How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story
forbes.com
forbes.com
In general, the people I know who were coders who have risen up in the ranks (probably 2,3 levels above me) in management had a game plan. They knew what they were trying to accomplish. They had a very good mentor. And they've done it.
I worked for a company who specifically made it clear that "rising up in the ranks" was not the only way to progress. People could stay out of the managerial ranks and theoretically still advance. However, this is not how it worked out in practice. The sense that managers were somehow better than the non-managers still pervaded.
I think it's a result of it being the managers' job to tell non-managers what to do, schedule their time, etc. Managers, by definition, exert control over the time and lives of non-managers. I think this affects the interpersonal relationships between the groups.
It might also have been affected by the perception that people outside the organization had. Managers have titles that confer on them a leadership position, so outsiders automatically gravitate to them as persons in charge. Perhaps it was a failure in execution by our organization to control expectations of our clients and customers, but I don't think so.
You may get asked, "so you never thought about management?". But you can rehearse a response to that. It's like the one about when you've been in a difficult situation. Example, "In a way I was managing" - you worked on this project, planned it this way, made these decisions. Or you could describe aspects you liked about the pace or type of work you were doing. Talk about the problems that would have been easier if you had been leading strategy, and about the mechanisms you instead had to use to influence strategy, and the reason why the tradeoff worked for you better than if you'd been managing. Use the question as an opportunity to highlight particular technical skills that you brought to the team and mention the rule of comparative advantage.
A great thing about IT is that the tools are so cheap now that anyone who wants to prove themselves can run a home project at virtually no cost to demonstrate their strengths.
Ageism in IT is very real. This is just one of the mechanisms by which it operates. The other side is the (youngest) programmers who haven't yet grown out of language fanboyism and dismiss your experience of last year's technology as irrelevant. Fortunately they're rarely in positions of hiring authority.
The IT industry takes about 10 years to cycle through fads. Someone I consider experienced has been through at least one cycle. I want people who can say XML? Oh yes, well I've never used XML but in the 90s I was doing EDI... (insert tech of choice)
At my previous company, where I began in the startup stage, we had lots of people older than 40 and 50 in IT. We had a QA guy who had to be at least 60. I suppose it all depends on the company (and probably the geographic subculture) but this "ageism" stuff is out of my experience -- I'll hire someone who knows what he's doing and is motivated to do it, period. Stupid shit like "but he has a wrinkle" is moot.
Same in banking, you might be able to stay a trader, if you're good. You couldn't stay an analyst, it's up or out. Or in engineering, you don't get to actually design machinery or chips or whatever for long, again, up or out, gotta make room for the fresh intake of graduates.
This might not be the best way to work, but it's the norm, and a programmer who really can stay hands-on their whole career is fortunate indeed. My own strategy in this area is to stay hands-on but do less work directly, spend my time automating common tasks and developing tools to make junior members of my team more productive. We'll have to see how that plays out...
It is hard to become a system architect without many years of experience under your belt.
I know a lot of very good developers who are in their 30s and 40s (not too many who are in their 50s, although I'm sure they exist and there will be more in the near future!) and have no desire to stop coding and become management. In some cases it's a very conscious lifestyle choice: you can maintain much more flexible hours and even do telework if you are writing code, while someone in a management role has to be physically present more often.
The idea that everyone should move into management is poisonous, both to developers who want to remain developers and feel pushed, and to management, which gets filled with people who don't really want to be there.
Some of the better places I've worked have recognized that some people want to get into project or staff management, and other people would prefer to perfect their craft and work independently. They link salary not to progress along a "ladder," but to actual value to the organization -- which often leads to developers who are making more than their project managers. This strikes me as totally appropriate, and it surprises me sometimes that not all companies are like this.
A company that pushes its best developers into management positions they're not thrilled about (either through 'career planning' or by making that the only way to get raises) is shooting itself in the foot in the long run.
"Traditionally, programmers are offered two career paths. They can become managers (a CTO track) or senior programmers (an architect track). The problem is both tracks terminate in roles that many programmers don't want. One path leads to pure management, the other to systems design work. Where do programmers who actually want to program go?
"Elsewhere."
If you're the founder of a company, you need to understand every nuance of the business, how it fits into its market niche, and the technology it uses. You have to convince other people to work for you; you have no implicit authority based on your title. Your effectiveness is based on how well you understand your mission as a company, and how well you can enable and motivate others to help you with that mission.
Those are all crucial skills in the corporate world as well.
They're also not necessarily mutually exclusive with being a coder/doer as well. All of the best managers I know come from a software engineering background. But it's about recognizing that other people can code & do just as well as you can, and leveraging what they're good at to help you and your organization achieve goals that neither one of you could do on your own.
Being in a job makes it relatively easy to see processes which always need some improvement. I wish it would be as easy to see how to improve things on the level of the society or the country. I can see many things that are wrong, but I have no idea how to fix anything.
I've made mistakes, I'll make more mistakes, but I'm not trying to be on the management track. However, it is important enough to me that I be involved in the decisions being made that this promotion is a good thing. What decisions?
1. How to arrange the office (we were able to partially remove the cubicles to give my team a much more open area to work with). 2. What we're working on and the technical direction that we should take in doing so (I am negotiating features and scope directly with our product managers). 3. When and how to recognise my team for hard work (small recognition; I have no direct control over pay raises).
