I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

The "self-demotion" is real though, especially since, according to the (much disputed) book, The Everything Store, alv declined Bezos' offer to lead AWS, and the job then of course was Andy Jassy's (who took over from Colin Bryar) which laid the foundation for him to eventually become the CEO-elect of one of the most enduring companies of all time.

I mean, in an alternate universe, alv is the CEO-elect :) Imagine the scenes!

- Position: guy

The chief of modesty.

One of the great dilemmas is that these things are always interwoven with the non-technical aspects of being a manager. There is some aspect in which it is essential - "how long will this work take" depends intimately on the technical complexity, exactly how skilled the available resources are in the necessary areas etc. Other aspects are completely non-essential - "responsibility for staff completing health and safety training lies with line management". I would really like to see a model where these are disentangled.

My old boss said: "on the way to work in the morning, you should be whistling". I'm from The Netherlands, and I'm not sure if it translates well. But that's the point where I thought that I love engineering, stopped caring about what others may think, and put my management ambitions in the freezer.

Five years further, and I'm slowly coming back to that decision, but in a much more natural way. I started freelancing, took on an apprentice, and slowly I'm getting more responsibilities. But in a natural way, not an all-or-nothing choice.

So my advice is to set boundaries. If you don’t want to be sitting in meetings, then stand your ground or come to a compromise. If they don’t understand then quit! Find the path for you, life is too short to be unhappy and someone else’s pencil pusher.

But as always: ymmv

Maybe you would be a great manager, maybe you would be a bad one. But you would not be nearly as good as a person who is just like you but has also worked as a developer. You literally will not know what you are talking about, and the people you manage will see this, and that creates an unfixable problem between you and your developers.

I mean, the classic "couldn't you just ..." is bad enough from a manager who at least was on the receiving end of that suggestion, at some point in his or her career. But from someone who hasn't had that experience, it is so much worse. Maybe you would never use that phrase, but the dynamic is unavoidable. Much of what you do and say will be second-guessed and devalued.

There is, but probably not in a Software company, since they tend to prefer promoting experienced programmers to managers based on their tech skills (for better or worse)

Companies that work in logistics, banking, engineering etc. and have in-house software teams, but don't ship software as their primary business are far more open to hiring non-programmers as software team managers (for better or worse). If you have any domain knowledge about the area they're operating in that often weighs much higher.

It's about more than knowing how to program, but rather the ins and outs of development, architecture, technology.

Plenty of more typical Fortune 500 type companies and small, non VC funded companies let managers from non engineering backgrounds manage engineers.

Congrats on the successful career shift.

That may or may not be true, of course, but it's an element in your favor either way!

(though fwiw, in my time as a past manager, I found that significant effort counted for a lot - it's cliche but folks who consistently put in extra effort and worked their butts off improved faster than those who relaxed, so they would soon exceed folks who relaxed, even if they had much less of a head start.)

This is true -- but your manager won't always act in your company's exact best interest either! I do think "management are human beings, too" is pretty important to remember.

> The loss of some fraction of X is always going to hurt the company more than your gain in Y will benefit them

I don't think you can assume this is always true. What if X is jQuery and Y is Typescript? Or X is oldLegacyCodebase and Y is newProjectInBurgeoningField?

Complete BS. If they offer it to him, they think he would be a good fit and they're just trying to pay less. Contrast it with my experience, where I just stepped up to fill the gaps whenever I saw them, my boss noticed, offered a lead position including pay bump.

I guess you and I are taking a more literal definition of demotion, whereas others may interpret it through the lens of the feelings of shame that would normally come with it, or perhaps even through a more "anarchist" view that no man is ever above any other.

Org-charts are about management structure and directors weirdly get very highly placed on them while their role isn't person-management driven. I've always found them exceeding strange except in their highlighting of SMEs and to aide in inter-departmental communication.

But this all may just be the socialist in me shining through as someone working with a team to make widgets that do their thing well.

