Friday Philisophy – To Manage or to Not Manage

Recently a friend of mine Graham Oaks blogged about his decision to step back from management and return to the Technical Coal Face.

I made a similar decision 3 or 4 years back, so I have a lot of empathy for his position and his decision. I found that to do the job of a manager takes up a lot more time, effort, patience and emotional effort than I had realised. Team leading is bad enough, having to coordinate the efforts of a half dozen people and sorting out the myriad issued they throw your way. Being in charge of multiple teams, responsible for strategy, dealing with staff development and moral, being a buffer against HR and having to deal with the politics created by people who WANT to be managers and wield power is more than a full-time job. Trying to hold onto a technical element as well, I found I could only manage it by doing the technical job as a “hobby”, in my own time. It was just too much to keep going year after year.

I had to chose. Give up the technical to give me enough personal resource to remain a manager and get better at it, or stop being a manager and start re-gaining my technical skills. I chose the latter.

Since I made my decision 3 years ago, I have met several people who have made the same conscious decision to step away from management and return to a more technical role. You may stand to earn more as a manager {which is something I objected to before being a manager and I still object to having been one – it should be possible to earn the same doing either} but for some of us it is not enough to make losing the hands-on work a sacrifice worth making.

One of the points Graham makes in his blog is that his spell as a manager has given him an appreciation of the challenges of management and the particular hells and stresses of the role. I think this is something that people who have never been managers have trouble really understanding.

I was working with a guy a couple of years ago and he was telling me how much of “a Moron” his boss was. In fact, he felt his current boss was even more of a moron than his previous boss. He then confessed that all of his bosses had been morons. “What, every single one of them?” I asked. Yes, absolutely all of them. That struck me as incredibly unfortunate, that every single one of these managers (and he’d had a lot as he moved between teams and positions on a regular basis), most of whom had come up through the technical ranks, were all Morons. I pointed out this unfortunate coincidence and wondered if there might actually be a common factor with all of these managers. He told me there was; They were all Morons.

He himself had never been a manager. He said he was too smart. Not smart enough to get what I was hinting at with the common factor suggestion though.

Obviously, some managers are poor at what they do; there are poor people in every job. But something I took away from my time being a manager is a lack of empathy for anyone saying all managers are a waste of time when they have never done the job themselves.

After all, I doubt there is any job where just doing it means you are an idiot.

Except Sys Admins – They are all idiots 🙂 (ducks behind server).