13 reasons not to be a manager

It so happened that over the past few years I have occupied a wide variety of executive positions in half a dozen companies engaged in the development of software of various kinds. It was possible to visit both the team leader and the project manager, and the project group, the head of the department and the head of the technical direction; wards happened from two to one hundred fifty people, and the size of the company ranged from three to two hundred thousand employees. Only one thing remained unchanged: a purely managerial work, a gradual and final departure from technical tasks.

And now, in the period between Christmas and New Year, when the tendency to deep reflection is especially acute, an understanding comes that if I knew some “insider” details of management activities in advance, I would have made a completely different choice seven years ago.

That is why this slightly chaotic and very varied list of moments that I would very much like to pass back somewhere was born, around 2005 - let me know if someone has already learned how to do it! In the meantime, maybe someone will find some of the points listed below are not completely obvious, or even useful for themselves; It would be nice to know that it was possible to help someone make a more informed choice of profession - or just something important to think about.

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1. It's a dead end
   No matter how ridiculous, one of the reasons why I once moved from technical to managerial work is just that notorious “glass ceiling”, that is, a public or unofficial limit of financial and career growth, which sooner or later begins to notice every developer. It seemed that one had only to abstract from technology, to get rid of the need every two years to almost completely switch to something completely new, how it would be possible to take it, and to bring one specific skill — that is, let's say, management — to mind-blowing perfection, and there ... I am waiting for endless prospects! How so. Practice shows that the prospects are endless from the developers: you can change the technology, try different roles in the project, you can work in the state or be a contractor, freelancer, sharovarschik or you can become an architect, for example. Once you become a manager, alas, you remain him forever. Having missed another big change of technology, without becoming younger, having acquired a family, you suddenly realize that it will be extremely difficult to return to technical / programming activities, or it may be impossible at all - especially considering that this is due to the loss of relevant market experience. It can not happen without a significant decrease in income. So the longer you stay in a non-technical position, the further the conditional “train” goes.
   
   
2. Glass ceiling is back
   Yes, yes, there is also a second glass ceiling, a kind of invisible growth limiter, which from a developer’s position was not very noticeable to me personally - probably, it was masked with “reflections” on the first glass ceiling, who knows. In short, in a relatively realistic situation - that is, without a radical change in the industry (for example, from an IT manager - to the vice-presidents of some spherical Gazprom in a vacuum) and country of residence - software managers have a rather narrow financial and career corridor, where you can "grow and develop." The ceiling is all sorts of directors and their intentions, which often turn out to be the founders and / or co-owners of the company, or their appointees. Simply put, these are those managerial positions that we cannot “grow”, but can only be “hit”; it is interesting that this applies equally to large transnational corporations, despite the fact that they actively promote themselves as being deprived of such annoying flaws (see words like “transparency”, “honesty”, etc. in mission, vision, values ​​- and similar texts).
   
   
3. What to do?
   Despite the pomp of the subtitle, this is not about philosophical matters, but about a very specific question - what should the manager do with from 9 to 18 in the workday? For technical specialties and positions, this is more or less clear and well defined: people analyze requirements, write programs, test them - there are many different things. Turning to management - especially after a rather long existence in the “engineering” Universe, where everything is relatively well-defined - you always encounter a stunning misunderstanding of what should you actually do all day? If there is any documentation, job description or description on this topic, then it is usually extremely vague, not specific and full of stamped phrases and terms that have long since lost all meaning due to overuse and are now suitable only for “bullshit bingo” . But usually not even her! Moreover, attempts to find out at least the high-level goals of their managerial activity encounter the same stream of undeciphered empty words: to ensure, adjust, support, achieve, create, etc.
   
