Would you tell me a little about your transition to and from management? Did you find it difficult to give up the management role at all, and were there things that you learned from managing that you were able to use when you went back to being a full-time engineer?
In the early 1980s I was hired as the Manager of Micro-Development at Lockheed Martin because I wanted too much money to work as a programmer. In these days the section I was in had no PCs so I brought my old luggable (not really portable) IBM PC/XT from home. I worked as a programmer for the large part and I was happy doing development work with two or three other programmers, but when PCs became ubiquitous I had a whole department and I spent much of time managing personnel issues and not coding.
I switched the coding from COBOL to VB4 and Oracle and then Java, and produced hundreds of thousands of lines of code for a Document Management System that I wrote from scratch.
At one point, when the Director was promoted to another department and the VP was fired, I was acting VP of the entire development group. Luckily this only lasted a month before they hired a new VP.
All of the systems that I wrote (including the original EZPass system for reviewing toll violations) reached maturity and my job was managing small improvements and bug fixes and nothing new or original. It was programming hell.
By the time I left, a new department had been formed to set up some the Web apps that would eventually replace the systems that I wrote, but I was left to maintain the old system.
Basically I worked myself out of job. I was doing precious little coding managing people that were bored and unhappy. Younger and more ambitious people were getting the next big thing. In 2000-2001 people were hiring anyone that could spell programmer for big bucks. After 10 years I was glad to move to IBM where I hoped I would be appreciated.
I have been a programmer acting as a team lead since then, but I never again want to be in the position where people call me in the morning to give me lame excuses as to why they can't come to work that day.
