Don't Become A Development Manager

You may be sitting there, or standing, or better yet, outside taking a walk and thinking that you have capped out your potential as an individual contributor and that the next logical step for you is to go into management. Your boss has hinted that it is a viable option for you so you are starting to move in that direction.

I am here to let you in on all of this things that are about to rock your world once you say yes to this promotion. I know I am the guy who is all about getting you into management, but Im starting to have second thoughts. I don’t want to be responsible for what you are about to go through.

First lets talk about your schedule. You are (hopefully) used to a nice wide open calendar. One or two meetings during the day, three tops. When I was a developer I used to not even look at my calendar in the morning because I knew that I had standup and maybe a manager one on one.

Well once you become a manager your calendar immediately fills up with meetings with other managers, one on ones with your reports, meetings with hr about how to be a manager, meetings with your product manager and often meetings with high value customers.

You have meetings about escalations, meetings about how there are too many bugs and if you dont have too many bugs you probably have meetings about a lack of velocity.

You get the picture.

Your once wide open calendar gets divided into 30 min chunks and you move from one chunk to the next, like a meeting attending machine.

Oh and those few emails you got every day about things you actually cared about. Replace that with 100s of emails from people who want you to be working on their agendas. People who have an expectation about you and what your role is that is quite a bit different from your own understanding.

Right now you are used to being the top of your field. You are an expert on your product from the bowels of the backend all the way to the front end. You know why that one service needs to be kicked every once in a while and about the three features that are flagged but never go released.

Get ready to give that up.

You will no longer be able to wax eloquent about a certain feature and how it came to be. The longer you are a manager the more general your knowledge will become. You loose that specialized knowledge and instead will have to bring in your engineers to talk about the details you once knew by heart.

If the loss of your specialized knowledge isn’t hard enough on your ego you will no longer get the satisfaction of building something.

Oh no, on the contrary. You will get the satisfaction of watching other people build something while you talk about it. You may start to feel devoid of purpose wondering if your words even matter.

You will get update after update from people who talk about the cool things they are building and doing and you will give guidance and watch while the product comes to life, without so much as a line of code from yourself.

You have spent the last few years of your life becoming an expert at communicating... with a computer. You can throw that skill out the window. You are now dealing with people who do not operate in binary. There is no black and white, just a sea of grey that you have to navigate with a toolset built on communicating with deterministic objects.

Not only do you need to communicate with people but you have to judge their performance. Don’t expect help from HR on this, because HR isn’t full of people like you. It is full of people who feel and operate in a non structured world. They will give you vague requirements when you want absolutes. You will be forced to interpret these standards and apply them in a way that seems fair and transparent.

Finally wrap all of this up with the understanding that while you built 0% of the product but you are 100% responsible for how it operates and the issues that it has. If someone has an issue with the product or it didn't scale to meet the demand, you are on the hook. If someone's head needs to roll for its failure, its going to be yours.

If you are still wanting to be a development manager at this point well I guess there is no hope for you.

But ill give you one more secret.

I actually loved my job as a development manager and every one of these obstacles is able to be overcome. If you don’t want to go it alone, Im here for ya. Lets do it.

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