   
4. Time trouble
   As soon as you get to the smallest managerial position, people who do not need anything come running from all sides - except for a little bit of your time. After a couple of weeks, you find out that more than 80% of the week's work time is scheduled for various meetings and phone calls / conferences, and in the end there is absolutely no time left for any kind of preparation for these meetings. It is exhausting. Like it or not, you always find yourself who either didn’t have time or didn’t prepare, or both ... and there’s probably no way out - at least I’ve seen people living in this mode for years, and they hardly chose this lifestyle consciously. But they produce a bunch of different adaptive mechanisms: for example, knowing that neither prepare for a meeting nor work on any document on its results will not work anyway, they lay this time in the meeting itself. So then you spend the whole day at two, three, four-hour meetings, where up to a dozen people are present, 90% of whom are not at all there. But just try not to attend! And one day you catch yourself celebrating lunchtime as a regular meeting in an outlook, otherwise you just won’t get dinner, colleagues-managers will eat all day without a trace. How came last week.
   
   
5. Ragged day
   It is no secret that for any knowledge worker - for example, for a programmer - for productive work, you need two f: focus & flow. That is, the ability and ability to concentrate on the work that needs to be done, and the environmental conditions that contribute to maintaining this concentration for any lengthy period of time. It’s no secret that every episode, when something (a phone call, a conversation, just a loud sound outside the window) pulls you out of the “flow” of concentrated work, costs about 15 minutes of time - so much is needed to return back to this concentration flow. That is why developers and engineers do not like calls, letters, “knocks” on Skype / messengers / ICQ ... and when you go to the managerial camp, your working day suddenly begins to consist of 80-90% of such breaks! Meetings that are slyly trying to answer ... twenty fresh letters, telephone conversations along the way from one meeting to another, as well as colleagues, who always need something urgently, right now! And while you delve into the essence of the problem, three more letters fell on the inbox, two more unanswered calls appeared on the phone, and you realize that the time you took for lunch just ended and the next meeting was in four minutes. And if all the same (despite point 3 of this list) you realize that you need to do some concrete, tangible work - well, let's say, write a document, slides for a presentation, or draw a diagram, then find how many something long continuous period of working time is simply unrealistic!
   
   
6. Non standard day
   Actually, the presence of meetings that fill the entire working day (see clause 4), incoming correspondence in quantities sufficient to fill the same unfortunate day (see clause 7), as well as the periodic necessity still something real to do, leads to that you regularly find yourself working in the evening from home, lingering in the office. Interestingly, this state of affairs is considered quite normal! For example, in one company where I had the opportunity to work, technical specialists without any questions were paid for double-scale processing, but not by managers. That is, everyone knew that constant processing takes place without them, they simply did not pay for them! So it turns out that the developer's income under certain conditions can easily exceed the income of his immediate superior. Another example: in one company it was so that the developer’s working time was sacred, but now it was just a normal practice and a regular occurrence to schedule a meeting for half a dozen managers at 20:00. Summary - suddenly, your personal time off ceases to belong to you; since the whole surrounding managerial “tusovka” considers such a situation normal, it’s impossible to “get off” in some painless way, only at the cost of permanently placing yourself on the list of “disloyal”, “unmotivated” or just lazy rascals ...
   
   
7. Inbox overflow
   In those days, when I was quietly and calmly engaged in development, in a day half of a dozen emails fell to me in inbox. Each of them immediately received my undivided attention, it was carefully read and answered as quickly as possible - it was right, good, and it gave the impression that I did everything in my power to help others successfully do their work - answered the questions forwarded some materials, etc. But when you have subordinates, the number of incoming emails starts to grow very quickly. For me, it kept around hundreds for months, which leads to very unpleasant consequences: even using all possible “gadgets” of the mail client - filters, folders, tags, etc., even using all the wise and not very time management techniques, even lost in an outluk in the evenings to the detriment of family and rest — there is still no real opportunity to even thoughtfully read all the correspondence, not to mention intelligent answers to everyone. In the bottom line, we have a steadily growing number of various “fakaps” (letters not to those, not about, or not so written, forgotten applications - and so on), growing a lot of even low-priority and non-urgent letters beyond the limits of theoretical “raking” resulting in forgotten business, unfulfilled promises, and also the itchy feeling that you cannot cope with your incoming correspondence, but rather, it “copes” with you. Chews and spits out.
   
