That’s the case with my previous workplace before I left. There is pressure to move up. I just want to work in a standardised manner and have fewer responsibilities. Because I want to leave early or on time and do my hobbies after work instead of staying overtime. I will ask for promotion if I feel ready.
I feel this. Just because I’m good at what I do doesn’t mean I’m leadership material. I’m too nice.
I’m at a spot where I’m headed towards technical leadership rather than managerial leadership.
I have a small team, and it’s up to me to use them to magnify my effectiveness with my work. It’s actually kind of a good spot, but I’m worried I’ll be asked to do more management stuff
Management is just making other people do your work 99% of the time. And it’s expected! I’ve run a few teams with good results and it’s always the easiest position in the group.
It’s only easy if the team is competent and motivated. I can literally hand some people on my team step by step instructions and they still come out wrong 50% of the time because they either think they know better (they don’t) or they’re just lazy. On top of that the HR policy here makes it take 6 months to replace a person and get us up to speed so if I get rid of the shittiest ones I’m still in a worse spot than I would be if I just deal with coaching them all the time. Working on jumping to a new role that isn’t a leadership position because I’m so tired of being responsible for other people’s performance.
Until two people hate eachother on your team. And act like children because of it. Never again.
I had this. I was a happy scrum master in an area that said scrum masters must not be managers - conflict between duties of the two
I moved to a different project and suddenly I’m a manager. Not even a pay rise.
At least I feel I’m good at it, though I favour scrum master methods for getting people to perform, rather than manager tools
Managing people is absolutely NOT good for my career. MAYBE it’ll be good for my salary (but I doubt it at my current company).
The problem is that you’ll fall off the technical curve eventually. It’s almost inevitable. Even if you read and study every day and keep up with every bit of technical meta, your brain will slowly turn to goo and you’ll find it hard to stay ahead of younger engineers purely on technical competence alone. At a certain point you need to develop some form of leadership skills so you can turn your experience into a multiplier.
My hope is to stumble into some role that is common today but will be niche in the future, like cobolt devs today. I’ll be some kind of java streams expert in 30 years or something lol
I strongly recommend Freakonomics episode 495 “Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses?” which discusses this exact issue. Great listen as well!
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-there-so-many-bad-bosses/
