Do you miss being hands to keyboard? I think I would be frustrated not being able to go in and help pair program or directly make changes. Maybe that’s something you still have the freedom to do!
I’m in a senior software engineer position so my day to day is mostly hands to keyboard work with some mentoring and design, but my career path will always be hands to keyboard until I move into more software design / architectural positions. In other words, I’ll never have to sacrifice being away from the purely technical work for career progression - there will always be a path for me to code or architect systems without hitting a salary ceiling.
So, I'm part of what's effectively a matrix organization running 3 agile teams. I'm the technology group manager for .NET and JavaScript / TypeScript development so those devs report to me regardless of which agile team they're on. I'm also an individual contributor on one agile team and responsible directly for a series of services.
My allocation is balanced to roughly 40% coding, 25% meetings, and the rest for misc. strategic, team management, analysis, planning, etc. types of work. I get to wear a lot of hats as a line manager who also contributes directly, and frankly, I love them all.
I'm doing well in my role and at some point might move further away from coding, but at the moment I get to code plenty, and a lot of the tasks coming my way are more strategic and architecture-oriented, which is a sweet spot for me.
My thinking is that as my coding time decreases, the things that will shift into its place are very worthwhile and still interesting to me and I can always code in the evenings and weekends for fun and continual learning. I don't see a place where I don't code, but I see paths where I don't code as my core output at work. Already my yearly evaluation is not on my output, but on my team's output and performance, and that's what it should be.
Even if I no longer coded, I would still want to be involved in code review and regularly review the state of the codebase.
I'm glad you have that path available to go technical or management. I am a firm believer that organizations need to reward engineers not with promotion to people management, but with paths on the architecture and technical leadership level as many, many, many engineers are not wired to be good managers.
See archive.is/Jx5wn for an illustration of such a ladder, though I would advocate that that CTO should be a management-oriented role and the CTO box on that diagram should be replaced with something like "Chief Architect"
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Do you miss being hands to keyboard? I think I would be frustrated not being able to go in and help pair program or directly make changes. Maybe that’s something you still have the freedom to do!
I’m in a senior software engineer position so my day to day is mostly hands to keyboard work with some mentoring and design, but my career path will always be hands to keyboard until I move into more software design / architectural positions. In other words, I’ll never have to sacrifice being away from the purely technical work for career progression - there will always be a path for me to code or architect systems without hitting a salary ceiling.
So, I'm part of what's effectively a matrix organization running 3 agile teams. I'm the technology group manager for .NET and JavaScript / TypeScript development so those devs report to me regardless of which agile team they're on. I'm also an individual contributor on one agile team and responsible directly for a series of services.
My allocation is balanced to roughly 40% coding, 25% meetings, and the rest for misc. strategic, team management, analysis, planning, etc. types of work. I get to wear a lot of hats as a line manager who also contributes directly, and frankly, I love them all.
I'm doing well in my role and at some point might move further away from coding, but at the moment I get to code plenty, and a lot of the tasks coming my way are more strategic and architecture-oriented, which is a sweet spot for me.
My thinking is that as my coding time decreases, the things that will shift into its place are very worthwhile and still interesting to me and I can always code in the evenings and weekends for fun and continual learning. I don't see a place where I don't code, but I see paths where I don't code as my core output at work. Already my yearly evaluation is not on my output, but on my team's output and performance, and that's what it should be.
Even if I no longer coded, I would still want to be involved in code review and regularly review the state of the codebase.
I'm glad you have that path available to go technical or management. I am a firm believer that organizations need to reward engineers not with promotion to people management, but with paths on the architecture and technical leadership level as many, many, many engineers are not wired to be good managers.
See archive.is/Jx5wn for an illustration of such a ladder, though I would advocate that that CTO should be a management-oriented role and the CTO box on that diagram should be replaced with something like "Chief Architect"