Is Beinga Manager Rewarding At All

I'm currently at a point in my career where I could take on more responsibility and move into engineering management. What's always been a little intriguing is the idea of mentoring people and giving people exposure to stuff they've never dealt with. I have this crazy idea in my head that this actually happens in management and that sometimes it's rewarding. So am I crazy? Naive?

Maybe more to the point, can some development managers list the rewarding things about managing, and then a ballpark estimate of how much of their time or energy is spent doing these things vs the stuff that makes you stressed out/cynical? I'd really appreciate this.

And I don't mean money - I could care less about that.

The main rewards for me:

the size of the changes I can influence as a manager - you can make more of a difference. As a developer, no matter how hard I work there's a hard limit to how much I can do. As a manager, I can work through a team of developers and achieve much more. Of course, I hope the difference I make is positive!
the kinds of change you can make differ. I tend to get more of a say in how things are done, as well as what is done. This isn't necessarily associated with being a manager, but often is, in my experience
the kinds of decisions I make. Often, my role is to decide between various options, balancing the commercial, business, people and technical issues. To do this usually not having deep technical knowledge - I need to rely on others for that - but the breadth and variety, if not the depth, of what I need to know is wider than when I was a developer
personal development of individuals in the team. It's incredibly satisfying to me to help someone get better at what they want to do. I treasure more than any other work achievements the unsolicited feedback I've had years afterwards from a couple of ex-team members, saying that working for me was a transformational part of their careers. Note that mentoring does not require you to be a manager, although again in many organizations the roles are associated

Note there are various aspects to management. For example, people management and project management are separable things and in my experience managers often want to focus on one or the other (although good managers need to be pretty good at both of them). See ManagementRoles.

mentoring people and giving people exposure

I don't wish to make this sound cynical, but the truth is much of management is about dealing with people external to your team. There is simply little time available to provide very much mentoring. As to the rewards of first level management, one has to learn to appreciate the following:

Getting a project completed on schedule and within budget.
Finding a solution that appeases many conflicting external groups and individuals.
Getting recognition for your group and individual members.

There is simply little time available to provide very much mentoring

My experience differs.

Really? Where do you work? Are they hiring? -- MikeSmith

"Yes, "Don't want to say", and "No, not for managers anyway". But if you, as a manager, think mentoring is a vital part of the job, then you need to defend the need for it and find time for it. If you've no control at all over where your time goes as a manager, I think you're merely an administrator.

This may be just another argument over semantics or over roles in differing organizations, but I found that I was able to do a lot of mentoring and to exercise influence over technical decisions when I was a "senior developer", but very little when I was a "development manager". Having seniority and respect is more rewarding (for me) than is holding an official management position. --KrisJohnson

Of course, being a manager can be rewarding. After you've been a developer on enough projects to have some perspective, AND after you've been on a few horribly-managed projects, you NEVER want to be on another poorly-run project. Being a manager is how you put your money where your mouth is - you can spout all you want about good programming/planning practices when you're a leaf node, but as a manager, you have to actually DO IT, and you have to do it all in the real world, with real constraints, time, money, and real people. Warts and all.

Managing is HARD. Anyone who thinks managers are just stuffed shirts just hasn't worked enough to see a project saved by a good manager, or sunk by a bad one.

-- ArlieDavis

Well there's nothing in there that sounds rewarding, the motivation you put forth is simply to call whining developers' bluffs. I agree that that's a problem, and it's a lot easier to criticize something someone already built than to actually build something successful out of nothing.

Running a project successfully is rewarding. To me, at least.

I don't know what you're reacting to either. Did I say management was easy? There are plenty of manager-bashing pages on this wiki - this certainly isn't one of them.

Thankfully so. It does seem to conflate ProjectManagement with LineManagement? to some extent. Management isn't always about running projects.

Some pages dealing with this topic: DeveloperTurnedManager RealStoryAboutDeveloperTurnedManager NowDiscoverYourStrengths ManagementRoles

CategoryManagement