I worked in different Roles since I started to work professionally with Software Development (without any degree) over 25 years ago. From "Web-Master" to CTO/CEO, as an owner, employee, and freelancer, from Switzerland, Brazil, Serbia...
Well, AMA, if you believe me, that today I don't work with Cobol and Pascal ;-)
Cheers
Stefan
Full-Stack Dev & Maker
Top comments (10)
What do you prefer? Being hands on, have a management role or mess with all the things nedded to carry on a businness?
As most thing in live... All has his positive and negative sides. But what I love more is coding, making things, from idea to delivery (or sometimes trash:-) Management is nice when you are in a position where you can decide and do things, not just task management.
I kinda agree: I've been a not successful enterpreuner once: didn't like the company management at all. At that time I discovered I'm a tech guy not a mangememt guy. I still miss a test as a team leader or so...
It's not that I don't like it. I mean there are reasons why I had some different roles in that area in the last 2 decades. But it's good when you really can decide. Must not be on the highest level, but in the scope you manage, nothing worse than just being kind of a proxy. Then it's muuuuch nicer to code a proxy server, in Go or whatever language we love. :-)
Hey there!
I've jumped around between roles in engineering and upper management a couple of times and I often find myself wondering if I've made the right choice (went back to pure engineering again recently). I enjoy building things a lot more than I do management, but one of the things I really loved as a manager was building and nourishing a great team. At times I found management very stressful and sometimes lost sleep wondering if I made the right choice.
Since you've been doing this for a lot longer than I have, how do you do it? How do you handle switching between these roles every once in a while? How do you handle the stress of management?
Sorry for my late answer...
How I do switch from one role to another. Well, it was always happening very naturally. In the last company I entered in a Developer Position, then there was a clear need to have somebody doing agile coaching and then I got somehow in that role, also beeing PO, then they needed a team leader for a newly built department etc. Same in the actual company. I entered as a PO, now I'm leading development. And it really happened kind of accidentally.
Sometimes this is very good. Sometimes, like in an actual company, it's not and one of the reasons I'm open for new opportunities, that time 100% remote, as dev/consultant.
In the last 25 years what has been your favourite language and which is your least favourite?
I like strongly typed languages more then other's, but can live well with Javascript on FE side. I do really love Go. For sure, at the end, it's not so much about the language, but what you are doing with
With 25+y experience in the field. How much do you earn or expect to earn when someone tries to hire you?
Hi Saurav. It's Ask me ANYTHING, so you did :-)
But I can't answer this here for different reasons.
One of them is, that this is sooooo relative.
I can tell you some examples, I hope this helps.
About 20 years ago I moved from employee to freelancer kind of work, was fix contracted from one person and had about 30% more Net then now. Then I was a mix of Dev, Engineer, and Consultant. Today I lead 3 Scrum Teams, responsible for road map planning for whole company etc.
Why I have now less? It's different... Even that I have much more responsibility, work much too much etc, I have less mainly because I work as an Expat in a country, where living costs are much lower.
But... If I would do the same, in the same position, in the same country etc, I know from people who get double.
So, one of the answers could be "It REALLY depends"... Not only on role and experiences but where you are, for whom you work etc.
And even these parameters are never fixed. Eg salaries of specialists, really good software engineers are growing worldwide, where I see a tendency that dev salaries for more "simple" tech jobs are going down in high-cost countries and only a bit up in low cost.