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I’ve been offered an opportunity to become my team’s new manager. I’m a senior engineer on the team currently, and my manager has too many direct reports right now. I enjoy mentoring and coaching, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve been offered the job. I asked for some time to think it over so I could talk to some mentors, and it’s just made me more torn. I’d become my manager’s peer, which is weird for me because I’ve reported to him for 4 years now. I’d be managing people I’ve been friends and coworkers with for just as long. What if I have to fire one of them? Or lay them off? I think I’d be good at it most days, because I’m already doing a lot of what I think managers already do when it comes to running the team day to day. I’ve helped two people on my team get promoted from the lowest position we have and I loved doing that. One mentor is worried I’m just another woman being pushed to a less technical job ladder. The other thinks I should do it if I think I’d enjoy the job more. Am I copping out if I become a manager?
Oof. I’ve answered some version of this question a dozen times before. I remember when I had to answer it for myself. Here’s what I normally tell people, and I’ll address the “less technical woman” part at the end.
Management is a different skill set. Understanding your team’s technical challenges is one piece of the puzzle, but especially as you move up the management ladder, other factors start to become more important: how the business makes money, how to keep teams healthy, how to set and execute a strategy, etc. The idea of management being “less technical” does not make it less important, and in many cases, management is still a highly technical role that now has added people complexity on top of the technical complexity. Most people making this argument don’t believe Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella to be less technical just because they have direct reports.
Even the individual contributor leaders that you see at the top of companies are often not coding nearly as much as the folks lower on the ladder assume. One thing I loved at Google was getting to look up anyone’s code stats. For folks struggling with this question, I’d ask them their role models and have them look up the number of code changes they’d submitted lately and what type. Most were surprised to find that increasingly their technical work was in incident response, architecture design, and technical strategy development.
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