportunity cost was simply too high for
the company having me screening people.

You can certainly find a way to do that as well.

If you feel like chatting more on this, my email is in my profile. Good luck
and don't burn out! Your work should be just as fulfilling as your team
members work.

~~~
rak00n
How can he delegate hiring?

~~~
zarq
Make it a team effort. Distribute resume reviews & interviews.

~~~
bit_logic
Disagree with this, this is why the industry is filled with junior engineers
doing ineffective algorithm whiteboard interviews. Hiring is too important to
leave to engineers who don't want to do it. Generally they will do a bad job
because it's just an annoying thing getting in the way of their work.

Hiring is broken because engineers think it's just another problem you can
apply typical engineering solution. Same kind of thinking that causes the
terrible customer service in Google products like random algorithm locking out
accounts.

~~~
themoat
I did a fair chunk of interviews when I was just a dev. I loved it, and I took
it very seriously in terms of vetting programming skill and practices. I also
felt good offloading that burden from a good manager.

It was win-win for our team. YMMV

~~~
Benjammer
What were your success rates compared to other teams who depended more on the
manager for hiring? How often did your company fire people for poor
performance?

Sorry, didn't mean these to come off so pointed, just super curious is all,
not trying a gotcha or anything.

------
pdfernhout
Here is a collection of related advice I put together useful for managers of
software developers: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-
Organizations...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-
Organizations-Reading-List)

It includes, among other things, a link to the Khan Academy Engineering
Management Reading List.

See especially the first book on the list about a need for "slack" (free time,
not the software) called "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth
of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco". The summary: "There is a tradeoff
between efficiency (meeting previous well-defined needs with minimal effort)
versus effectiveness (meeting newly emerging needs with flexibility and
responsiveness through organizational learning). If you optimize only for
efficiency in meeting previous needs from past opportunities, you will by
necessity eliminate your organizations's capacity to respond effectively to
future needs from newly emerging opportunities. This ability to learn and grow
as an organization requires "slack" time. Middle management has a vital role
to play in organizational adaptability -- but only if they are not over-
scheduled."

Tom DeMarco also previously co-wrote "Peopleware: Productive Projects and
Team", another excellent book on software management.

Another informative and funny book in that area is by Michael Lopp: "Managing
Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager"

Bottom line: you have essentially switched to a new field even if computers
are still involved so you need time for self-education and practice and
failures and recoveries. As in, ultimately, years to get really good at this
new profession the same way it took years and thousands of mistakes to get
good at software development as a programmer... (Although mistakes with people
are often more personally painful than mistakes that just the compiler yells
at you about.)

Something else to be aware of (may not apply to you) is that many of the best
software developers have some degree of Asperger's -- but people with
Asperger's often have issues dealing with human relationships unless they
consciously learn various skills for dealing with people that many other non-
Aspies just seem to have intuitively. And even when they get good at those
skills (sometimes better than non-Aspies because they make understanding all
that a focus or obsession), an Aspie using the logical primary CPU part of
your brain all day to do what many other people do essentially with an emotion
co-processor can leave one feeling drained at the end of the day. So
"promotion" from software developer to manager may often be a step backwards
in career satisfaction for top developers. Anyway, that is just another
complexity on top of all the other issues a new manager of any sort has to
deal with. But as you point out, being a manager has its own satisfaction in
helping others grow, so if you can get enough positive feedback from seeing
your own leverage increase that way, the benefits of transitioning to becoming
a manager may eventually outweigh the costs (especially once the people and
organizational skills needed to excel become more routinized).

