robynsmith
Yes/no. It depends. Context is king.
If we're talking VP/C-suite level compensation, probably not.
If we're talking engineering manager / director level, the answer is likely yes.
The issue is, the higher up you go, the less roles there are (for either manager or dev). It's usually way easier to jump from dev to manager than from dev to staff/principal engineer. There is also likely a cycle of having to prove yourself at new companies (often staff roles are promoted from within), but I am seeing more and more staff roles on job boards.
It's actually a great career move to jump into management for a period of time, pick up the skills, then jump back to dev. It would make your impact even higher once you become a staff engineer.
I don't know how useful this is. But if you love to code and don't want to manage people, it's a solid route.
If you want fast compensation increases in the short term, go for the management route.
Edit:
I chose the management route because I like support, basically. Helping people, solving problems, and seeing people grow is my favourite thing. You can do this as a dev, but I found that I enjoy this stuff more than coding.
I also love systems thinking (computers, people, process). So it's a good fit for me :)
I think in general, the management career path can lead to faster short-term gains in terms of career and compensation, but the most senior devs almost always have more interesting work, autonomy, and better compensation (EM's often make less than say, Staff/Principal devs).
I think "impact" is how you level up in either path:
The more senior you are, the more your work impacts larger parts of the organization. As a manager, you level up by running a team, then by running multiple teams, etc. You're a coach who's always helping your team grow & removing impediments to their work.
As a dev, there are multiple options:
- Evaluation of technologies
- Help setting best practices
- Mentoring the team / leveling up the technical skills of others
- Pair programming / answering questions / supporting team members
- Being involved in projects early on in their inception
- "Just being a solid contributor" on critical projects that need a particular level of quality or speed
For better or for worse, I don't think you can get to the most senior levels by "just putting your head down and coding". Both as a maker or a manager, you're going to have to learn the people/organization side to some extent.
The advantage of the technical route is it will often lead to more interesting projects and you still get to code! :)
I think I might just be idealistic and having thought about it this way. Thanks for the context.
I'm a relatively new engineering manager in an older company in Canada (turning itself into fin/insurance tech), and a big part of my role has been about breaking down silos.
The silos where created at a time when being really efficient at 'your piece' was what the system rewarded, whereas now we want to be efficient at shipping code, which means efficient value streams (from inception to production)...which has basically meant many rounds of silo deconstruction.
But I'd be VERY curious about why silos get built in the first place & what incentives are in place to make this happen...and why this is bad. To be honest, maybe I'm just idealistic, but I see silo building as not desirable.
I’d say the narrative is working :)
Try and find an alternative device that has the same level of privacy and updates for 5 years.
You can do it if you flash a rom on your android device - but that’s not currently realistic for most of the current user base.
This is becoming a pet peeve of mine. When I run into my limit I just skip the read or find a way around it :)
Wish people would just stop posting to or linking to medium.
Maybe I should be moving? Crazy.
(Sadly, family is here, so moving is unlikely)
Previous discussion:
>People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe.
This. So much.
Affordable housing and reasonable transit that makes the entire city and neighboring suburbs accessible will reduce car usage.
I work in Toronto and commute from a nearby suburb. Rent and real estate costs in the city are ridiculous, but I'm planning on making the move anyway.
I would love to live car-free, but the reality is a failure of transit. Transit sucks:
1) Transit in suburbia sucks. A lot of routes are every 30 or 60 minutes.
2) Transit between the suburbs and the city sucks. The systems are not aligned well and when you have layers of busses and trains that only come every 30-60 minutes, it just adds a lot of unnecessary waiting time to your commute. This causes a lot of people to drive and park at the GO station so they can take a train into the city.
3) Transit in Toronto is great if you happen to live and work on a Subway line. If not, good luck - you'll likely add 20-60 minutes to your transit commute. A car makes the rest of the city easily accessible.
So dealing with 2-3 different transit systems makes a commute unreasonable. If you're commuting from a nearby suburb, it can take 2+ hours to get to work.
