Avoiding Management

You can probably guess from prior blog posts that I am not a manager. I have made it clear in my last several gigs that I have no interest in management and that I only wish to be an individual contributor. I've managed before and I don't like it. The perqs - more control over the project, more money, a bigger office - don't even come close to the disadvantages - more meetings, less contact with the code, dealing with people problems, and so on.

The worst part of managing is dealing with people. In any group of people, there is some median level of performance, and by definition of the median, half the people are below that level. And one is at the bottom. He's the one who is always late, always had the bad luck, never checks in code, and so on. He struggles. Perhaps the right thing to do is to let him go, but I've been there. I've had jobs where the fit wasn't right and I wasn't performing at my best. I empathize. The last thing you need when you're in that position is the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. It's a horrible position to be in and I don't want to exacerbate it. I'll gladly forego the perqs of management to avoid being in the situation where I have to fire someone or even threaten to fire them.

But I do like to help people. I like to mentor and coach. I can usually keep the big picture in my head and I can help people find the places where they can be most effective. I'm pretty comfortable being a senior engineer, a technical lead, or an architect.

Scheduling is hard. I've got a rule of thumb for estimating how long a project will take. I take the best estimate I can get from the team, and then I triple it. If I think it will take two weeks, I tell upper management it will take six. It is almost always a realistic estimate - I'm not padding or sandbagging. When I get the time I ask for, I almost always deliver on time. But manegement rarely likes to hear the word "six" when they were hoping for "two".

There is always overhead that is hard to account for. You come in some day and find that your infrastructure is down and you have to spend a whole day fixing it. Or you need to coordinate with another team and it takes two days to get everyone on the same page. Or you discover that the API you were depending on hasn't really been implemented yet, and you have to spend a day or two writing a workaroud. These add up. As a contributor, I'm 100% busy developing and putting out fires, but managers only want to count the time spent developing.

The best managers I had didn't manage. They didn't assign work, or try to tell me what to do or try to direct the project. Instead, they acted as my off-board memory. I could rathole on some problem and when I solved it and came up for air, they would be there to remind me what I was in the middle of to begin with. They would keep track of the ultimate goals of the project and how we were progressing towards them, but they would not try to direct the activity. They trusted that I knew how to do my job. They acted as facilitators and enablers, not as managers. They would interface with upper management. They would handle the politics. They would justify the six weeks I asked for.

So I prefer to be an individual contributor and I avoid management like the plague. Programming makes me happy, and I don't need the stress of management.