~~~
krageon
I appreciate the thought RE the "Asperger", but in the interest of aligning
with reality: Asperger no longer exists as a diagnosis (it's all on an autism
spectrum now) and saying that many of "the best" software developers "have
some degree of" a psychiatric diagnosis is... Well I'm not sure exactly what
to call it. Premature springs to mind.

~~~
pdfernhout
Something by Jeff Atwood on this: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-
developers-and-asperg...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-developers-
and-aspergers-syndrome/) "Software Developers and Asperger's Syndrome: When I
read Wesner Moise's post on Asperger's Syndrome, I wasn't surprised. Many of
the best software developers I've known share some of the traits associated
with Asperger's Syndrome: ..."

Jeff also links to this 2001 Wired article on the topic:
[https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/](https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/)
"Autism -- and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome -- is surging among the
children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?"

See also: "The Real Problems With Psychiatry: A psychotherapist contends that
the DSM, psychiatry's "bible" that defines all mental illness, is not
scientific but a product of unscrupulous politics and bureaucracy."
[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-
real-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-
problems-with-psychiatry/275371/)

And from there: "One of the overlooked ways is that diagnoses can change
people's lives for the better. Asperger's Syndrome is probably the most
successful psychiatric disorder ever in this respect. It created a community.
It gave people whose primary symptom was isolation a way to belong and
provided resources to those who were diagnosed. It can also have bad effects.
A depression diagnosis gives people an identity formed around having a disease
that we know doesn't exist, and how that can divert resources from where they
might be needed. Imagine how much less depression there would be if people
weren't worried about tuition, health care, and retirement. Those are all
things that aren't provided by Prozac."

Also, in general, there has been pushback about removing Asperger's from the
DSM. As above, it was a "successful" diagnosis in that it helped a lot of
people feel less alone and find better ways to cope with a situation once they
had a name for it -- see especially the multiple books now on Asperger's and
relationships which can be extremely helpful for people with it and their
partners (e.g. "Love, Sex and Long-Term Relationships: What People with
Asperger Syndrome Really Really Want" by Sarah Hendrickx).

But, moreso, it is not clear that Asperger's is completely the same as "high-
functioning autism" in some ways. This is controversial, but just one example:
[https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/brain-curvature-
distinguis...](https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/brain-curvature-
distinguishes-asperger-syndrome-from-autism/) "A region of the brain that
controls language is more extensively curved in children with autism than in
those with Asperger syndrome, according to a study in the Journal of Child
Neurology. The findings offer preliminary biological evidence that Asperger
syndrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum, is distinct from high-functioning
autism, researchers say."

I wrote "many of the best software developers have some degree of
Asperger's...". Someone can have a little of something to some benefits in
some area like programming (below the level where a formal diagnosis of
Asperger's might be made other than noting tendencies) -- whereas a lot of
something might cause profound difficulties in life overall and fit all the
diagnostic criterion for a formal diagnosis. There may also be some sweet spot
for success given programming in practice especially in a corporate setting
does involve dealing with other people to some extent. Labels tend to be
binary -- whereas personality trends are more shades of grey (or shades of
colors). In various books on Asperger's (e.g. Asperger's on the Job) there are
examples of people with Asperger's who excelled in their jobs because of
Asperger's and then got promoted to management where they crashed and burned
again because of Asperger's (well, usually undiagnosed Asperger's where people
were unaware of the particular challenges they would face and did not know how
to handle the transition including just asking to go back to their previous
role).

I had qualified my comment as "many of the best...". For contrast, here is a
Quora article arguing most programmers in general do not have Asperger's
though. Part of the reason is explained here: [https://www.quora.com/Is-it-
true-that-most-programmers-have-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-
most-programmers-have-mild-Aspergers-syndrome) "While in a way aspergers's
gives a good aptitude for something methodical and logic based like
programming. The deadlines/stress of company life and ‘real world’ work does
not provide a good environment for somebody with Asperger's Syndrome."

So, in the right environment and role, a programmer with Asperger's might
excel beyond those without it. In other situations (including for some, a
promotion to management), a programmer with Asperger's may fail hard and
someone with less technical ability or less ability to focus intensely on one
task but a better intuitive people-sense and better multi-tasking ability may
do much better.

