jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #117 on 09 Apr 2022 and has tags Managing Your Career: Other
Twin Anxieties of the Engineer/Manager Pendulum - Charity Majors
As I’m decidedly back on the IC side of this particular pendulum, this has been on my mind a little bit.
Majors raises two anxieties she’s heard people have with this: “What if I never get another shot at people management”, and “am I too rusty to go back”. In both cases, her advice lines of strongly with my experience.
For the first one, you’ll have to have to actively fight off opportunities to go back into management. “Once a manager, marked for life as a manager” she says, and she’s 100% right.
For the second, she points out that you do get rusty, and if you went into management too early before you really had a change to build very strong technical skills, it could be hard:
Never, ever accept a managerial role until you are already solidly senior as an engineer. To me this means at least seven years or more writing and shipping code; definitely, absolutely no less than five.
But after that, it comes back, especially if you try to keep up a bit of fluency.
Most importantly, though, she talks about useful it is to have people with strong technical and people leadership skills:
If you’re a good manager it’s actually nearly impossible to hide that you have the skills, because of the way it infuses your work and everything that you do as an IC. You get better at prioritization, more attuned to the needs of the business, and restless about work that doesn’t materially move the business forward. You get better at asking questions about why things need to be done and at communicating with stakeholders. You get better at motivating the people you work with, understanding their motivations and your own, and mediating conflicts or putting a damper on drama between peers. People come to you for advice and may seem to just do what you say, or go where you point.