My partner works in another suburb, and to transit there would take about 2.5-3 hours each direction. It's just not practical.
We've reached a compromise: We have a single car, and we car-pool to a reasonable spot and I take the train into the city. I'm lucky in that my place of work is near a subway stop, so my entire commute in this way is about 75-90 minutes each-way. I often work on the train on my way to work.
I'm planning on moving to the city, but we will never be able to be car-free with the state of transit the way it is. My partner will have to drive from Toronto to her work. Without traffic, probably 25 minutes. With traffic, closer to an hour. But that beats the 2.5-3 hours (each way) that it would take to commute via transit.
Does the book have a lot of advantage over the tutorial?
Thanks. I'll have to give it a try.
If it supports images I may well switch.
If you wanted to import notes from Evernote, what would be the best strategy for that? Are there any already written tools for that?
I think I'd basically have to convert my notebooks to tags for it to make sense in this app.
It seems really "fast" and it supports markdown! I'm super happy about this.
As a longtime Evernote user, this app is highly comparable. The choice to only allow tags is interesting, and I think I could live with that.
That being said, the lack of support for:
- Images (I should be able attach an image inline into the document)
Would make it difficult for me to switch. That being said, I love the markdown and this is definitely an amazing MVP! Good job!
1) Leadership: Stop viewing the IT/Ops/Support department as a "cost to keep down".
2) Leadership: Treat the department like they are manned by people.
3) Realize that not all requests are created equal. Some take minutes, some take months.
4) Determine a reasonable number of requests/tickets per sysadmin/engineer. Make sure to add padding for things like project work, sick time, vacation, professional development, and so on.
5) Hire proactively to prevent the determined threshold above from being surpassed.
6) From the IT/Ops departments perspective: realize that the incoming requests are coming from people that need your help and they are effectively your clients/customers. Treat them as if customer satisfaction is extremely important!
There are also other strategies where you give a subset of people the ability to work on projects and designate a different subset to be interupted with urgent requests, and rotate the role. There are all kinds of things you can do to improve the situation :)
This is sometimes an organizational problem. I worked in a support role at VMware for about 5 years and this is what I observed:
- Support & IT departments typically have enough staff in the beginning
- The organization grows & the department grows to match the new work that exists
- At a certain point, the organizational view of Support & IT/Ops changes, and it's now viewed as a cost that you want to keep down.
- Leaders try to minimize the increases in budget, but the workload per sysadmin/engineer increases.
- The sysadmins/engineers have no control over the flow of new work, which effects the quality of work that gets done and can create a toxic environment.
It literally becomes impossible to handle all the incoming requests. Different people handle it differently. Good sysadmins would learn to prioritize properly, but due to the toxicity some people have trouble handling it so they end up developing strategies to make a certain number of requests "go away".
Anyway- just my two cents.
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software ---> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
I prefer not to call myself a programmer, although it's a decent way of describing what I do.
I create [value] and solve problems. I used to this by fixing hard datacenter problems as an IT/Ops person, and now I do it as a Full Stack Web Developer. The creating things / solving problems mindset is what is really important to me. Programming is just one interesting "medium" to do this in.
I could see myself creating things and solving problems in other profession. One that I thought heavily about is medicine, law, and writing. I think there are many possible places you can do this in life - it's just a matter of picking a medium you enjoy.
If you need to work on something else, then you can always pick it up as a side project or hobby. I used to find philosophy fascinating. I spent probably a decade of my life reading it as a hobby. Part of me wanted to go back to school or somehow figure out a way to learn it/do it professionally...but I honestly got what I needed out of the hobby. Now I've moved onto other things.
ANYWAY.
If programming made me miserable, I'd consider getting a second degree in psychology and perhaps doing a ph.d eventually. Or maybe go into management. Or maybe go into medicine. Go with the flow or something.
I'm one of those people that types "backspace" and goes back unintentionally way too often.
I've lost form data because of this!