What’s your path?
Ben Halpern
Posted on
If you mostly write code for your day-to-day, do you have plans to get promoted out of that situation?
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Latest comments (60)
I used to work in tech support. I code full time now. I come home every night to a lovely wife and 4 awesome children. I can't remember the last time I was on call, I travel no more than 1 week a year (conference!) I've been to every pack meeting, soccer game, school play, science fair, birthday, anniversary and date night. I'm living my dream. I'd never want to be in management.
"That situation" sounds kind of bad.
I love coding and always want to code, no matter what I do for a living.
Lately, I've noticed that I have unexpectedly come to understand tech leading after all this time, which surprises me. Maybe I have seen enough successes and not-so-successes I have a feel for what works and what doesn't.
And, I have an unexpected desire to run around and get funding for a startup. I'm not exactly ready yet, but I'm gearing up for it.
It may happen that in the future, I won't be coding every day for a living because I have developed other interests.
But, no, I love "that situation" and if I never lead or start a business, I will still be happy coding.
I plan to continue mentoring while remaining focused on the priorities of the business. You can do both, especially if you love people.
I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that most developers only want to write code. A large percentage of the remainder—those that want to take on leadership roles—have had the employee mindset beat into them most of their lives and might not be able to fall in love with the business side of things.
Then again, once you have a business mindset, it becomes more and more difficult not to start your own!
6 months ago I got promoted to a mix of tech lead/product owner covering 3 teams and 16 devs. Now I got promoted again to be the manager leading all 62 devs in the organization. I have to say: I want to program again!
I am really surprised by the virtually unanimous "hell no" response on this thread. Though, since this is a (fantastic) community of dev enthusiasts, I probably shouldn't be surprised.
I am still trying to find my path, but I am seeing more and more that I can add a lot of value through non-coding tasks. Sometimes, these non-coding tasks add a lot more value than the coding tasks. Anything I can do to organize the efforts of a team, improve processes, and help find new technical directions for the business will undoubtedly add more value than spending the same amount of time on code. Sure, lots of code still needs to be written, but I am not sure it needs to be written by me.
Now I do respect the preferences of others and recognize that "management" activities are not for everyone (I too dislike many of these tasks). And maybe this is just me rationalizing the reduced coding time I am already seeing. However, I love solving problems, I want to provide as much value as possible, and I am starting to see how being a "technical manager" might be a better use of my time/skillset than a "technical contributor".
As a follow-up, my interpretation of @ben 's question is that you would transition from primarily writing code to primarily something else -- leaving open the possibility for being a manager who at least occasionally dips into the code (which is something I always imagine doing).
Absolutely not. I have no desire to move into management, ever. I do want to mentor and teach though. Moving into a lead position without any managerial responsibilities is the dream, honestly
I promote myself by quitting jobs and getting new ones.
One can be promoted and not be forced to leave behind creative pursuits like programming. My dad, even though he was the lead technical architect for a university's medical college, still wrote code for those projects (quite literally) till the day he died.
Hopefully, the industry still affords me the ability to continue doing technical things till I'm ready to retire. That said, it's hard to say that programming will continue to be in that realm (how far away are we from machines programming, any way). I assume I'll still have the opportunity, but, "who knows".
Nope! My plan is to get promoted to more positions in writing code. I want to be an Architect or SRE... Probably the best would be an advocate that does tons of proof of concepts and other cutting edge coding.
I'm on the other side of this. Only about 20% of my day-to-day is coding. The rest is filled with managing ads, generating marketing materials, answering customer service type things, tracking down/taking product photos, and more. It's a small company, so I wear a lot of hats.
I long for the day when I can just leave headphones on, get hyper focused, and blast through coding projects all day.
I did get promoted to running both the Software and IT departments at my previous job(at the same time). I enjoyed it, but not as much as I do coding.
In that job I was lucky to get to work on code for 2-3 hours a week. I spent most of my time managing various projects, reviewing some code, writing, papers, presentations, and so many meetings.
I'm now back to coding in a different field and enjoying it
I plan to keep coding while my fingers can type!!!!
I used to work Desktop Support at one organization. I coded a bit for fun and to solve repetitive work issues (easier to train an intern to run a script and fill out a worksheet than memorize everything).
Then I thought "You know what I want? More time for projects and less on putting out small fires".
So I took a pay-cut and changed departments… putting out small email config fires and never having time to redesign the website. Leaving a team of 13 for a team of one and a half (including me) was frustrating because my old boss was the best support I had: she knew how to tell the client "No, we can't and we won't do that."
Now, I'm a junior web/backend developer at a sister organization. I'm given tasks with a clear goal and deadline in mind, my voice is appreciated in design meetings, and I'm not personally responsible for more than I can personally handle (e.g. my supervisors know when to tell the client AND/OR me "No" for our own good).
I think I'd rather work in a functional team more than merely having a higher title myself.
By transitioning to more thought leadership and offering a different and unique take on the experiences. And mastery.
For the moment, I don't. I'm currently more interested in how to maintain a codebase than in how to maintain (part of) an organization, although the 2 are intertwined in many ways.