Crossing the Great Divide
Originally posted 2005-08-07 18:06:23
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Thus penned Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet, to his dying father. I felt as if he were writing to me, instead, when I left my development job this past week to enter the realm of management.
Yup, I swapped my upturned Dilbert tie for a pointy-haired coiffure. I willingly relinquished 42 IQ points. I traded discussions of refactoring patterns for discussions on how to motivate employees. Did I go too gentle to the world of endless meetings? Did I not rage hard enough against the dying of my programming career? Time will tell.
My father spent most of his career in management. I recall, as a teenager, wondering how he filled his days. I couldn’t fathom what he did each day besides file a few papers in their appropriate folders. I didn’t think him a sluggard, but I had no vision of what he did all day. In my defense, he couldn’t really articulate his work activities for me when I asked, so I continued wondering into my own professional career: what, exactly, do managers do all day? I suppose I settled on an image of deep-thinking strategy meetings, golf outings, and solitaire games with a handy Excel spreadsheet ready to cover the evidence.
I was wrong.
I’ve worked more this past week than I ever did as a developer. I doubt that either my former boss or my new boss reads my blog, so I’m not kissing up. Here’s a handful of observations from my first week in management:
- I whisk from meeting to meeting, each of which demands my input. The meetings stretch out interminably, and prevent me from sitting at my desk and playing Solitaire.
- I have no safety net. Someone asked me when we were going to push a fix into production, and it was my decision when to do the push. This seems obvious, but it caught me by surprise. I’m used to determining when I think the fix could go in, and then asking someone else (my boss) to make that decision.
- Emails pour in from all sides. It seems the world has contracted emailorrhea. I get more work emails now than I get offers to refinance my home or grow my anatomy in my personal email account. Each email gives me an action item, too. As I sit in meetings, my inbox piles up with these requests, and I fall further behind.
- My timelines have shrunk. When developing software, I’ve always had deadlines. However close the deadlines have been, however, they’ve always been far enough in the future to accommodate cycles of rapid progress intermingled with periods of slow-to-no progress. Now, my timelines are about 38 seconds: \”I need this give me this now everything has come to a halt until you make this decision or do this thing.\”
- However you couch plans for change, people feel threatened.
Perhaps I chose a poor time to begin my management career. The company I work for has begun perhaps its largest project in its history. The reorganization that opened the position I stepped into upended many of the extant processes, meaning that I can’t just do things the way the previous manager did them–we’re all scrambling to learn new processes, even as we strive to complete this big project. With 10 people and one or two open positions, my team is a little on the large side. I embrace challenge, however, so even though I’m sitting at work on the weekend, catching up on email and planning assignments, I’m eager for this new opportunity.
Let’s see if I can manage without dying.