~~~
DanBC
> Something by Jeff Atwood

This is a great example of Dunning-Kruger.

~~~
pdfernhout
Jeff Atwood's was the top match in DuckDuckGo for "asperger's and
programming". But sure, he can be controversial.

Here is the second top match from 2008:
[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536193/it-
management-...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536193/it-management-
asperger-s-and-it-dark-secret-or-open-secret.html)

From there:

======

Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? Asperger's Syndrome has been a
part of IT for as long as there's been IT. So why aren't we doing better by
the Aspies among us?

... He loved the tech parts of being a system administrator, and he was good
at them. But the interpersonal interactions that went along with the position
-- the hearty backslaps from random users, the impromptu meetings -- were
literally unbearable for Ryno. "I can make your systems efficient and lower
your downtime," he says. "I cannot make your users happy."

... While careful to protect his clients' confidentiality, Becker confirms
that he sees many adults and children of adults who work for the region's tech
powerhouses -- Microsoft Corp. and The Boeing Co. -- and the hundreds of
smaller companies that orbit around them.

Some of the Aspies he counsels are at the very top of their tech game:
software and aerospace engineers, computer scientists, Ph.Ds. But for every
research fellow with Asperger's, he says, there are a legion of fellow Aspies
having a much tougher time in the middle or low ranks of the industry.

"The spectrum of success is much broader than one would expect," agrees Roger
Meyer, the Portland, Ore.-based author of The Asperger Syndrome Employment
Workbook who runs one of the oldest peer-led adult Asperger's groups in the
country. "Adults who have grown sophisticated at masking and adaptive
behaviors can either bubble along at the bottom of the market or do very well
at the top."

It's that "bubbling along at the bottom" that has Becker, Meyer and other
Aspie specialists concerned. Employees with Asperger's might do well for years
in data entry or working in a job like insurance claims, where knowledge of
ephemera is a prized work skill, only to flounder when they're promoted to a
position that requires a higher degree of social interaction."

======

------
brandall10
Early in my career I worked at a large company where the average dev age was
late 30s. Quite a few of these people had taken a stab at management and
returned to development. Basically I was told this much - don't do it unless
you're done with coding and desire to rise up the company ranks.

9 years ago I did such a bang-up job as the lead on a medium size product that
I was offered a promotion to management. The first thing I asked was "can I
still code?". No. I got my CS degree because I like doing that. Turned it down
and accepted a promotion to a principal dev instead. Still, I was rather
miserable in that environment. A year later I rebooted my career from .NET
enterprise dev -> Rails consultant for early stage start-ups, best thing I
ever did in my 20 years as a dev.

You're hired by your company to perform a job for a certain comp package.
You're not there for charity. If you're not happy change things up. Your
reports will carry on without you, and if things are that bad in your absence,
will also carry on to hopefully higher planes.

~~~
siddhant
> don't do it unless you're done with coding

Kind of, yes. I guess it depends on the workplace. Some companies still allow
managers to code for a certain percentage of their time, while some don't.

But you're right - transitioning to management usually involves letting go of
code.

~~~
brandall10
Yeah, I should definitely qualify that statement to larger orgs. Every company
I've been in with < 100 people tech management usually coded, and typically in
places < 20 people the CTO would be the most prolific coder.

------
kbenson
I have a good friend that went from Google Software Reliability Engineer (SRE)
to manager of an SRE team, but for him it's less of a problem because he's
always focused on helping others (and to hear him, he gets a good amount of
time to help steer juniors towards solutions and around problems).

I believe he does make sure to set aside a good amount of time every week to
code on whatever side project is his current fancy (usually Perl 6 related). I
don't think he would handle it nearly as well if he didn't have that to fall
back on. So it sounds like maybe you've stumbled on something that might help
(designated time for side projects). The question is whether the rest of the
job is (or will become) gratifying _enough_ to hit a good equilibrium.

I assume you're being paid a salary at the position you're at. An important
facet of salaried positions I've drawn upon is that unless outlined clearly
otherwise in a contract, I'm judged on what I _deliver_. If that means to keep
my sanity I take an hour out of the work day to read HN, or code a side
project, or any other thing, so be it. That's a requirement for me keeping my
sanity at the job I'm at, and if I'm not delivering, then I'll be judged on
that by my superiors. My suggestion is to do whatever it takes to make the job
palatable to you. If that means putting less than 100% in, then put less than
100% in. I assume they would rather have you at 80% indefinitely than 100% for
another 3-6 months before you burn out. It sure sounds like your co-workers
would.

