Why Good Developers Become Poor Managers

Usually in development teams there comes a time where someone needs to be promoted into a team-lead or CTO position. People grow up in their careers and want a salary raise, that’s natural. But often it becomes a disaster scenario for both sides. So what are the reasons?

Reason 1. It’s TOTALLY different set of skills

Let’s be honest — developers write code, they think in algorithms, zeros and ones. They like to solve technical problems, their architectural thinking is more suitable for creating things. In a way, they are artists — like singers, dancers or painters. Just the field is different.

Now look at the role of managers — they manage the resources. They don’t actually create anything (sorry, but true) — actually, quite often their goal is to prevent something from being created, in order to save company’s resources.

So turning a developer into a manager is like turning an artist into an accountant. How hard can it be, right?..

The better the coder, the worse the manager

And actually, it gets even deeper. Let’s imagine the best developer in the field — senior architect who knows his stuff inside out. That means they spent enormous amount of time getting deeper into technical stuff — design patterns, server management, architectural decision. And now they are thrown in a totally different world — what are the odds that they immediately turn down all that hard work and dive into a totally new field and be GREAT at it?

Reason 2. Developers are bad at communicating

Sorry guys, but it’s true. A typical developer is an introvert who likes to just do their job without anyone disturbing (see Why you shouldn’t interrupt a programmer). And it’s a natural thing — producing quality code does require complex thinking and focus.

Now, imagine a typical day of a manager. Meetings, stand-ups, emails, follow-ups, negotiations, giving good/bad news to the team, also sometimes hiring/firing people. And a lot of LIVE communication — not every ex-developer can handle it effectively.

Reason 3. Developers and managers are enemies

If you don’t have that feeling from the first two reasons, I will put it in more details. Imagine a developer who always got their instructions from managers. For years they were arguing about bugs, features, cutting costs and overall effectiveness of the process. Even if they don’t want to kill each other yet, their whole purpose is different — developers need to create stuff, and managers need to manage developers so that they wouldn’t create unnecessary stuff.

Moreover, in some companies these relationships look like this:

And you seriously think that if one of developers is promoted into management, other developers will just listen to him in a heartbeat? They become enemies again. Speaking of which…

Reason 4. How hard can it be to manage ex-teammates?

Hard. Really. Just psychologically — yesterday you were drinking beer together and talking trash about managers, and now you become one of THEM. Even if at first it looks really cool to “finally have a normal person in management who knows the stuff” (from devs perspective), situation changes really fast when upper management and CEOs require business results and that becomes priority for a manager over development team goals. Which is good for the company, actually.

And then both sides don’t know how to act — they still try to remain friends, but more and more secrets appear, and what if a manager needs to fire one of non-performing developers? A lot of inconvenient talks need to happen, so it rarely ends well.

OK, so what to do?

I have a few tips for business owners if they need to decide about promotions.

1. Promotion doesn’t always mean changing the position or profession (which it is in the case of developer-to-manager), often just being Senior Developer or Architect with raised salary is totally fine.
2. Managers need to be trained like managers, so they need to come from business world. In ideal case, from IT business field to understand enough about technical stuff.
3. If you do need to promote developer into manager, ask them honestly — do THEY want it?
4. And if it all comes together and you make this promotion after all, give them time. It’s really hard to adapt in that totally different world, so give all the help you possibly can to both a new manager and their former team. Don’t expect quick results and mentally prepare for a plan B, just in case.