Ok, it was a reduction in rank, but an increase in status (if you ask most software engineers) ;)

These two are quite different:

I followed my dreams and got demoted to software developer

I follow my dreams and got promoted from Development Team Team to Software Developer

The article has a good message, but the title is absolute click-bait. Many people might come across the title, and although not interested in reading it, walk away with the idea that following dreams leads to negative consequences. I hope the author changes it.

It didn't come out of thin air, as this person had been coding as a hobby for a few years (Ludum Dare rocks!). So she actually did have some skills, though maybe not as formal or structured as say, a tech recruiter, might want to.

Furthermore, it's great that she is working in an organisation that would support such a change. It makes this career change much easier than having to quit your job and trying to get gigs or get hired without having formal credentials or experience.

Every time I hear this explanation, I can't help but think "so we're still smoking Luck Strikes, huh?"

When you make a decision as a software engineer, the impact of that decision can often have a multiplicative or even exponential force.

The goal of 21st century organizations -- especially software organizations -- should be to make things scale in way that's at most sublinear with the number of people you throw at it.

Automation prints money and businesses that can harness automation have huge profit margins.

People are expensive and body shops are shitty companies waiting to be replaced when technology catches up with whatever work they're throwing bodies at.

It's not 1960 anymore. Invest in your automators and treat your people managers as a low-value-add cost center.

That depends on how high the multiplier is and how many direct reports a manager has. A manager with 5 direct reports and a multiplier of 110% is only producing as much net value as 0.5 of his/her reports. A manager with 20 direct reports and a multiplier of 106% produces a net value of 1.2 of his/her reports.

It's not safe to say that managers in general produce more value. Some do, some don't. It depends on their ability and the abilities of those they share a management relationship with. But the same could be said about engineers/architects/devs.

But this is obviously false, right? If the IC is truly a spectacular IC, then it's likely that no matter which manager they're under, they will have large impact.

The impact of the manager isn't the entire impact of their directs, but rather the relative difference between the impact of their directs and the impact their directs would have under a different manager. Which is substantially less, and could easily be less than the impact of a particularly strong IC.

The above resonates as an exercise in tautology to me. If the job of a manager is defined as a position in which a person's decisions will have a multiplicative force... well... then of course their decisions will have a multiplicative force! Though I'm not sure the above is even remotely true for the vast majority of management-type positions, save those at the highest-level. And even if it is... then it of course a fact that the value derived from an individual in such a position is therefore not related to the "multiplicative force", rather, the decisions themselves.

I'd wager most managers come from two camps (the first two below):

1. Those that are ex individual contributors who have accumulated enough seniority and experience to best-understand not "what to build", but rather, "how to build it best". And are therefore given the authority, responsibility, and pay-check to do so.

2. And those who are not really managers at all, and whose job would be more accurately named "coordinators". This seems to be the role you are hitting on at end. You know, the guy who asks the engineers "how can I unblock you today?" and whose explicit role is to have the authority to act on the answer. Notably, not synthesizing the answer in the first place.

3. The third camp is of course the ones to which you seem to be alluding in your comment. The high-level, c-suite, "director of strategy"-type roles. And you are exactly right about them. Clearly the person deciding which widget needs to be built is in a position of tremendous responsibility when the value they can add (and remove) is extremely consequential (assuming the resources required to do so are equally consequential). There aren't many roles like this in a company.

It's the second group of "managers", I think, that the OP is confused about. They don't actually make that many decisions, and the ones that they do make are rarely different from the one their most competent reports wouldn't also make. Sure these "managers" sit in meetings and talk about the larger context of the code, the product vision, etc., but only insofar as that its useful to have someone who can distill and relay this information back to the engineers building the product. Because as an engineer it is, of course, nearly impossible to build a truly great product if you don't understand its larger context. It is this group of managers where the tautology is glaring. It is their job to carry-out the work necessary to multiply force. The work isn't all that creative, doesn't require much judgment, and rarely requires much expertise. The value isn't in multiplying force, it's in just showing up...

