Chapter Twenty Seven: Jumping to Management

Overview

Each step upward into management requires the programmer to program less, to understand more about the company business processes and staff, and to depend on communication skills while letting others do the detailed work. Each step takes a manager farther away from the objectivity and solitude of programming toward the more subjective and political environment of management.

Like me, many programmers find a career as a head-down code writer (pure programmer) both challenging and fulfilling. But some programmers suspect, when they ve been on the job for a while, that they have more of an affinity for IT management than for coding.

If that has been your discovery, you haven t wasted your time by entering through the programming door: Your skills and experience as a programmer are splendid grounding for a career as an IT manager.

You ll find that each step upward into management requires the programmer to program less, to understand more about the company business processes and staff, and to depend on communication skills while letting others do the detailed work. Each step takes a manager farther away from the objectivity and solitude of programming toward the more subjective and political environment of management.

This chapter offers the stories of two programmers who reinvented themselves as managers.