The challenge not discussed as much, that I have seen, is how to re-wire your brain for a job search. Say you have a career of decades as a coder and have made the transition to management. You now have decades of worthless job search experience. :) No longer can you search for a new role based on hard skills like languages or technologies known. You have to completely start over, on a topic not very widely discussed.
You are expected to just have an extensive network of even more senior leadership people to tap, even though nothing in your history would have required such a network previously. :/
Agreed. Absolutely a challenge. I've also seen a very wide disparity in manager interviews at different companies. Some are "all vibes" and some are almost the same as developer interviews with a few minor questions on managing people.
Generally, you should be prepared to discuss your experience and your approach to management. It's worth preparing some specific anecdotes about particularly challenging situations (having to manage someone out, handling a performance problem with someone on the team, debugging disagreements between team members, hitting a challenging milestone, etc), some stories of successful situations (supporting someone to get a promotion or big raise, delivering a major release against the odds). Product/Engineering disagreements come up in interviews where there is some friction between those functions. You may want to be ready to talk about how to manage technical debt while delivering on feature priorities (that comes up a lot). Don't have specific experience with some of these scenarios? Think about how you would handle them if they come up and get a crisp answer ready (and some alternatives if someone challenges your answer).
On the network side, yeah, having a network of senior people is great, but you just want to get your resume past the auto-screening and into the hiring managers hands, so ANYONE you know at a company who can recommend you for a role is good. Developer, manager, marketing person, whomever. Don't know someone at a company you want to get a job at? Find a second order connection in your network on LinkedIn and see if the person you know will intro you to the person they know.
Thanks for bringing this up! I think you are absolutely correct that there should be more resources for it. I'll try to write up more thoughts on this soon.
Sounds more like an excuse. You can do lots of management tasks with coding. Coding doesn't necessarily mean creating PRs and adding to your project's codebase. Coding can mean automating scheduled calls or meetings or 1:1s, or helping others interact with you more intuitively, or setting up an automated slack bot that does daily check ins.
This post more sounds like you trying to rationalized and justify yourself not coding anymore, while you have inherent guilt about it and feel like you're not being technical anymore. Perhaps do more self-reflection than projection, in that case.
The first computer I programed was a UNIVAC 60/120. We wired boards. That was the "program" The data was on punched cards. I moved up to IBM 360 writing code in BAL and COBOL. Some of my code is still running today.
I loved the creativity of writing code and always tried to code when I could. I really made a mistake moving into management. It was all about the money. If I could get a "do over" I would still be writing code.
The challenge not discussed as much, that I have seen, is how to re-wire your brain for a job search. Say you have a career of decades as a coder and have made the transition to management. You now have decades of worthless job search experience. :) No longer can you search for a new role based on hard skills like languages or technologies known. You have to completely start over, on a topic not very widely discussed.
You are expected to just have an extensive network of even more senior leadership people to tap, even though nothing in your history would have required such a network previously. :/
Agreed. Absolutely a challenge. I've also seen a very wide disparity in manager interviews at different companies. Some are "all vibes" and some are almost the same as developer interviews with a few minor questions on managing people.
Generally, you should be prepared to discuss your experience and your approach to management. It's worth preparing some specific anecdotes about particularly challenging situations (having to manage someone out, handling a performance problem with someone on the team, debugging disagreements between team members, hitting a challenging milestone, etc), some stories of successful situations (supporting someone to get a promotion or big raise, delivering a major release against the odds). Product/Engineering disagreements come up in interviews where there is some friction between those functions. You may want to be ready to talk about how to manage technical debt while delivering on feature priorities (that comes up a lot). Don't have specific experience with some of these scenarios? Think about how you would handle them if they come up and get a crisp answer ready (and some alternatives if someone challenges your answer).
On the network side, yeah, having a network of senior people is great, but you just want to get your resume past the auto-screening and into the hiring managers hands, so ANYONE you know at a company who can recommend you for a role is good. Developer, manager, marketing person, whomever. Don't know someone at a company you want to get a job at? Find a second order connection in your network on LinkedIn and see if the person you know will intro you to the person they know.
Thanks for bringing this up! I think you are absolutely correct that there should be more resources for it. I'll try to write up more thoughts on this soon.
Sounds more like an excuse. You can do lots of management tasks with coding. Coding doesn't necessarily mean creating PRs and adding to your project's codebase. Coding can mean automating scheduled calls or meetings or 1:1s, or helping others interact with you more intuitively, or setting up an automated slack bot that does daily check ins.
This post more sounds like you trying to rationalized and justify yourself not coding anymore, while you have inherent guilt about it and feel like you're not being technical anymore. Perhaps do more self-reflection than projection, in that case.
You may wish to re-read the article because you are attributing statements and opinions to me contradicted by what I actually wrote.
The first computer I programed was a UNIVAC 60/120. We wired boards. That was the "program" The data was on punched cards. I moved up to IBM 360 writing code in BAL and COBOL. Some of my code is still running today.
I loved the creativity of writing code and always tried to code when I could. I really made a mistake moving into management. It was all about the money. If I could get a "do over" I would still be writing code.
Is anyone looking for a old code monkey?
I just missed punch cards! At the time I was very happy, but now I wish I had gotten the chance to try programming that way.
Plenty of old code monkeys in the industry, I've gotten to work with (and learn from) a few over the years.