Ask HN: Being a manager while programming

7 points by diminium 13 years ago | 5 comments

Your company is in need of good managers. Your company is in need of good programmers. You can do both pretty well but you enjoy programming more. Unfortunately, the place is in desperate need of a good manager. You know if you don't become the manager, someone very bad will do it. The other way it might happen is you could work under the good manager while your coworkers who you enjoy working with must deal with the bad one.

Is there any possible to do both or are you forced to choose one or the other? Has anyone here worked under a full time manager who also writes great code at the same time?

backspace 13 years ago |

Sure, you can be a good manager and write great code at the same time. But not on the same project or company. Maybe your pet project outside of work or an open source project.

To be clear, I'm making a distinction between a great tech lead vs. a great manager. Both those roles are often confused with each other.

A tech lead will lead the project to launch by managing resources, unblocking team members, making tough decisions, writing productive code, etc.

A manager will ensure smooth operation of their team by making sure their reports are motivated, encouraged, challenged, etc. They will actively seek to recruit new team members, solve resource issues, have tough talks with underperforming reports, navigate politics and negotiate with other teams, etc.

You cannot simultaneously do both. They require very different skill sets to be good and even higher skill to be great. If you are looking to keep coding and do some of the leadership work, then being a tech lead is better for you.

tommccabe 13 years ago |

I don't know the size of your team or the scope of your work, but I think that it is difficult to be a good manager and a good coder while conforming to a 40 or 50 hour work week. Both positions are skills that are difficult to master and require a focused effort. When attempting to do both, it is likely that one will be done poorly or the role will eat up 80 hours of your week.

My advice- if you become a manager, look for ways that you can support your developers. Look for ways to conteibute code, but Don't expect to be the lead developer on critical functionality while also managing and coaching resources.

There's also a system of balance in the manager and developer relationship. If you are the developer and fail to meet a major milestone, who hold you accountable?

lazyjones 13 years ago |

I don't know about "great code", just a lot of it, but I've done this for more than 12 years (mostly because we're not really successful at hiring the kind of people we want and need - blame it on the country and our Perl ecosystem), so it can work.

My opinion is that it's doable to some extent, but not satisfactory because you'll feel like you need to be doing much more of either of these things.

adziki 13 years ago |

going through this right now. It's tough. The great managers I've worked under in the past were pretty much 100% managers. whenever they had delusions that they could pick up a small coding task, they'd end up being brought off task by managerial duties and would delay the rest of development. Obviously, different people can balance this, and every company is different.

JoeAltmaier 13 years ago | |

I think you are right; and every company is really the same in this regard.