~~~
ep103
This is exactly where I am at. You summarized it perfectly. I'm happy to hear
there are other people who are in my position, that devote time to code as
well.

I'm trying to find a way to make that remaining 80% more gratifying. And I'm
nervous about committing to it permanently until it is. Similarly, I am
hesitant to give up on the opportunity, or go back to IC / team lead status
(with the career limitations that implies (how real a threat is ageism?)) if
it might still be possible to make management more gratifying, given what an
opportunity it represents.

------
hartator
Can't recommend enough "The One Minute Manager" by Kenneth H. Blanchard.

Clean read. Easy to understand principles. From what I remember and learnt:
Limit meetings, define responsibilities, trust your people, focus on what has
been done, going to be done, and the obstacles. And, you are here to help not
to micromanage.

------
acl777
I just became a manager of my team and was introduced to the
[https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts](https://www.manager-
tools.com/podcasts)

Single best resource I have used for management. It taught me how to manage,
even after getting my MBA and serving as president of a Toastmasters club.

I attended the Manager Tools conference and did a conference debrief of it:

[http://redgreenrepeat.com/2019/03/08/conference-debrief-
mana...](http://redgreenrepeat.com/2019/03/08/conference-debrief-manager-
tools/)

If you have any questions, please ask!

------
wellreally
A lot of interviews about the motivation being some variant of teamwork or
changing the world.

Not many people admitting the financial motivation.

~~~
siddhant
A lot of companies these days have parallel tracks for ICs and managers, so
I'm not sure that the financial motivation holds at such places.

~~~
haseeb1431
agreed. Being an IC with less stress and getting similar compensation while
enjoying the architectural work seems more lucrative

------
kojeovo
Interesting content. I'm at the IC vs. manager crossroads and this was some
well timed perspective.

FYI: You have a `margin-top: 1rem;` value in your `.navbar-custom` class
causing text to be visible above the header when you scroll.

~~~
siddhant
Thank you! Fixed. :)

------
dagaci
So many times i have seen coders "promoted" to managing roles. It actually
seems to be normal practice to do this because: the coder is intelligent, the
coder knows whats going on technically, plus the idea that general experience
is somehow related to management skill.

However the truth is if your not regularly training as a manager and
consciously applying well known good management techniques then your probably
not doing so well... as a manager.

As a coder you train a lot! then as a manager you should also train =>
proactively get training please!!

However management is a soft-skill, and coding is a hard -skill. Mistakes in
management are not seen clearly to actually matter too much. Mistakes in
coding clearly matter. When bad management techniques are applied (such as
frequently requesting changes, imposing bad deadlines, not actually planning
....) then the outcome: bad or wrong code, missing deadlines will be seen as
an issue with the coder and not the management. How many coders are being
turned over before....

an anecdote:

When the emperor napoleon marched back to Paris after his 5 month sprint
through the Russian winter, he was able to return as Emperor and remain as
Emperor without too much trouble when considering the scale of the disaster,
he was then able to then raise another Army and start a new series of
campaigns.

:)
[https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters](https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters)

------
spenrose
Highest recommendation for The Manager's Path:
[https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-
path/97814...](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-
path/9781491973882/)

Also excellent but require some translation to a tech setting: Becoming a
Manager (Hill) and Managing (Mintzberg)

------
haseeb1431
For me, the most challenging part was doing performance evaluations among
different engineers where some was doing really amazing stuff but they weren't
good at selling while others weren't doing anything impressive but selling it
very smartly. Being manager, doing code reviews, going through ticket managers
and other tools you can see this who is what and how much but you can barely
influence 360 reviews.

On another occasion, it really got out of hands, when I was working on totally
independent team and my people working on so many different teams. Being the
guys, you gotta know ins/outs of all these projects going on while not loosing
track of yours

------
srouhaewaehy
The Problem with this Kind of interview is that a lot of These Manager types
won't do interviews About their Jobs. So you will only get interviews with
~20% of them who are probably neither at the top nor at the Bottom of the
Manager sphere.

------
eazystock
"A good developer can't a good manager, similarly a good manager can't be a
good developer" combination of both is a rare case

------
333c
> FIND YOU CAREER PATH

shouldn't that be your*?

------
TheRealDunkirk
IT'S TOO LATE FOR ME! SAVE YOURSELVES!

------
bitL
Why do we need managers? Seems to me like anachronism from authoritative past.
I can't recall a single manager that wasn't getting in the way of doing things
in my past working experience (top engineering companies everybody wanted to
get into); more often they were just enforcers of shady things that companies
kept in the dark. Ramping up education, practicing virtues, supporting
transparent exchange of information, and people can self-organize without any
managers. Having managers just keeps everybody weak, uninformed, ignorant and
lazy. Anyone remotely competent doesn't want to be managed.

