I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager
Introduction
A former colleague who is considering a management role asked me: “Why did you become a manager? Why do people do it?” My first thought was: “Right?! I woke up many mornings and asked myself the same question with a lot more profanity involved.” My second thought was: “Good question. It’s complicated.” I’m going to talk about my reasons and their complexities in case it helps other folks process theirs.
It picked me
When I first got a management role, it chose me. I was nineteen years old and working on a team that was building a microcomputer frontend for a mainframe-based portfolio accounting system, the team lead left; because I was the only other microcomputer programmer at a Fortran based mainframe shop they asked me to be the team lead. To say that I was immature and lacked basic social skills is a colossal understatement. The thing that saved me was good mentors who patiently showed me what to do. All the same, my next several jobs were all individual contributor jobs and I was very happy.
My next management role happened again in a similar way several years later when I was working for a company that did accounting and estimating software for construction companies. I was the only C/Assembly language programmer at a BASIC shop (yep, real software products were made with BASIC). I wrote the UI, database, and networking extensions for BASIC so it looked and worked better. Our manager departed and because I was the most experienced person I ended up the manager. At least by that time, I was a little more mature and less socially awkward.
I probably wasn’t the best manager in either of these positions, but I certainly learned a lot. Most importantly I learned that my engineering ability didn’t have a lot to do with managing people. I also gained confidence just by interacting with other people, which helped me as an individual contributor too.
It’s a control thing
I started thinking about management as a career path when I was probably fifteen years into my career. I had reached a point where I was a very good engineer (at least the folks paying me thought so) and even though the job wasn’t easy, there wasn’t much mystery or growth in it for me. I’d become much more aware of how companies and teams worked and I started to crave more control. The first few times I sought out management roles it was to obtain more information and to have more influence in order to protect myself and feel more comfortable. I think a thing to mention here is that I went back and forth between management and individual contributor and it didn’t hurt my job prospects at all. In fact, it actually improved them. I would however counsel you to avoid the hybrid role of technical leader and manager. I’ve been there, done that, and I ended up alternating between sucking at one role or the other. The best scenario for these situations is to help hire your technical lead peer and have it be someone you see eye-to-eye with.
I found out that I liked it
A side effect of working more and more as a manager was that I started to try and be good at it. I copied good managers that I had worked with or near, especially my older brother. I also started to enjoy the delayed gratification of team success. It made a lot of sense to use my experience to support a whole group of people with less years and to help them perform better and progress faster.
It isn’t a coincidence that my maturing as a manager coincided with me becoming a more mature person. As a kid, folks had always seen me as smart but distracted, and never as the leader of anything. Actually, I’m not a joiner either: I’m more of a loner. I found that being a manager was actually the safest place for a loner/nerd/introverted person like me. It allowed me to control most encounters with other people and in the power dynamic I had the upper hand going in. I only had to do a few “performances” as the corporate version of a leader to keep the business folks happy. In reality, I did most of my “leading” one-on-one with folks on my team, which is the perfect-sized interaction for an introvert.
I enjoyed the more subtle problem solving required in management and creating organizations. I had always had a talent for keeping big complex systems in my mind and restructuring them. Human organizations felt very familiar and more challenging since people are less predictable than code. I also liked having the ability to help folks who reported to me to succeed and grow as part of the process. Mentoring is a very satisfying part of being a manager and an effective way to get better as a manager by listening to folks and having to reflect on your own experience in order to respond to them.
Money, power, and problems
As you get higher in level as a manager, your satisfaction from your job becomes more and more abstract. At the end, I did enjoy managing other managers and learning from them and making them into a team to support an even larger number of people. But as you get to that level, you become more and more split in your focus between your own team and servicing the needs of peers and higher level executives. It ends up involving more “performances” that essentially amount to making an executive or peer who is scared about something feel better, or at least feel in control.
Money is certainly a motivation for choosing to become a manager. Later in my career (as I started to consider early retirement as a viable option), I saw that I could level-up faster (and with a bigger total compensation) as a manager than as an individual contributor. I was getting older and the mental and emotional stamina that I could summon for coding under an intense workload (required to earn a lot of money) was definitely waning. There is certainly truth to the phrase “more money, more problems,” in that you trade stress about your individual performance for a lot of stress about the performance of other folks that you loosely control. I developed a good poker face to mask my internal stress about my position as I climbed the management ladder. It would crack every so often, but generally folks thought I had the ability to remain calm in the worst situations. Even though I still experienced a lot of chaos and churn, I preferred to experience it as a manager where I at least was in the room when bad decisions were being made even if I couldn’t prevent them.
Know when you’re done
I knew I’d hit my final level when I got to VP of Engineering. From that level, you can look into the abattoir of executive management without having to spend all day in it, and you either like what you see or you don’t. I didn’t, and since I had no desire to just repeat myself, I stopped. By that time in my life there were a lot of other things that interested me more that had nothing to do with business. I had been planning my exit for ten years and I was in a position to make the final moves to retire.
I hope these reflections help to give you some perspective. I probably should have mentioned earlier in this series that you should feel free to ask me any questions you have via twitter (@jpfxgood), https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpgoodwin/,or comment on this post below. I can’t commit to answer every one directly, but I will be writing more of these essays and I’ll try to address them there.