   
8. Pure, uncomplicated responsibility
   In managerial circles they like to distribute responsibility for anything. This is done, as a rule, with great pathos, presented as an incredible positive and happiness for whoever receives such responsibility, but there are a couple of pitfalls. First of all, it is almost impossible to refuse such happiness - well, that is, without getting into the list of disloyal, ungrateful villains-saboteurs. Secondly, practically no details are ever communicated about what, in fact, it will be necessary to “answer” (see also point 3). It is clear why: after all, all this ritual is the essence of throwing over a smut from higher-level managers to subordinate ones, and such a throw-over occurs either because the throw-in “smacks”, or because the original happy “responsible” simply didn’t understand what it was. Well, the hands did not reach, it happens, but you can’t admit it at all, right? Thirdly, of course, the responsibility is distributed only in its pure form, that is, without any power or resources that can really influence the accountable situation. In fact, it turns out a veiled assignment of the culprit for the imminent future "facac", and the appointed must cry with pride that they chose him. What is the result? The habitual feeling of having more time to do, even less time, there is no longer any sense at all, but failure is inevitable.
   
   
9. No “not my job”
   What happens if the developer asks, say, to clean the office floor? He twists his finger at his temple and explains that it is not his job, and, accordingly, it will not do it - and this will be perceived perfectly normal, because everyone understands what the programmer’s job is and therefore it is very easy to determine what is not. So a huge surprise for me was that in management circles it is not so! Since management itself (as a specialty, profession) is something muddy, vague, strongly dependent on the context of the organization where everything happens, which context usually remains vague (see clause 3), managers have practically no opportunity to say that it is not part of his duties - without (of course!) an extraordinary recording of himself beloved in the list of unreliable traitors who undermine the foundations of the company. As a result, the average manager periodically finds himself engaged in the purchase of office furniture, searching for employees, writing marketing materials and a bunch of various other things that are poorly amenable to any coherent categorization. Just because ... well, not the developers to strain, right?
   
   
10. Enchanting contingent
    In the early 1990s, when I was studying at the university, there were 4 groups of us programmers. And in parallel with us, 19 groups of economists-managers were biting into the granite of science, and it would be naive to assume that they would disappear from the face of the planet only after receiving their diploma. Strangely enough, they all went to work somewhere, and some of them ended up in software development organizations - of course, not in the position of programmers! These guys, they are, by definition, smarter and smarter than everyone else - they immediately go to the management. How and why people with zero experience and education “about nothing”, but with cherished letters, “MBA” are taken for any kind of leadership positions - this is still beyond my humble understanding, but the fact remains: if among developers meet the casual a person is quite difficult (well, at least the interface is still distinguished from an abstract class), then among managers it is easy! Crowds of people with strange work experience and without any useful skills randomly migrate from sales of laundry detergent to software development, while they sincerely don’t see the difference - doesn’t it even matter what to manage? Accordingly, they have no time to understand the intricacies of the industry, they make a career - which, in fact, is their main and, sometimes, the only true "specialization", so that, suddenly being in this sweet circle, for a couple of months I I personally saw enough of such a number of blatant lies, bases, hysterics, cunning plans of seizing power, “friendship against” and all sorts of alliances - over the previous years 10 non-managerial work and half did not score! That is, to say briefly - in the managerial layer reigns its own, special, incomparable atmosphere; someone will be in it like a fish in water, and someone can very quickly become very, very nasty.
    