~~~
EliRivers
A good manager makes a bad team good, and a good team outstanding. A good
manager is an enabler. A good manager makes individual programmers better,
makes the team work better together, makes the work itself better. A good
manager can have an incredibly positive effect on a group. Seen it myself.

Sure, sometimes a group has relatively simple tasks and doesn't have enough
incompetents, prima donnas, social disaster zones or or straight up sociopaths
to _need_ a good manager, but given that a good manager can massively improve
the output of a team, make everyone happier and make a company more
profitable, it seems silly not to have a good manager.

In the interests of no passive-aggressive nonsense, I simply don't believe
that you've never encountered a situation where a good manager can make things
better, or never encountered a situation where somebody _was_ managing things
and in doing so making a positive difference. The odds against it seem
astronomical; especially in a 750 personnel sized company.

~~~
bitL
I've heard a lot about good managers, but never experienced one. It was always
some form of manipulation, cutting the corners, forcing agenda even on
solutions that were both wildly profitable as well as technically excellent
"to make their mark", finding scapegoats to blame, in order to propel
manager's ego and standing within company; the game was purely about power,
hacking perception of their seniors about their qualities in order to
progress. People that didn't play tended to find themselves packaged for
layoffs, regardless of how much company benefited from them in the past.

So from my experience: Good manager is like UFO - I've heard of it, but never
seen one. Unless you consider top management that just makes itself invisible
and leaves kids on the playground doing whatever they are inspired to. That
would be probably closest to what I could take as good management.

~~~
coding123
This is my main problem with engineers that become managers. Programming does
tend to create ego problems. You want that as your manager? Not really a good
move. My best manager had no idea how to code, but he knew how to communicate,
lend an ear and really listen, and make sure everyone was happy. But somehow
he did it with a firm hand. Every one knew the line to not cross was mostly
about lying. You have to be truthful that's what he can see through.

~~~
EliRivers
Apropos of this, some of my junior engineers now repeat back to me "code
without ego" every time they have a code review or make a mistake. They take
pride in not allowing their ego to get in the way. All it took was me
demonstrating egoless working and loudly advocating that we all leave our ego
at home.

I soothe my ego on the anonymous internet. In the workplace, it goes in the
fucking box and every other thing I say is a variation on "I don't
understand". Working life is _so_ much easier without ego games. So much more
pleasant.

I hypothesise that programmers with excessive ego have been sadly let down by
managers and team leads in their formative years :(

