How do you navigate the shift from coding-centric tasks to managing larger projects and influencing technical direction? Share insights on balancing coding and leadership responsibilities.
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Top comments (2)
When I started the job I'm in now, I faced a similar situation, the team is small, its is a startup that is building a lot of stuff from scratch. During this first few important weeks I gave some advice that ended up defining our current tech stack, and I noticed that slowly I was getting into a more managing role, so what I did was organize a meeting with my boss and talk about it, I asked him if he likes me doing and talking with the team about this topics, also if he was happy with the decisions taken so far, and if he is ok with the fact that I was spending some time on managing that I'm not spending in coding.
The point is that if you are getting into a similar situation you have to talk with your current leads and clarify the expectations from both sides, maybe you taking important decisions was more a managing problem of your boss not taking a more active role in your team, or maybe you really have some stuff to communicate and your advice is very valuable.
If you like managing go for it, and take advantage of every opportunity to be a leader you see, event if you don't want a managing role, that experience is invaluable, obviously you are going to do mistakes (I made some during this job and now we are stuck with a javafx application using a Chinese sdk for RFID scanners, don't ask me why.), but learning from your mistakes is important as an authority figure and will give you more experience that a thousand lines of code.
Code-centric job to the leading position is like an attitude change. Once you feel you are good at your craft(coding) then you should understand the work of others and be involved in recommendation and support and then the overall product level decision making and so on. For some, it's a very quick transition, and for others, it would need a little bit more time. Managers normally get a cue of this during Status / Tech meetings to discuss new feature updates, refactoring, or scratch developments and then identify people who could cope up to the next level...Balancing is like taking the decision of which gets more priority...One of the projects I worked on was quite a time crunching and I was leading small team of 4 to complete the development activities...I had to chip in as a developer to handle some complex framework work and also take the burden from the team, so these kind of situations are always there for everyone to switch gears.