    
11. Food chain reporting
    A colleague of mine invented (or borrowed from somewhere) a funny term - “reporting food chain”. This is when the big boss demands to provide him with some kind of report, and gives orders to downstream managers, who in turn begin to pull their subordinates and demand some data from them, while those run to their subordinates ... and so on. A chain is formed (more precisely, a tree) of people and their actions, the end result of which is a certain colorful report for someone very important, and such a chain can penetrate through all levels of the organization hierarchy, down to the bottom. Needless to say that at 3-4 levels below the big boss, no one is trying to understand why all this fuss was originally needed. Another thing is interesting: in large organizations, where there are several levels of management, some kind of parasitic elements are inevitably infused - managers who do nothing but participate in one or several of these chains. Formally, they may have some very sonorous position, but in fact they are in hibernation, until they are awakened by the beginning of data collection for one of those reports that traditionally pass through them. At this moment it is better not to get in their way: realizing that these reports are the only thing that justifies their existence in the organization, such guys will sweep away everything and everyone on the way to the cherished numbers and graphs! They will stop critical projects, pull out important people from the teams, hold dozens of meaningless meetings, arrange several scandals - but will get their precious numbers, and then - back to hibernation. Worse than getting in the way of such a data collector, it can only be permanent integration into the reporting chain at the very last stage of it - which often happens with newly-minted, inexperienced managers; the unfortunate tables of useless numbers are waiting for the unfortunate who is caught, who must be obtained by such and such a date, and not by that ...
    
    
12. Warm human communication
    According to PMI (Project Management Institute), a project manager usually spends about 90% of his working time on “communication,” that is, on communication; live, by phone, by correspondence in one form or another. It may sound ridiculous and naive, but it seems to me that it is very, very much. Before starting my active career in management, I led the usual quiet life of an average introvert programmer, who is much more “thrilled” to interact with a computer than with colleagues; and therefore I couldn’t imagine what for me personally could mean such an amount of communication with different people, without a break, day after day - it dramatically exhausts. In a good way, you can effectively communicate with about a dozen people - keeping in your head the entire history of relationships with them, remembering all the data and the promises received, knowing that it is interesting to whom and what moves them. When there are more people around, the quality of communication predictably falls: a couple dozen - inevitably you start to lose something from useful information, fifty - you can hardly keep in your head at least the names of people, their faces and who are busy at the moment, and if their number passes over a hundred, then ... I don’t know how anyone, but I didn’t even remember to remember the names of all my subordinates, and communication with them turned into incessant torture, a string of awkwardness and straining attempts to remember whether this dude was asking something me last week or he is generally here only from Monday. Very soon, I discovered that I was simply hiding from colleagues! In those rare moments that were free from meetings, I preferred to be anywhere, but not in my workplace, where my subordinates could find me, and (oh, horror!) To engage in some other conversation, about work or not. But there is a positive point here: I understood why, when I was a developer, it was so unrealistically difficult to always “catch” my boss somewhere, let alone discuss something vital with him!
    
    
13. No more your
    In any work collective, some kind of social circles are formed, and if a member of the team is not quite unsociable beech, at least he will participate in one of them. It does not mean family friendships and joint picnics on weekends, everything is much more prosaic - to exchange a couple of phrases about anything, joke about the authorities, customers, send or receive a link to some funny garbage ... these little bits of something not quite working they allow you to get distracted and not go crazy in one single working day. However, as soon as you become some manager from a senior developer or timblid - at least a project, you begin to slowly notice that when you appear at a coffee machine or in a smoking room, lively conversations subside, the intonation and / or the subject matter changes, and then you By chance you learn that in addition to the official project chat somewhere on Skype, there is also an unofficial one for joke-jokes. Only forgot to invite you there; and at this moment you realize that for the team you are not quite your own. And at that moment, when decisions on hiring, dismissal and salaries turn out to be in your power - you become completely different. It seems that the point here is not even in person and not in the team, it’s just that there is a standard dynamic, and I guess it would be quite difficult to change it - if possible at all. However, in the bottom line, we have another negative factor actively influencing the psychological comfort of the newly-minted manager ...

That's all that came to mind. And the damn dozen is probably the most suitable length for this list.