What do you do that you earn six figures?

[u/fidgit86]

It seems like a lot of people make a lot of money and it seems like I’m missing out on something. So those of you that do, whats your occupation that pays so well?

[u/r_lovelace]

My experience as a dev and with devs is that there is 0 respect for a manager who can't get dirty with trouble shooting and writing code. If you can find a position where you're purely doing the admin bullshit no one cares about then sure but you'll be viewed more as HR than the head of the team. The Dev managers I've dealt with need to be able to walk into meetings and direct conversations with customers or other teams to identify project requirements. Part of that is knowing what a project will actually require to be complete so you can set expectations and timelines, know how the work needs to be divided efficiently and to be the devs voice of reason and be able to speak on why option A is had and going to take 6 months when option B is similar but can be done in 2. If you don't know the actual job you likely aren't going to be able to do any of that and so your team will view you as useless middle management and talk shit constantly behind your back.

[u/Accomplished-Bad3380 → u/r_lovelace]

I guess I'm curious how much of that is 'learnable' because in my experience in other industries, you can understand the nuances and complexities of the different project components without being the expert on the team.

[u/r_lovelace → u/Accomplished-Bad3380]

Everything's technically learnable. The question is can you learn faster than you lose the respect of your team and peers or will you be jumping to a new job every time the current job realizes you have no understanding of your teams role.

[u/Accomplished-Bad3380 → u/r_lovelace]

That's not how you learn.

[u/r_lovelace → u/Accomplished-Bad3380]

If you're going to learn by having real world dev experience before being a manager then the entire conversation is moot.

[u/Accomplished-Bad3380 → u/r_lovelace]

Hopping jobs when shit gets tough is not how you learn.

[u/r_lovelace → u/Accomplished-Bad3380]

I was implying you either leave willingly or get forced out. Its hard to last in a position where you aren't providing any benefit and your direct reports don't respect you.

[u/Accomplished-Bad3380 → u/r_lovelace]

There is a lot more to effective management than that. This conversation would not have been started if it weren't for a comment that promoting good devs into managers doesn't make them good or effective at their jobs. Management is not about being the best and most knowledgeable about a project and coordinating with a team. If there are a dozen skillsets and a person is good at the entire management aspect, and knows how to effectively communicate with the team to come up with the appropriate solutions, then why should a singular weakness mean "you aren't providing any benefit and your direct reports don't respect you" throughout the process of learning and understanding the tasks.

I have been a manager in a few different capacities and have been pulled into projects to help be the 'fixer' on something I had pretty much zero experience on. Knowing how to communicate and pull the right information out of the right people is the biggest challenge. No, I don't know how long it's going to take you to solve xyz problem, but the expert doing that work, does in fact know that, and therefore, I will defer to their expertise. That has never failed. And from there you can set manageable goals and deadlines.

It seems like you are set on the idea that if you aren't an experienced dev you will be a shit manager overall, and maybe that aligns with your experiences, but there is much more to people management than just being a tech expert, in my opinion.

[u/r_lovelace → u/Accomplished-Bad3380]

What you're describing is basically just a generic project manager role at the places I worked. Maybe this is a difference of role responsibility but my experience with people managers is they need to have a very strong understanding of what their team technically does because they will be sitting in meetings with Project Managers and project sponsors to discuss requirements, scope, timeline, and be the Frontline who fights and says "no, this is not at all possible in this time frame with this headcount" and pushes back immediately on bad project plans before a dev is even assigned. This is something that will be near impossible for someone to do who isn't knowledgeable in what their team is actually doing of they will do such a bad job or require such a significant amount of team input that the team will view them as a hinderance or at best a useless middle manager.

The statement that promoting good devs into managers doesn't make them good or effective at their jobs is still true. It's an all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares situation IMO. A good Dev manager was probably a good Dev at one point in time but not all good devs are going to be good managers.

[u/Accomplished-Bad3380 → u/r_lovelace]

Are you a project manager?