A short manifest on management in the tech industry

I have recently had an opportunity to read a blog post published by a former colleague, who pointed out that promotion to management is not the only growth path available in the tech industry nowadays.

The subtext of the essay was “management — it is probably not my path, and you, the readers, should probably thoroughly consider if it is yours, and make sure that if you do pursue this track — you do that for the right reasons”.

It is actually not a secret that for many engineers a career path of an Individual Contributor (IC) is the choice of preference. Professional growth opportunities, such as Tech Leads, Principal/Staff Engineer are common across the industry — whilst managerial roles that were perceived as preferred promotion in the past — are now just one option among others that may not necessarily fit everyone.

Back to the above-referenced blog post. I have been wondering for a while about a critical question — the limited number of candidates for junior management positions among engineers.
Let’s be honest: it’s been increasingly uncommon for junior and mid-level managers to be perceived as true leaders (the privilege reserved for some fortunate and talented individuals). Instead, young managers are often viewed as “less-than-expert” (from the technical perspective) individuals that excel at organizational politics, who perform managerial duties just because someone had to take this responsibility.

So management positions in the tech industry are not as attractive as they used to be.

If one goes back 20 years, he can understand how we reached the current state of things.
IT giants such as Microsoft and IBM, once the sector’s locomotives, realized they were stuck with antiquated professional development models for their employees, while being outperformed by Google, the new industry star that attracted top notch professionals. They realized that a professional development track for engineers utilized by Google became one of key drivers of its success.
Ever since that realization, the entire industry decided to follow the trend, making professional development tracks standard (with some variations), as many developers preferred to remain “IC”s — Individual Contributors. The rest is history.

I would like to use this opportunity to encourage engineers to consider a management career path, or at least explore this fascinating challenge.

When in doubt, one should be asking himself the following questions (in my humble opinion):

How much would I like to affect my organization? How much do I value my product’s success and would I like to influence the product development direction and its future? How important is it for me to improve and grow the engineering culture within my organization? Would I enjoy contributing to the success and flourishing of other employees?

Every newbie manager in the IT industry is familiar with this “holy” triangle:

Lets try to break apart the challenges posed by each of those areas of influence within an organization, and discuss what could you do as managers at different levels:

People

A manager should retain and develop his team members, continuously and thoroughly, to encourage motivation and initiative.

Every individual counts, and must receive undivided attention. Beyond this personal approach that should be applied to each employee, managers must discuss with employees their personal development on a regular basis in order to plan it and monitor their progress.
Moreover, the achieved progress should be periodically communicated to employees, as not everyone is able to observe the changes in their own performance and translate them into clear awareness of their growth and development.

Managers should also provide constructive feedback in each case of underperformance, both in “soft” skills and “hard” skills related matters. In addition, regular performance analysis and feedback meetings should take place, preferably in a more frequent cadence than the formal annual/quarterly reviews, in order to communicate to employees the way they are perceived in the organization and emphasize their successes and areas of improvement.

Manager’s routine should also pay attention to employee’s personal issues, and a reasonable effort to help resolving those, to facilitate continuous contribution to the organizational goals.

Personally, I feel extremely gratified, when during the annual review my team members acknowledge the path they have gone through, knowledge they’ve gained, and progress they’ve achieved, — knowing that my contribution to that was significant and that I have created the right opportunities for them.

Same thing happens when I see the level of commitment of my team to our company, as reflected in various organizational surveys.

Technology

A manager should maintain a high level of expertise in his professional domain. He should be curious, keep learning, and remain well-versed in industry trends. He should be well familiar with his product’s architecture and be aware of the details of the current technical challenges and the related alternatives — both inside his system and outside. The manager should formulate and define his own opinion on every challenge of such a kind, and strive for its resolution and implementation.

The manager should also be on a quest for potential solutions and mitigations for business challenges, in a way that, on one hand, would not block further evolution of the product and the system, and, on the other hand, would not block current initiatives.

Knowing what you want to achieve, and building a smart, creative and gradual plan to achieve your goal — is an integral part of one’s work as manager. This plan should be implemented, step by step, preferably bringing each separate phase to production (and not keeping code on a separate branch for half a year).

There are no shortcuts. When you want to promote an infrastructure project or to eliminate tech debt, which may significantly improve the business, you should continuously work with various stakeholders, to assure buy-in, involve the right people, create a plan, persuade, buy-in again… it is a sisyphean and an exhausting process that should be sustained for a long period of time. A Marathon.

It would be a wrong thing to say that as an Individual Contributor an engineer cannot show initiative and make an impact on the tech and the product — on the contrary, the expectation is that the senior engineers would do exactly that.
Nevertheless, ICs’ ability to influence the organization is usually more limited than managers’ who have more tools to do so. In addition, the majority of engineers (unfortunately) do not get to acquire a sufficient soft skills’ set or don’t possess enough experience of this kind in order to be able to lead significant changes. I usually put a special focus on this area in the personal development of each and every engineer.

Process

How frequently do you feel that you are wasting precious time on something that could be and should be done more efficiently?
Whether it is the agile routines (someone said daily / planning / retro), the development procedures and tools, effective usage of system resources and code performance — for all of those your input is highly appreciated as an IC.
The CI/CD is not effective enough? Too much time is invested in infrastructure stabilization?
As managers, you will be able to (and would definitely like to) analyze the team performance and the system you manage, learn from other organizations, and continuously look for improvement and growth.
You will also influence the way your organization operates, optimize development and planning processes, and be involved in strategic business decisions.

As you keep stepping up within the organizational hierarchy, your challenges will slightly shift from micro to macro, and so will the level of impact you may achieve. You will be able to challenge old paradigms, suggest and promote innovative technological solutions, promote the development of critical areas in your product, and change what is perceived as the “world’s order” — the way your organization acts and operates.

All of that just fascinates me!
What about you?