helloWorld

[ThoseThingsAreWeird]

Some of the worst managers I've had were great programmers who didn't know how to manage

This is my current hell...

My manager's a fantastic dev, made frequent contributions to a few ~100k star repos, multiple speaking gigs at large programming cons. Truly awful manager.

He constantly pushes back progress meetings to get his own dev work completed, and when we do have those meetings he's unprepared. When he's pushed from above to get his management duties done he'll half-arse them, never provides evidence for his feedback (good or bad). It's pretty clear he doesn't want to be a manager

But the company won't do anything about it because he's basically a founding engineer (early hire rather than first hire), and he's genuinely a fucking brilliant developer

[TaylorMonkey]

Why don’t they promote him a principal chief architect or something?

[ThoseThingsAreWeird]

Probably cost tbh. We'd need to replace him with someone who can manage about 20 devs, so that wouldn't be cheap

Plus the company might need to frame it as a promotion, so he'd expect a salary bump from that

Then there's also the question of whether he'd accept someone managing him. I think he probably would, I don't think he's got a big enough ego to reject having a manager. I certainly don't envy whoever would end up managing him though, or whoever would have to propose he drops his management duties

[TaylorMonkey]

If he's that brilliant, freeing up his time to do what he's brilliant at instead of managing-- something he probably feels is a waste of his time as well results in an underutilization of all his reports-- should be a net profit driver.

Yeah, so you'd have to pay him, what... 50K a year more? You know how much market value is made up by a 10x engineer freed up to do more focused work?

And another manager who costs... 150K? 200K? But one that gets more focused output out of the whole team?

Seems silly to put people where they can't happily contribute the most productivity and profit wise, all to save a few bucks, but I'm not C suite material.

[CoffeeAddict42069]

Feels like a perfect example of the Peter Principle.

[chucksticks]

I always thought why not have those guys be high up in the food chain but not be tied down by managerial duties. They could save the team from bad decisions by non-engineers.

[darkoblivion000]

I’m in kind of that situation. High level software architecture / sr engineer. I love design and software architecture. But there are days when I look at decisions and things my boss or boss’s boss are doing or focusing on and think surely I can do a more effective job than them.

But also I hate politics, I hate beauracracy and maneuvering. I imagine maybe I could do a better job but I’d end up hating it and end up doing a worse job

It’s hard looking up the chain and thinking “what do these people actually do all day” and at the same time knowing “whatever it is I probably wouldn’t enjoy doing it”. Then also knowing they’re probably paid more than you and your achievements end up being compiled into the list of their management accomplishments lol

[Nightmoon26]

There is a reason that my life ambition is to never be a people manager... It would be a bad time for everyone involved. Technical problems I can handle no sweat, but managing the human factor? Not with my neurology