I wanted to take a different spin on offering career advice to software engineers. I thought it could be an interesting exercise to share several big lessons from my ~12 years of managing software engineers and transform those lessons into actionable advice.
The first 8 years of my professional career after university were managing software engineers, but I was also a contributing software engineer myself. It was difficult to balance (especially at a rapidly growing startup), but the experiences from both IC and Management perspectives were very helpful.
I hope you find value in this! TP;DR at the top of the post.
Is managing AND programming really something that is still done? I thought most managers were “forbidden” to actually add code to the project?
(I’'m accidentally doing a business IT bachelor instead of a more technical IT bachelor right now, so I’m wondering about what my future holds)
In the small business / startup / consulting world, we do it ALL the time…
IDK how big businesses roll, I stay the hell away from those. I consulted with Meta for six months a few years ago and OMG never again.
From what I’ve seen from two of them, they tend to stay away from programming. I’ve seen managers review code, but very rarely contribute any.
Yes. It is much in vogue. Especially in big corps. And Big corps have no idea what they doing. A year ago I had helped couple of managers to “go back to engineering”, because org had to many managers.
The amount of people who can make code and manage is very limited. But it is very alluring from the perspective of human resource optimization for people to do both. You take decent engineer => You receive shitty miserable manager that can code something non essential. This is very sad.
Big corps are like a pythons on ketanol. They have no idea what happening but they want to grow and shit profits everywhere.