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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

There is still some truth to it. I'm 37 and have had to repeatedly and forcefully turn down managerial roles. The idea of horizontal growth is a hard sell to people who've chosen the vertical path. It would be very easy to drift into a management role, and in fact it happened to me once and I had to take deliberate action to get off the management track.

I don't want to manage people. I want to build, and learn about building. And I hope to be lucky enough to do that until retirement age.

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I've done management, and I can say that management experience has been invaluable to me.

I do consulting and freelance development now, and my success is in a large part due to the people skills I developed when managing others. You learn a lot about the many different ways people work (and don't work), and you learn a lot about yourself that you'd never see otherwise.

You learn how to mediate differences. You learn how to spot interpersonal problems on the horizon and head them off. You learn how to protect yourself. You learn how to promote harmony and goodwill. You learn how and when to compromise. You learn how to cooperate better. You learn to hear peoples voices. You learn how to be worthy of respect.

Without these skills, you'll forever be at the mercy of the prevailing political and emotional winds. The satisfaction of knowing you're 100% in the right won't unsink the ship.

Not only that, it's much harder to move around different companies as a manager. That's one of the reasons I stay away from it. Also, I don't like listening to people bitch about petty things. I manage small groups of people but I'm always deep in the code.

Also, most places want you to be a manager only. If you don't code every day, you lose it pretty fast. A friend of mine who is a VP had that problem. He got stuck in a shitty company and felt trapped. He jumped without a parachute but luckily landed.

I'm 10 years older than you but feel the same way.

I would be interested in hearing from people that did make the jump to management. Why did you do it? How did it turn out? Any regrets about making the jump or for not making the jump sooner?

I manage a small team of developers and still do a lot of development myself. My reason for doing it is that because what I want to work on now is bigger than a single person. I have a vision of what I want to accomplish and I can't do it all myself.

So far it's turned out well and I have no regrets. For me it wasn't a jump at all, just a gradual progression of what I've already been doing.

Thank you for posting this point of view. I have a feeling there's plenty of people on HN like this, but I don't see others explicitly talk about it often.

So I'm not terribly old yet (37) but I'm a manager for the last 2 years. I'm on the fence about the whole issue. At my root I'm a builder, I love it and really would never leave that. That said, I've had a lot of REALLY bad managers and I know that I can do it better. I love leading my team. It's amazing and thrilling to be able to tune the situation and work being done to benefit everyone involved to the maximum that the situation allows. Then comes the downside. Dealing with the other managers and the higher level business people. Some days, maybe even most days, it makes me miserable. I loathe it. So much self interest and political games. The really bad situation is that I work for a company that is actually really tame with that kind of thing. It's just the nature of the beast once you start up the chain.

Honestly I don't think it holds a future for me. At some point I'm moving to starting my own company... again or trying to turn my manager role into an architect/CTO type role or even more likely going back to being a lead developer. I don't regret it because I know what it is and that I can answer that bell when I need to. I just don't want to anymore.

I went into product management (not people management) because I was tired of being a cog just implementing other people's ideas. Admired the product managers as "deciders" and wanted that creative aspect. Little did I realize it'd simply mean writing requirement documents for other people's ideas. Project management is similar: Executing the schedule for other people's ideas. Unfortunately it's pretty rare in the corporate software world to actually get to create something yourself end-to-end.

It's turtles all the way down. Even CEO's feel like they have no agency at times.

It depends on the maturity level of the business you're in. In mature industries customers have a clear picture of what the software should do, even if suboptimal, and you're just there to turn their preconceptions into running software. In new industries nobody knows exactly what it can do, so you have a lot more agency as a developer.

I spent years working on an IWMS system and always felt trapped by other people's ideas, and then moved on inside the same company to a smart building project where I can pretty much do what I want because the market hasn't decided yet what such a system should do. The tricky part is selling something people don't understand yet, but luckily smart building is in the leading edge of a hype cycle.

:raises hand:

I'm now 40 years old and recently took a position as Software Development Manager. I manage a small team (currently 2 developers, 1 test engineer, and a product owner, and should be adding 2-4 more devs over the summer). The PO and I still wear our developer hats for a good portion of the day.

The "why?" is simple - I like the challenge. Yes, I can challenge myself with 100% technical tasks, but moving into management was something completely new.

The move into management has been gradual. I followed a standard developer path for years - dev, senior dev, principal dev, architect. Did the architect thing for a few years, then decided I wanted to work on my soft skills, so took over the scrum master role. I have a great boss/mentor, the position worked out well, and I recently took over a full development manager role (basically, same as I was doing, with the addition of personnel management).

How did it work out? Pretty well, I suppose. So far, I'm enjoying the new responsibilities.

Regrets? No, not really. But, I'm also not far enough removed from 100% developer that I couldn't pick up that hat again should the need arise.

Reason is simple, very few people love programming and even fewer love to keep learning to stay up-to-date with new technologies. Its simply hard if you are not much interested in doing programming and were in the profession to get a nice job because everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon while you were in college. It is also possible to lose love for programming after initial interest fades away. It has happened to me multiple times. The only reason I stayed as programmer is because I hate management even more.

I'm 63 and love programming. But my job is mostly other things. I coach a scrum team of 5 devs, PO and a proxy PO. I manage 2 developers, I do some security work and a whole lot more. I manage to write code most weeks. Python, php and Java. For the record I love python but my skills are not where I want them. I'm better, much better at Java, but I really don't like coding in Java much anymore and well I do php when I have to.

I do love learning and will continue to learn as I get older.

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