ingmarheinrich

That's actually a great move. Ex-devs as Product Managers / Product Owners are the best.

As described above, to me it came sort of naturally. But generally, you just have to find your first project :)

In my case, most engagements came from head hunters, and only some from my network. Also, I have a somewhat nice looking vita, which helps.

Right now, it's mid size businesses with 50-75 FTE product development departments, but when I will be 50+, I want to get also projects at bigger companies :)

I don't know, I think I was very lucky. I just went from job to job (I'm 47 btw, and started working in the field ~20 years ago), and it all just came to me.

The switch to freelancing also sort of came naturally - a permanent job stopped very abrupt, and a headhunter that helped me find developers before approached me with the idea, because he had a customer who needed help.

I guess you also have to be "management material". Either you can do it or not. To a certain degree, you can learn management stuff, but honestly you have to be that kind of person.

I used to be a developer, but I never became am excellent one, because I was interested in so many aspects, including (dev)ops, qa, product management, and most importantly the business side of things. At some point someone else (which is a bit embarrassing in hindsight) realized I might have what it takes to be a CTO, and I was brave enough to do that step.

Now since about four years, I'm a freelance interim CTO and help companies that struggle inside and around the product development department.

I left my wife and my two kids of 6 and 8, because I couldn't adjust to my role as a father. A few months later I realized this was the biggest mistake of my life, but my wife wouldn't allow me to return - can't blame her.

For a few years I was eaten by feelings of guilt, and the only thing that kept me alive was my two sons. Today, I still get guilt attacks, but I somehow managed to move on. I have a good relationship with my soon-to-be ex wife (she's the best person I ever met), and I'm seeing my sons as often as possible.

So this basically isn't a "problem" per se, but it's the hardest thing I ever had to overcome.

Restricting this to female founders is highly sexist.

If you change from being e. g. a developer to being a manager, then this shouldn't be regarded as a promotion. It's a different career path.

.. but why?

I literally thought this was about the Windows emulator.

In Germany, it's impossible for employers to tell their employees not to talk about their salaries. It collides with §2 of the German constitution.

First of all, getting people together to talk is not doing nothing. It's getting people together and talk. There are companies/departments where people just don't talk to each other anymore, or not about the right things, because many things are so bogged down that people don't bring them up anymore.

Ok, now while I'm typing I see what you might mean: Of course in a management role you actually have to actively "facilitate": You have to challenge things that seem to be stuck, you have to offer solutions by comparing your experience with the situation at hand. Some kind of an "organisational coach with focus on IT teams". But this wouldn't be a permanent position but a freelance one, and 6 months seems to be a reasonable time for an IT team (and its stakeholders!) to resolve a lot of issues and to be able to flourish on their own.

Having the team decide on architectural matters isn't bad management per se in my opinion. At least having most of the ideas - of course management is responsible for the decisions, but if the ideas come from the team, the developers usually feel way more appreciated, and the decisions are supported way better than those that "come from above". But also, management has to facilitate: Have the team explain why they want to do things a certain way, have them lay out alternatives, and challenge their ideas with your experience.

That's just my understanding of an IT manager: You're not a manager because you were the best developer, and so you were promoted - changing into a management role is NOT a promotion, it's taking a different career path, doing a different job. So to my mind an IT manager should not be a lead architect who has all the great ideas, and the team works them off. He's a Servant Leader who helps the team to be the best team they can be.

It's a bit similar to what I'm thinking about right now. I started my career close to 20 years ago, coding dynamic web pages (yes, I worked with php3), and unintentionally broadened my skillset into something like a CTO skillset for specific environments - I never was a really great coder, so I'm not suited for the lead-developer kind of role in an early phase startup.

Now I'm losing more and more interest in "core tech". While I find infrastructure, performance and scaling still kinda interesting on a rather abstract level, I find it more and more enjoyable to work with "people & processes", so: How do people collaborate within an IT department, how does IT collaborate with its stakeholders, how are the roles & responsibilities structured, where are the frustrations, what can be improved, how do we scale the team.

I've been doing this as a freelancer for almost three years now, and I had just two large-ish projects (about 6 months each). Problem is that both projects were started because management thought the problems they were facing were "the IT's fault", so I was hired as an interim CTO to "fix the IT". Management had the impression that I would look at the code and improve it, and then everything would be fine. However in both projects I discovered there were various severe dysfunctions that didn't really have anything to do with what the IT produced.

So staying within the jurisdiction of IT seems reasonable, but I'm also thinking about leaving it completely to become a general "organisational coach". But at the end of the day, I have no idea what to do, since right now it's hard to find clients, since my communication is rather incoherent, and people don't really understand what I have to offer. As soon as I say that I won't even _read_ code, they think I'm completely useless.

"Devops get stuff to run, Ops keeps stuff running". Following this definition, we'll always need Devops. When using AWS, there's no need for the old school "Ops", however, having SRE is a good thing. AWS + Devops + SRE = Profit.

Me too beta, pretty please!

As a side note: I almost never hire mid-level.

I hire seniors and high-potential juniors. Many mid-levels are mid-level because they don't have what it takes to become a senior. Those high-potential junior might or might not have it, but this doesn't really matter. If they don't have it, they become the war horses that are very familiar with the stack, and that do most of the implementation work, while the seniors do more the architectural kind of work, and take care of the juniors.

Not hiring juniors that have little experience, but seem to be very intelligent and eager to work, is one of the biggest mistakes you can do in tech hiring.

White King goes to a8, only using white squares and b8. Black has to make the mistake to leave b8 unguarded for one move. Then white pawn to c7. Black King cannot b7 because of the white King on a8. Black bishop has to take the pawn, or pawn c8Q will be mate. Black bishop on c7 however is forced stale, since the white King cannot move.