To clarify, I'm not suggesting managers don't have value, and certainly don't believe there doesn't exist a spectrum between those in the position. Some people multiply force more than others. They know to ask "how can I unblock you today?". They know that Jim doesn't like to be bothered before 11AM. That Susan is more productive if she has a tight feedback loop. Or that Ron isn't as good as Pam at test coverage. They know how to find and exploit people strengths while also minimizing their weaknesses. This is valuable.

Even so I'd wager most of the time a manager's pay is calibrated such that they make more than those whom they manage regardless of the value these people (the people being managed) contribute and without any sort of rigorous appraisal of how much value they bring or how much force they multiply. How could you? The skills illustrated above can't easily be captured in a pay band...

In my 25 working years, I've learned this is mostly lip service. Yes, there are ICs who make as much as a VP. But look at Amazon. There are maybe ten people in that company that are IC level making what VPs make. And thousands of VPs.

To be a VP, you have to be a really great manager. To get VP pay as an IC (ie. Distinguished Engineer), you have to be the best in the world in your field.

So yeah, it's possible to have equivalent tracks, but the reality is that you will never make as much as an IC than if you switch to the management track.

E.g., the 2nd/3rd-to-last rung of a FAANG IC ladder makes much more than managers and directors at most other companies in the USA.

This is significant because it's much easier to become a senior IC at a FAANG than to become a Regional Director at the typical company in the USA.

Managers don't generate defects. Developers do. Not to mention that a lot of the times it's much harder to reverse an engineering decision vs a managerial one.

Most outages are caused by developers and IT, not managers. This perception that there is higher risk as a manager is false. As a developer I make multiple decisions daily, interpret vague requirements, make judgement calls, request new technologies etc. My manager understands about 20% of the decisions I make. Here is the kicker since I work in DevOps, with a super heavy emphasis on the Dev side. 70% of my decisions have wide ranging effect, much wider than my manager's eight person team.

Finally note that no one really talks about 10x Managers, but people talk about 10x Developers. Why is that? Managers are glorified cheerleaders. Most managers are average, their value is vague but they are controlled by managers so its an endless loop till you hit the worker layer that get things done.

Of course anything is possible, but there is often a chain of managerial command (managers of managers) to catch mistakes. It's pretty hard for a single, middling manager to inflict costly mistakes anymore than an individual engineer. Also, I've seen management levels that are 0 - 1 subordinates deep (managers of none).

Employees are the first to get fired when a company struggles.

Managers are less likely to be fired, and when it happens they can have more savings as they salaries are higher.

CEOs quit failing companies with multi-million exit bonuses.

So no, salaries are based on power, and so is the ability to dodge risks and responsibilities.

Fast forward 3 years and here I am, being asked to be an Interim-Director as the director here is now retiring and I'm the only one with management experience. They are then in turn 'encouraging' me to apply for the full time director position, saying how I'm the most qualified and despite the "promote from within" policy, they want me to go up against external candidates to "earn" the job they asked me to interim.

I've wracked my brain for a week now--I'm an engineer level do-er, I'm not a manager, but 22K a year is a NICE increase and I want to buy a home. Part of me says "thanks but no thanks, I'm not going to apply for a promotion to a job you obviously think I'm qualified for but won't offer out-right if its going to be a massive paradigm shift AGAIN for me," and another part says, "Dude, you're so dumb if you don't apply for a job that pays 30% more than you're currently making!"

I've got a couple weeks to decide--money isn't my driving factor, the ability to "turn off" at the end of the day is.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Any big organization will optimize for people who can extract as much value from their peers/subordinates and present it as their own.

By the way, this does not mean they are not smart or hard working, but you could say the same about any other worker.

I did not say they create nothing, i just said that they should not be held to a higher "rank" than people who actually create something real, with that said there should not be a feeling of "demotion" from director to developer...quite the opposite in fact.

BTW: Look at your reaction, instantly calling me ignorant because i think managers are just gears in the system and NOT drivers.