Saying Farewell To Being A Manager
Are you clear about the motivation behind it?
I have had numerous conversations over the years with friends and colleagues looking to move from Management to Individual Contributor (IC) roles.
This isn’t going to be a post listing all the “right” or “wrong” reasons for a Manager to IC transition. Nor do I want to talk about the merits of making the switch. You’ll find plenty of opinions and resources about the role switch online, often referred to as the engineer-manager pendulum. I made the transition from Manager to IC in 2018 myself (and then went back to being a Manager in 2019), but the mindset was one of moving towards an IC role as opposed to moving away from a management role, all to support some technical aspirations I had at the time.
Instead, I want to focus on a specific pattern I see (or hear about) when I speak to people in management roles considering the switch to an IC role. I often hear:
“I miss the satisfaction of shipping code”
“I used to be able to tell how much work I got done.”
“This whole week I attended meetings, read documents and responded to a lot of questions! I don’t think I could tell you what I produced.”
These sentiments might be expressed by someone who truly misses writing software, the accompanying state of flow, and the feeling of accomplishment from seeing software you wrote bring value to customers.
However, it might also be that the person isn’t missing the act of writing software, but is instead missing evidence of producing tangible and easily measurable outcomes and artifacts.
What’s My Impact
As an IC, it can be easy to see impact via Pull Requests merged, new systems or components created or rearchitected, and value delivered to customers. How do you see and experience the impact of your work as a manager:
In the short and medium term, you might be asking - What did I produce or reconfigure? How did the team / organization / customers tangibly gain from my work this week?
Over the long term, you might be asking - How does the current state of the team and technology tie back to decisions that I have made or supported? Exactly how has the team benefited from my presence, guidance and decision making over the past few months / years?
If you are a manager considering a transition away from management, consider asking yourself:
“Am I feeling unfulfilled because I am having a hard time clearly visualizing and understanding my impact?”
Only you can answer that question for yourself, possibly with some help from candid conversations with your manager, and with members of the team you support. You owe it to yourself to think deeply about this question. It would be a shame for you (and your team) to lose out on aspects of management that you love, all because you couldn’t (or did not have the support to) clearly picture the fruits of your labour.