this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I don't dream of labor (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love writing software. I write a fair amount of it, and upload it for free. And my experience is that the best way I've found of turning something you love into something you hate is to tie it to being something you have to do, and do by other people's rules. I only started liking writing code again when I moved into management and didn't have to write code for other people anymore. I was able to go back to doing it for pleasure.

So, yeah. In an ideal world, I'd be free to write and publish software, on my time. When I burned myself out, I'd switch to something else; home projects, setting up selfhost servers, maybe build a table. You can't do that when you're doing it for a living. Fuck if I know how we make that happen; I'm not an economist. And I think it's probably another couple of generations away before we could possibly get to a post-scarcity society - even assuming that we don't extinct ourselves, and that the people who could make it happen actually let it rather than greedily using it to enrich themselves.

Automation, clean energy; I think we're close to having the tech for post scarcity. I do believe this: if we freed people from defacto indentured servitude, they might turn into unproductive fat slobs like on Wall•E. Or they might become artists and artisans ushering in a new Renaissance. But I'm optimistic: we won't know until we try, and not trying because we have a low opinion of our fellow man is just callow.

[–] lillardfair 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing this! I'm at a point in my career where I could move up to management, or I could stay on a pure tech path and start to have limited opportunities for advancement. I've also been feeling less satisfaction for my technical work lately. I've thought about looking around at other jobs, but I've been coming to the conclusion that it would be the same anywhere, because it is ultimately for someone else and most of the time either the goal of the project or the method required to get there don't align with my own goals or interests. From the bottom looking up, there's a lot about management that doesn't excite me either, but I've been wondering if it would free me up a bit to keep hobby work fun.

I'm glad to hear you were able to feel an increase in your passion about coding after moving to management and I'm hoping it can do the same for me. I'm a little weary of becoming just another cog in the system though. I'm just hoping that I can keep my current perspective in focus so I can use that to bring compassion for my reports and keep them from being burned out as long as I can.

It'd be nice to just to screw off and make my own things, but I have bills to pay. None of my hobby project ideas are money producers and even if some of them could be, I don't know that I want to pervert them by making that a goal. I feel like that would suck out the fun of them for me and put me back in the same trap I'm already in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I feel you, and it's exciting that you're at this point!

My one caution is that you make certain that you like management before stepping into that track. It may not be what you imagine. Things I learned the hard way:

  • Line management is very deceptive. You still get to be hands-on with the tech. You still get to work with the people doing work. A lot of your value is in translating tech to non-tech peers and higher-ups. The importance of soft skills is minimized.
  • As you climb, things shift rapidly. The value you provide is based almost entirely on your ability to network - the relationships. Your job becomes predominantly soft skills related: building and maintaining relationships, understanding your peer's jobs, what they needs, who they are, knowing them personally and them knowing who you are.
  • The above point means you spend a lot of time in meetings and socializing, in and out of work. It's not just that you have to work to seek others out and spend time with them, but others are doing this with you. And the higher you go, the more people you have under you that you have to spend at least some time with.
  • So, maintaining relationships takes a lot of time, and you probably still have more hard-skill duties: approving expense reports, dealing with personality conflicts, vendor management, objective setting, performance evaluation. So the soft stuff (which often isn't a measurable objective) eats into your time, and you'll find it impacting outside-of-office-hours time
  • You'll find that the kinds of things you thought climbing would give you control over - the stuff you want to make decisions about, the technical stuff - you don't really have. The fun decisions are a game of selling to other people - "building consensus" - and you spend a lot of time doing this and often failing to get your desired outcome. If you're really unlucky, and this will happen to you at least once in your career, someone higher up will read about some technology in a magazine and you'll find yourself being strong-armed into pursuing it. Even more likely, big vendors will wine and dine your upper management, and pursued with glossy literature, and you'll find yourself using a vendor just vecause they're were able to bribe their way into the Gartner Magic Quadrent, which is biased against small companies.

My TL;DR is: before you take the management track, make certain you're either an extrovert, or that you're comfortable in that space. You'll have to act like an extrovert to be successful, and to be of value to your team and your company. Be sure you're willing to have your career consume more of your personal time; on-call and having your manager call you at random times of hours is nothing compared to what a mid-level managent position demands. You may trade having your passion debased for finding yourself doing things you hate all day, nearly every day, for the rest of your career.

Lest you feel as if I'm rowing the biggest bitter boat: I loved the Manager-1. It still felt like being involved in production, and I could easily identify and explain the value I provided. But in most companies, at some point, it's either up or out. If you're doing well, you may be offered a promotion, and it can be hard to resist an offer that's going to bump your salary by 20-50%. And if you're not, well, that raises other issues when the budget shrinks.