Ask HN: How to keep coding while moving up the ladder?

I became proactive and managed my managers. I did not and still don’t want to return to management, but the company only viewed progress as working up the management ladder.

I made a case for an almost parallel career path as a technical contributor, my value was not just in company/domain knowledge but also driving quality, reliability, robustness and developing solutions in response to company needs.

While I do assist and fill in for team leaders I still code.

I do a fair amount of mentoring, coaching, research and presentations, my work is still 75% billable as “code”

I think what I am saying don’t be passive, manage the mangers and make a case for what make you happy and benefits the company

Most people cannot. Management is a full-time job. The worst managers/leaders I ever had were those who still coded. These managers are like those rich people who go to their construction projects and hammer a few nails to connect with laborers .

I am on same path, trying to climb up ladder but want to do only one job well instead of two mediocre jobs.

However, programming is my hobby, and my plan is to keep it as a hobby and do it after work. Perhaps I will contribute to open source or write small utilities to automate some boring management task.

Short answer: you can't. Even the 'career ladder' positions like architect, engineering manager or even sometimes tech lead will eventually turn into less coding and finally no coding. Instead you'll report progress of what coders are doing, present solution designs and plans, estimate effort and cost, analyse third party solutions, spend your time in excel and powerpoint etc etc

You can continue coding after work. But if you want to do during the work hours, you are not ready to move up the ecosystem

I’m currently a Staff+ Engineer at a huge multinational company. Had that conversation when I came here because the role was not very well specified and you were supposed to do both people management and continue working as an IC. I spent months trying to get this clarified while doing both roles and it was a mess. I spent 90% of my time doing management things and very little IC work or keeping up to date on the technical side.

This year I pushed them to set a date for me to transition to an actual Staff+ role or my time with the company would come to an end. My manager moved heaven and earth for me to get this and we have a finally have a plan, so we will see how that goes.

If it is something you really want, push for having a technical leadership role with clearly defined responsibilities (and actual ownership and empowerment). There is nothing worse than turning a great engineer into a mediocre manager.

If/when you actually have that, you will still spend most of your time attending meeting, doing planning and providing input into tons of things but not actually contributing directly. So in order to keep up-to-date you will have to define how you will do it, while still using company time. Myself, I usually book a full day to try new technologies, do PoCs, read books, watch talks, attend courses. Not always possible but I at least try to spread those 8 hours throughout the week and actually make use of them to keep learning.

A question that a lot of people that reach the higher-level of a Senior role is how to keep progressing in terms of career/compensation but still be able to keep coding during a large part of my time? The answer is you don’t (not on most companies at least): after Senior Level your value to the company is in you experience and your domain/company knowledge that you accrued over time. The best possible way to make use of that is to have you help other people grow and cross-pollinate multiple people/teams using that knowledge.

Good luck!

There are a few options:

I will give the same advice I got when I told my manager that I wanted to keep coding while moving up the ladder. She told me that I should pick a project/problem where I wouldn't be a bottle-neck if I got sidetracked due to other commitments and code that. This way I would still get to code but not cause bottlenecks in the flow and it worked fine for the most part.

Another thing I have been doing is that I would code PoC's to validate a concept or solve an interesting problem and then hand it over to the junior folks to add the boring stuff (error checking/unit-tests etc) to make it production ready.

This approach allows me to solve interesting problems without having to do the 'boring stuff' . :)

If you really want to move into a leadership role but continue IC-tier code output, find a company with horrendous WLB and try that out. I'm only partially joking. Plenty of orgs will let you start out as an IC cranking on code all day, and if you're personable enough, you'll be hoisted into leadership roles. If the job is sufficiently bad, your higher ups will expect you to simultaneously knock it out of the park as a leader while also keeping code output high. This has happened to me in the past, just be ready to work 12-14 hour days.

The questions I have are:

• Why do you want to keep coding?

• Why do you wan to make PowerPoints, excel calculations, plan budgets, negotiate with different parties, plan resources, etc.?

I can give you my perspective on it as someone who went the dev -> architect/team lead -> university level education in management -> stress -> adult ADHD diagnosis -> dev route and the extremely short answer is that you do not move into management it you want to code.

What you need to do is to figure out not only what you want to do, but what you like to so. I excelled at management, I enjoyed being involved in significantly more important projects and seeing how the world works form the perspective of really high level enterprise management on the national scale of the public sector while being there as what is essentially a specialist advisory role. I enjoyed working with people and helping them find their motivation and grow, and I never got put down by the hard decisions, but as it turned out, what I’m actually build for is solving problems. It did turn out that I had undiagnosed ADHD and what some people call “flow” I call “hyperfocus”, what some people call “boring” I call “painful” and what some people call organisational politics I call hell. Now all of this wasn’t triggered until I had my first child, because it wasn’t until I had what was essentially 3 full time jobs (1 added for ADHD energy expenditures) that I couldn’t keep up, but when that happened it fairly quickly became apparent that I could never be a manager and a father of small children at the same time, and then what do you do? Well, one of my friends mentioned his company was looking for a developer, and knowing the CTO I reached out and got myself hired as a developer. In the past five months I’ve build some really amazing things, I’ve read manuals on how solar inventors work and setup data collection and distribution for our partners. I’ve build a typescript node package for generic Odata APIs and worked on cash flow predictions and I’ve had such a good time doing it that I’ve gone from part to full time (in a healthy way), something my leading psychiatrist thought would take five years.

Depending on your area of the world it’s very likely that you can’t make the same career out of programming that you can out of management, but there is currently a bigger demand for talented programmers than talented managers in a lot of places. So it’s certainly possibly to keep being a programmer if that’s your jam. You can also move into different forms of Enterprise Architecture and still do some amount of coding if the advisory specialist role appeals to you.

If you want to manage then I encourage you to do so, and go at it wholeheartedly. Which means cutting down on coding to the point where you no longer do any. You can still do it as a hobby, but not professionally. If you want to develop then I suggest you use your experience to find your way into places that are great to work.

It's simply not realistic to expect or want this. You have only a final amount of time in a day so you can't have it both ways and still do EITHER well enough to be competitive with people who focus.

You simply have to let go and minimize programming or you have to minimize management/strategy.

Why not just code your side projects on the weekend?

> Why not just code your side projects on the weekend?

Should those serious about a career legitimize a weekend without coding nowadays?

I think the more basic point Is that if you want something you can’t get at work, you need to provide it for yourself. If you take a job that does not encourage coding, it shouldn’t be a surprise you’ll do less coding, and it also shouldn’t be a surprise that you’ll need to code on your own time if you can’t meaningfully do it at work. My current role has involved a lot less coding lately, and I need to make time to keep my skills sharp and/or learn new things.

> if you want something you can’t get at work

This is not about "something you can’t get at work". I have problems doing sex/drug/rock'n'roll at work, just seem not to be able to get to it. Hence it gets pushed to the wknds.

This is about ensuring you can keep coding at work while making promotions. This is "work coding" not "side-project coding".

>My current role has involved a lot less coding lately, and I need to make time to keep my skills sharp and/or learn new things.

You seem to be okay with cannibalizing your wknd for work. Great that that works for you, but I think this should not be expected and is not the answer to OPs question.

Also, I think it fits the workaholic mindset that I try to avoid altogether.

I don’t work much outside of core hours, I just use downtime at work efficiently.