Moving into Management

Here are my takes (being in the senior / tech lead for 10 years now in management in a major firm), I have known at least 3 managers who transitioned back to Engineering / Scientist from management.

- You have more direct control as a engineer than manager, you are responsible for your own failures, where as manager you are sorta responsible for failures of members of the team.
- It takes a while to let go of the techincal side, you are judged on the performance and contribution of your team, and sometimes you can get frustrated not being able to wade in and do the work yourself.
- There tech lead is totally different from engineer manager, tech lead decides techinical direction also contribute to coding, while manager does some of that + HR stuff, like performance reviews, pay increases etc.
- In middle management there are senior tech contributor that is paid higher than you, that reports to you, something took me a while to get used to, since I decide how much salary, bonus they get.
- It is much harder to find a job as a manager than senior engineer, so if you are planning to jump around, engineer is much more sought after.

If you like to be focused on solving the techinical problem at hand, enjoy being known as the guru / problem solver, then stay in engineer path.

If you like solving people problems, establish processes, and being the person people look up to, then go for the management path.
 
^really good insight, I have thought along similar lines myself.
On the first two points, my thought process flips between this a bit. You carry the can for failures within your team, but equally you aren't in a position where you are being pressured to complete a technical task that you are struggling with. You can have the experts do the 'real work' and act more as a sounding board, quality control and air cover. You have to be able to position the progress (or lack of) with stakeholders but physically it doesn't come down to you having to design a solution. I guess I'm a bit different in that I've never been a developer/engineer or architect by trade, although I have reasonable technical skills and have written code used in production systems. So competent, confident engineers probably don't fear such situations in the way I might.
On balance, this is probably outweighed by the lack of control however, i.e. it's more frustrating as a manager when an engineer can sort of shrug their shoulders and say "yeah it's not ready on time, had some issues" or "I don't know why the numbers we provided Finance are wrong, I'll look into it" because they aren't the one in meetings with Directors about it. They also rarely have to balance priorities, they just get told what the priority is and focus on that, rather than having to balance a plethora of different requirements from different sources. In other words, an engineer gets judged on what they have worked on, not what they haven't worked on; by contrast a manager is judged based on how they have handled the entirety of all the things requested of their team, and hence has to cope with a huge amount of task switching.

On the final point, this is something I have dwelled on a bit. The number of (suitable) management positions is fairly small compared to the number of 'technical' roles and indeed the management roles are often perm meaning less money than a contract tech role.
This is compounded a bit by some 'management' or even 'Head of' roles still expecting a high degree of hands-on engineering work, typically in smaller/greenfield teams. I'm used to heading up a team with dozens of resources (developers, BAs, architects, delivery managers, testers etc) which inherently was spread so thin that I wouldn't be hands-on in the weeds, so it's too much of a leap for me to take a role where really they are looking for a principal engineer who can architect a new platform. Whilst it's not great for me personally, I do actually think it's nice to see more senior opportunities arising for techies rather than them having to move into a 'generic' management role to progress. A common challenge I face with some recruitment processes is articulating what I am not - saying something like "I'm not a hands-on techie" can set alarm bells ringing and people automatically assume that I can't hold conversations with people that are, when in fact I can (e.g. I have pointed out flaws in the code logic of senior highly respected developers, I've spent thousands of hours working with SQL etc).
 
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Enjoyed reading this thread because I'm finding myself with a similar dilemma lately. I work in the water sector and have always been a technical type person. I enjoy doing the work, getting stuck in and delivering the outputs. I don't really have any desire to manage people. But how can I have salary progression without moving into management, I can't see how in my field.
 
Spiritwolf said:
Here are my takes (being in the senior / tech lead for 10 years now in management in a major firm), I have known at least 3 managers who transitioned back to Engineering / Scientist from management.

- You have more direct control as a engineer than manager, you are responsible for your own failures, where as manager you are sorta responsible for failures of members of the team.
- It takes a while to let go of the techincal side, you are judged on the performance and contribution of your team, and sometimes you can get frustrated not being able to wade in and do the work yourself.
- There tech lead is totally different from engineer manager, tech lead decides techinical direction also contribute to coding, while manager does some of that + HR stuff, like performance reviews, pay increases etc.
- In middle management there are senior tech contributor that is paid higher than you, that reports to you, something took me a while to get used to, since I decide how much salary, bonus they get.
- It is much harder to find a job as a manager than senior engineer, so if you are planning to jump around, engineer is much more sought after.

If you like to be focused on solving the techinical problem at hand, enjoy being known as the guru / problem solver, then stay in engineer path.

If you like solving people problems, establish processes, and being the person people look up to, then go for the management path.
Click to expand...

This in a nutshell, moving from technical to management is not all its cracked up to be apart from the stupid reason you get more money while your technical ability does not get justification for a nice pay rise (most of the time)
 
I always saw myself as a functional specialist (regardless of the specific discipline) until I was asked to lead a team a couple of years ago.
I had the opportunity to shape the team, hire and fire as I needed to, and have full ownership over how the function operates.

Sure, there are drawbacks, and when it's hard it's very hard, but overall I would never go back to a purely functional role.
 
I know this thread is a few months old, and there have been a few useful replies already, but I thought I'd share my thoughts.

Having worked in the motor trade for over 15 years as a sales executive I was initially given the opportunity to be a senior sales, the reality was it was nothing more than a different job title and higher basic, but this opened the door to become a business manager and then now a sales manager.

There are days when I do wish I could go back to selling as the stress I get can be difficult at times, ultimately when I was selling I was only accountable for myself, now I'm accountable for a large team and everything that goes on in the sales department.

My main motivation for progression if I'm honest was having a more consistent pay, that comes from the higher basic salary. I earnt more selling cars, but I've set myself a goal of being a head of business by the time I'm 45. At that point you're doing Monday to Friday (as opposed to weekends) and with a massive basic and bonus opportunity.

I guess what I'm saying is there's no right or wrong answer, you need to decide why and what your motivations are. For me it was money driven but in a different sense. As a sales executive if I didn't do 20 plus cars a month my pay was terrible. Now if I have a team of 10 and we sell 200 cars it doesn't matter how that split is, if a sales executive does 10 and another 30 (to even out the 20 each average) I don't care.

The other motivation was the day to day duties, I have less interaction with customers which I enjoy as working with the public can be a pain at times, and I got fed up of everything else involved, fuelling cars, chasing customers for finance props, etc
 
Lopéz said:
I always saw myself as a functional specialist (regardless of the specific discipline) until I was asked to lead a team a couple of years ago.
I had the opportunity to shape the team, hire and fire as I needed to, and have full ownership over how the function operates.

Sure, there are drawbacks, and when it's hard it's very hard, but overall I would never go back to a purely functional role.
Click to expand...

This is the key to happiness IMO, ownership is so important, and if you are a really good technical driver as well, the reward can be massive!

Ah, I remember those days before someone muttered those fateful words "You seem to get stuff done and everyone likes you, so we are promoting you in to the senior management team".. :(
 
In the old fashioned mechanical engineering world moving into "management" is the only real way for a salary increase. You get to a level of expertise then you are just left to meander through the day. Or leave for another company in the hope their design engineer pay is better than your old place. Engineering is a great profession but the pay sucks compared to other lesser jobs :)
 
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