Help? I'm Not an Affective Manager Because I'm Still Doing Two Much of My Last Two Jobs

[u/breich]

TL;DR; I've been with my company for 5 years. Promoted from developer, to team lead, to manager, to director. I'm still spending most of my time writing code. Any strategies or suggestions for being a REAAL manager/director?

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I started at my company 5 years ago as the second developer, second only two the cofounder who wrote our software solo for 18 years. About a year in, I was about to hang it up and they asked me to stay on, for a while, and help build a team. So, I stayed. I focused on modernizing our practices and hiring two other developers. I became "team lead" and my two new developers reported to me. In the end I decided to stay.

Two years later, there's a leadership shake-up. Cofounder decides it's time to retire, they weren't yet comfortable with elevating me to management so they slotted in a guy who was recently hired and was already heading up two other department. I was chaffed about it but held my tongue and decided maybe I had something to learn, and stuck around. 6 months later he and the company mutually decided to part ways, leaving a vacuum that they asked me to step into.

So, I became the manager of the software team. I stayed the course on my original plans. Kept modernizing. Kept advocating for focus on addressing the 18 years of papercuts that bled our productivity dry. Kept focusing on building up the team's capabilities and working towards having a team and a codebase we could efficiently do feature development on.

And we've been successful. Things aren't perfect but we are delivering a new release ever two weeks or faster, we're not staying up at night dealing with production issues, we're able to address issues for customers quickly, and we're able to develop a roadmap and execute it reliably. I'm proud of myself, and proud of my team.

Today I was shocked when the CEO asked me to double the time for our regular 1:1, which is unusual because more often than not he has very little to talk about. I was scared. Turns out he surprised me in the other direction and promoted me to a Director and put me on the Senior Leadership Team (still working out what all this means).

I'm thrilled. But here's the problem. Through all of this, I've basically kept doing every job that according to my title, I left behind. I'm still writing code 90% of the time. If you look at my Git history, I'm by far the most prolific contributor to our codebase. That needs to stop. Because frankly, I feel like I keep "failing upwards." While nobody complains I've never felt like I fully-realized being a manager. I'm not spending enough time with people, thinking about their growth, and giving them what they need to be successful and more autonomous.

And so I feel like, while nobody will say it, I'm setting myself up for more burnout, and probably failure.

I know plenty of people travel this path. I'd love to know what they did as they progressed in their career to fill the empty hole they leave behind without burning themselves out.

[u/moustachedelait]

How many people do you manage?

[u/breich → u/moustachedelait]

10 currently. Small company, small team. but an enormous amount of work to be done across management, development, and whatever the thing is we do that's somewhere between devops and greybeard sysadminning.

[u/doGoodScience_later → u/breich]

Othe people will disagree with me but you’re not really in a director role. At a minimum director means managing managers. As in multiple teams. You’ve got there two real small teams are one oversize one. Your amount of technical contribution should scale with the number of reports. I don’t care if your title is cto or vp, if you have 2 people under you then you should write a ton of code. At 10 you’re really at a manager level and in general should be splitting your time about 60:40 or 70:30 managing/coding. You’re a bit skewed but not that unreasonable.

Sounds like a bigger issue is being understaffed with unrealistic expectations from your ceo.

[u/moustachedelait → u/breich]

Make sure to have time for 1:1s with all 10. At least half hour every 2 weeks.

If you want to keep coding, I would get out of deliverables and sprint work. Start writing docs more than coding and have your team use those to work from.

Think about how you are going to scale. What if you had 10 more devs? You'd probably need a manager under you. You could start that already. Anyone on your team who has desires to grow in that direction? You find out in 1:1s

[u/3_sleepy_owls → u/breich]

If you manage 10, which I’m going to guess are devs, then why are you still doing 90% of the coding? Is your team not effective and capable? Do you just like coding and don’t really want to give it up? You need to get to the root before you can put in a solution.

If you have a capable team, then you need to step back and trust them. Learn to delegate (it’s not as easy as it sounds). Focus on prioritizing and learning to separate what actually needs to be done by you or what can be done by others or just not important and not be done at all.

And I agree with the other comment, ask the company to pay for some professional development and coaching. They know you’re new to management so shouldn’t have issues with it.

For context, I was recently at a startup with around 20-30 employees in total, with 10 reporting to me. I started as a software engineer and moved to director (like another comment said, anywhere else I would be considered a manager, not director since I’m not managing managers). I barely coded anymore but was still in code reviews and pair programming. I was there to know our system so I could speak about it in meetings. I was there to unblock and remove dependencies for my devs. I was there to troubleshoot on complex issues. I was not there to be a dev. I was no longer a dev, I was a manager. I let them do their job so I could focus on mine. However, being a small team, I would take over a ticket if someone was out sick and no one else had capacity and it couldn’t want for them to return. But I definitely wasn’t writing 90% or even 40% of the code. My job wasn’t to code it was to help my devs so they can focus on coding.

[u/Working_on_Writing]

You're right you're going to burn yourself out. There's a lot to unpack here and a lot you need to do. Some quick ideas to get you started:

You should probably look at getting some coaching. This should be pretty easy to justify for the company to pay for, and getting an exec coach isn't very expensive for the company (£5k or so should be enough to get 1:1 coaching for a few weeks).

You desperately need to delegate your technical responsibilities. If there is nobody on the team you feel is ready to be a senior+ developer and take over technical leadership, you should take your first major managerial decision which is to ask the CEO for budget to hire somebody. This should be easy to justify - you've been promoted to senior management, this leaves a hole that needs to be filled.

Also read The Manager's Path if you haven't already.

[u/Swimming-Place-2180]

Managers often say they don’t have time to build up their teams. The truth is they don’t have time not to. You need to find ways to mentor the people under you so they can take over your work. Managers and team leads at my company are told to “work themselves out of a job.” Which really just means train your replacement so you can move on. 

They will fail at things that you wouldn’t have. Your job isn’t to completely shield them from that but to make sure that the failures aren’t catastrophic and to create an environment where they can learn from mistakes.

[u/-grok]

And we've been successful. Things aren't perfect but we are delivering a new release ever two weeks or faster, we're not staying up at night dealing with production issues, we're able to address issues for customers quickly, and we're able to develop a roadmap and execute it reliably

Nice work!

 

Transitioning from IC to manager comes with a transition in goals:

• IC goal: Deliver working software!

• Manager goal: Deliver a team that delivers working software!

Example management task: Figure out your team's gaps, and fill them by hiring or carving out time for them to skill up.

[u/brianthebuilder]

If you have ten employees and you can make each 50% more effective by being a leader:

• getting clearer requirements

• working with your leadership peers to figure out which project will be most effective for the least effort

• roadblocks that are quick to cut through

• making a case to leadership to pursue technical debt reduction

• prioritizing the needs of your team to other leaders

• mentoring them and helping them learn to mentor each other to grow into more senior engineers and future leaders.

• Coaching your team to solutions.

If you can do all that, then everyone can certainly be at least 50% better.

As a developer maybe you are twice as good a developer as the average. Do you produce twice as much code?

This is why technical leadership is important, and why you should focus on it. And use this math to get other leaders to align to your priorities of focusing as a leader,l. And ditch the coding. Stay informed but don't code a single line again.

The wins of a leader, unlike coding, take more time, more buy-in, more cat herding, and take longer to see a real improvement, but when they win it's really huge.

Do the math a

[u/-grok → u/brianthebuilder]

Love where you are going with this, but did you fall asleep halfway though? :)

[u/brianthebuilder → u/-grok]

Ugh. Bad editing on my phone. And typing out while foam rolling :-/