There's more, but it's really important to me that the people that I work with get the respect they deserve, and it's now officially my job to make sure that they get it. If they've got good ideas, I want to hear them so that I can be their advocate for those good ideas.
Even though I've written very little code over the last year, I'm still developing software. I just have other people who write most of the code.
For people in a management role: what do you use to demonstrate that you're good at your job? If you're interviewing for another company, is it a steady record of promotion? Successful projects (but is that due to you or a good team)?
If you're a coder and your job sucks you can at least build something to show at interviews or learn new languages on the side, but how can you do the same in management?
Then there are the harder to quantify results but which mainly revolve in being able to explain how you achieved (or attempted to achieve) the hard numbers.
A lot about being a good manager is seeing what needs to be improved and then actually making that improvement happen. It sounds pretty basic - but you will find most people do their job that they are hired to do and not much else. Many people know what is wrong with their area/company, are happy to complain about it, but won't go and work out how to fix the problem, and then put in the hard yards to make that happen. Alternatively, many people confuse putting in long hours with 'making a difference'.
A good manager should be able to identify and implement fundamental changes to how the business operates that makes it 'better' (happier staff, more productive, great profit/revenue etc, less overhead/red tape). Being able to explain what you identified and implemented these changes is how I demonstrate how good (or not) of a job I'm doing.
(HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875714 )
This may have been true at one time, but not so much anymore, especially in IT. I prefer Michael Gerber's (of EMyth fame) description: there are three types of roles in a business, the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician. If you run your own business, you better be all 3. But if you work for someone else, you can choose your path. Choosing the technician path is perfectly acceptable, and often preferable to the manager path. You get to focus on the critical path, do what you do best, and in many cases, earn more than your boss. Many programmers I know that made the switch to management are sorry they did; they miss the cool work and hate the meetings and bullshit. I made the switch back to technician. No one has ever questioned why.
It seems like both candidates worked at an investment firm, but neither were promoted for anything related to doing what investment firms are supposed to do -- finding good opportunities to invest in.
The 'good' candidate merely figured out how to use excel better and become a manager. The other guy completed tasks and made friends with fellow analysts.
I have to say, I doubt this place was training their analysts to be good stock pickers and instead pumped out mediocre returns while gobbling up fees off of their clients/investors.
I have a good friend that works for a large mutual fund who already pitches stocks to the PMs. Other guys I know are simply excel monkeys.
In investment banking, it is a bit different. Analysts and Associates are excel jockeys with the job translating towards sales/deal sourcing as you climb up the ladder.
"instead pumped out mediocre returns while gobbling up fees off of their clients/investors."
Your words succinctly capture the true nature of almost all financial services firms.
Firstly, after reading a lot of comments here it seems that many people are talking about how NOT to get into management and stay with the job you love (particularly in reference to programming).
Though this sentiment relates to this article I also find it somewhat disconnected in the context of Mark and Ted's opinions of their roles. A lot of commenters clearly seem like they're already in established programming roles with a degree of authority they enjoy, whereas these two guys in the article aren't. They're new to their company, and are striving to get to a place where they're satisfied (quite the opposite situation from many of the commenters).
Next, the general message I gathered from this article is that being successful in an organisation is apparently about having an awareness of your surroundings and making small yet persistent changes without getting in the way of others. Doing the opposite, which in Ted's case was shameless self-promotion, working hard, working overtime and being highly-strung with a drive to get further is not the way to succeed.
Now I find this VERY debatable, because a lot of it is subjective to the organisation's culture. What's to say that in another organisation that values aggressive proactiveness Ted would've been promoted instead, while Mark would have taken another year or two to move up? You cannot teach people how to be successful in management based on one case-study. Furthermore, each staff had no idea of their performance until the actual bonus time and hence were kept in the dark. There's something wrong here if Ted was convinced he was on the right track. Isn't this what mid-year reviews are all about?
The key messages I can see here are to have an aim, observe and adapt. Mark had an aim, which was to somehow distinguish himself from the pack. He observed his environment and he adapted. Ted had an aim too (promotion + bonus), which he clearly observed because he seemed to have worked his butt off. Having failed to get his promotion he now has to adapt (move to a new company, change his ways, whatever).
The story isn't finished yet. A year later tables could turn. Mark could get comfortable with where he is and slip, while Ted could make it very big.
Really what it all comes down to is positioning yourself in a position where you aren't easily replaceable is really the "secret" to rising up on the corporate ladder. Networking and having good visibility into the company's overall workings and being a rockstar Excel jockey are really just two sides of the same coin.
From what I've seen, to rise above middle management you need both. A deep working knowledge of your tools and a good grasp of the big picture and all its moving pieces.
Also as other posters have mentioned some of the details in the story are suspect. Ordering supplies and lunch in IBD? Doesn't he have analysts to boss around and endless pitchbooks to compile?
That's surprising. I would think that if someone did that at an investment bank, they'd get fired and replaced with an administrative assistant. Same work, less pay.
It also sounds like Ted made himself a real pest.
"It took only a few minutes, so it didn't keep him from his other work"
In my experience rewarding the top performing "hamsters" nets greater retention and gains for the organizations productivity than a sole focus on rising managers.
Felt this article assumes Mark is double smart. i.e he can network, see & improve what other departments are doing & be the "go to member" of the team.