I don't get my hands on code, because I'm busy coordinating several hundred people to all be pulling in approximately the right direction. I manage the odd code review and occasionally get stuck into debugging if there's something my team can't manage on their own, but overall I directly contribute little. It's just management, some like it, some hate it, some are good at it, some are terrible.
Any tech jobs where you sit around giving opinions but produce little?
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Fixed it for you.
You can sit back if you can manage and plan engagement with sales, if they’ve hit their numbers and sandbagging for next year - this makes it predictable income as part of the business case.Product manager is quite is bit of hustle involved both with customers and management. Once it gets into the lifetime of the product it should be drumming up sales/engagement and ultimately increasing value (either income or internal business value).
quite often I’ve seen “consultant” (regurgitating the same slideware), “enterprise architect”, “board advisor” is another (usually part time, mutiple boards, rebranded slide decks).
Funnily anyone one that uses the term “lens” when talking usually triggers the “consultant” alert.
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The worrying thing is I've done or had close exposure to quite a lot of roles mentioned in this thread:
I think really what I'd like would be some sort of internal consultancy role where I review and provide feedback on a bunch of different things. Like a process improvement consultant or something, but on an elevated level as that doesn't pay well enough. Maybe programme assurance?
Overall I'm being a bit deliberately fussy and slightly facetious in saying I want some job where I don't do any 'real work' but I kinda figured I'm at a stage now where I ought to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and compromising or not being honest won't get me there.
Reflecting on all this I feel like a hands-off engineering management role or may be the best fit which is kind of weird because that's something I sort of stumbled into previously and never would have had as a career aspiration years ago. I also noticed a real trend in recent years for firms looking for a hands-on 'Head of' in my sort of domain like working with much, much smaller teams than I'm used to and having the manager really rolling their sleeves up (I once withdrew from an interview process and fed back that I felt the number of resources I'd have was way too few to achieve the ambitions they'd laid out).
Done that. To be fair it wasn't that far off what I describe but there was just too much to do and relentless pressure, zero respite at all as my team was working on numerous critical projects in parallel so I'd be constantly juggling stuff. That's OK and I'm not bad at that sort of thing but it wears you down after every single day being 110% over multiple years and having no capacity to innovate. Maybe I'd thrive somewhere with a smaller remit.
I've got a Masters in that space and some expired certs like PRINCE2 Practitioner and Certified Scrum Master from many years ago.
I've done project management before, the problem is it tends to be less about giving opinions / feedback / ideas and more facilitating the delivery of what someone else thinks is needed. Depends a bit on the project/org I guess.
I've pondered a bit on that, on paper it's probably not far off what would suit me.
I've worked quite closely with people in that space and there's too much sketching out designs for my liking. Really not my forte, I'm great at looking at their designs and telling them how it could be improved / have you considered XYZ / we need to mitigate these risks etc (I spot the things others miss), but useless coming up with it to begin with.
I've worked for a couple of consultancies before, it wasn't too bad but was really influenced by the client/project I was working on. Some really weren't interested in collaborating, they just wanted someone to manage a workstream in a 'them-and-us' type model.
I think really what I'd like would be some sort of internal consultancy role where I review and provide feedback on a bunch of different things. Like a process improvement consultant or something, but on an elevated level as that doesn't pay well enough. Maybe programme assurance?
That's where I was originally building a career maybe 15 years back, I have an aptitude for it but it didn't pay that well.
I'm finding different orgs treat that sort of role quite differently, I think for it to really work for me it would need to be an area I have a lot of passion for as you still need to produce stuff.
Overall I'm being a bit deliberately fussy and slightly facetious in saying I want some job where I don't do any 'real work' but I kinda figured I'm at a stage now where I ought to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and compromising or not being honest won't get me there.
Reflecting on all this I feel like a hands-off engineering management role or may be the best fit which is kind of weird because that's something I sort of stumbled into previously and never would have had as a career aspiration years ago. I also noticed a real trend in recent years for firms looking for a hands-on 'Head of' in my sort of domain like working with much, much smaller teams than I'm used to and having the manager really rolling their sleeves up (I once withdrew from an interview process and fed back that I felt the number of resources I'd have was way too few to achieve the ambitions they'd laid out).
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From what you describe, the two things that come to mind are either some sort of internal business analyst role or indeed an assurance role. I would look into either of those and see if it fits with what you're looking for.
Man of Honour
As a BA you're not going to be giving opinions and generating very little output - if anything, it's the opposite.
Similar to me, although I try and carve out some time do code for few hours 1-2 a month as I miss it.
The thing is there is a big difference between zn individual contributor who mostly does what someone else tells them to do,.and an engineering manager or similar that can be guiding 1-2 dozen engineers, and a technical director guiding 100+ engineers.
Not directly contributing an easily quantifiable productivity doesn't make one less important as you know.
Soldato
came here to say this
Not sure - my BAs did a lot with defining processes integrating with the company etc.. required ITOM for each service product etc.
Now I get your point. I've seen BA's produce stuff that nobody looks at and has no value. Same with enterprise architect. Some places are good and use it whilst others the EA was sat almost in his own little land being the only EA in the company but the company 'required' the role but completely ignored him.. yes.. great.
Soldato
“I don’t need to know any technical details, I just need dependencies and due dates?”
“Is that why you’re at my desk three times a day asking me ‘Why does X need a Y to work?’ and ‘What does WCDMA mean again?’?”
Dear PMs, don’t get your panties in a bunch when you rock up to my desk after 17:30 and get told to do one after asking me a question that will take an hour for me to answer properly. You get paid for every second you can get away with billing and I don’t get paid overtime.
Soldato
Of course, the consultants spent a billable month asking the minions the how/what/why of the job and how to improve it, before passing this on to management for a big fat fee.
Management could have saved themselves a lot of time and money by listening to their staff ages ago.
My most recent one lol.
High pay contract and FA work, fully remote from home. Annoyingly it was for a government project, so OFC they moved the goalposts and contracts couldn't be met (it's like they don't think things through or something...). Now have to find a real job again
But yea...as others have said. If you want a permanent one, project manager. Lots of meetings to discuss big (often flawed) ideas but other people somehow do all the work
High pay contract and FA work, fully remote from home. Annoyingly it was for a government project, so OFC they moved the goalposts and contracts couldn't be met (it's like they don't think things through or something...). Now have to find a real job again
But yea...as others have said. If you want a permanent one, project manager. Lots of meetings to discuss big (often flawed) ideas but other people somehow do all the work
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A lot of career PMs are like that but what it does do is really highlight how good some technical PMs and even Programme Managers are in contrast. Like the 5% that 'get it' are really great to work with, they recognise what's important and what isn't, they aren't just pushing lines around in a gantt chart. When faced with blockers they aren't just saying "give me a date when this will be resolved" but are helping to remove blockers. Of course, they can also be challenging at times, because sometimes they know more about an area of tech than you do, but that tends to be well-intentioned / constructive challenge, rather than the super-annoying metric-based questions some PMs come up with that have no tangible meaning.... "How many user stories are there?" - what action are you going to take whether I say 20 or 40 or 80? What if the user stories have different complexity levels?
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