Unfettered Blather

Back in late 2006 I hired a young but promising developer, we’ll call him “Raj”, to join the team I was forming in India. His resume was impressive and he interviewed great, we hired him on to be one of the senior developers for the team. As the project was ramping up to start I was having trouble finding a team lead, so Raj began filling that role while we continued to look for a lead developer. Now, in the pantheon of thankless tasks, I think filling in for a higher role knowing you’re going to be replaced has got to be in the top ten which includes tasks like “Cleaning the bathrooms because you’re the least important employee at the store”. Still, without complaint and without further campaigning he began to fill the role and document tasks as I would expect a team lead. While he did not have the amount of experience I would have preferred it was clear we were going to have trouble finding someone who would do the job as well as Raj was already doing it so we offered him the job and filled his old position.

The project was poorly managed and Raj received the brunt of it. He was subjected to jealousy on the part of the team due to his age and the fact that he was elevated above other people who had also been hired in as senior developers. As my own boss continued to override me and started sending more edicts to the team about longer hours and working seven days a week Rajendra did not despair. He led by example but always voiced his opinion that he did not feel this was a good way to develop the product. He displayed good design skills, was a talented developer, had a can-do attitude, yet was willing to voice concerns to his superiors in a culture that often discourages subordinates from questioning management.

When I went to India to visit the team, and this was before the whole project went pear shaped, Raj met us at the airport even though it was midnight their time. He was at work the next day and even beat us into the office. He was one of our regular tour guides during the two and a half weeks we were in Hyderabad. Raj expressed interest in coming to America some day and I remember learning that when he was talking about how a friend of his had gotten an H-1B and how happy they were for him.

Over Thanksgiving, Raj contacted me. He is in America now and will be for at least a year. This is a tough time to get a job in America, but he is a talented individual so I don’t worry much about him succeeding. I am happy he has finally gotten to visit our country and I am hoping that if he wishes to stay beyond his contract the opportunity will avail itself to him. So many of my friends and family have hit hard times recently that it is just good to get a piece of news like this. I’m glad to see someone who deserves it get such an opportunity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about risk these days. Lately it seems like our society has some kind of aversion to risk. The idea of failure just seems so final, yet I have failed many times in my life and I consider myself to be a great success. Failure is inevitable, yet by engaging in risk avoidance behavior I think we simply postpone failure until it becomes huge. The consequences of failure don’t go away, I think they just continue to mount until we hit a point where we have to pay all at once. At that point we start looking for an “out” to avoid having to pay the consequences. Insert comment about government bailouts here.

I know from personal experience that I tried to offset my fear of failure and ultimately paid the price by losing a job while not having another one to go to, right during the dotcom bust no less. I could see clearly that I was not going to be allowed to succeed and fed into negative environment by losing a great deal of my motivation. I hated going to work because I had nothing to do and when I did get a task it wasn’t challenging. If work wasn’t going to improve then the right thing to do was to find a new job, and I knew that at the time. Yet I convinced myself that it was safer to stay where I was, miserable or not, and I kept pushing that assumption until I finally lost my job. I failed, hard.

Yet from failure comes triumph. Taking risks can reap rewards, but taking a risk that doesn’t pay off isn’t without benefits as well. Failure always hurts, but the learning experience can be invaluable. While failure can hurt you professionally, personally, and financially, how you handle failure may speak volumes about your character or value as an employee. When projects have hit roadblocks, when things have gone wrong, I have tried to be at the forefront of fixing problems. When others throw their hands up in despair I am rolling up my sleeves. When others flee I dive in. Losing my job was hard, it hurt me on a personal level and it was a struggle those many months being out of work. I learned and grew from that. I can’t promise my family or myself that I’ll never be out of work again, but I have certainly learned some skills that will help me land a new job, I have a network of people who can help, and we’re in a better financial position than before as well. I would never want to fail like that again, but I have to acknowledge that I’d never want to be back at that job either. Even as late as last year I found out some of my old co-workers were still there, and my last conversation with them were that they were miserable. I feel bad for them, and I have tried to help them out of there, but I am thankful that I no longer work there. Indeed, I doubt very seriously I would be where I am at today if I had not been forcibly ejected from the company.

I have failed since then to, but I’ve learned how to recover. I take risks and sometimes those risks don’t pan out. Most of the time they do though. I’m not a gambler, I evaluate my chances very carefully. I’ve also decided that the risk of failure outweighed the benefits of success on every occassion. I watch as other muddle through their jobs and complain about how they can never get a break. Guess what? You make your own breaks. People like me, those that believe in helping others achieve their goals, are always looking for opportunities to help others advance. I can hold my hand out but if you don’t take it then I can’t help you. I get frustrated by this malaise that seems to grip people. Here’s a tip, if you complain no one will give you a chance but then turn down any offer of help because it carries some risk then you’re not ready to move on in your career. Either that or you’re so comfortable that you don’t really want to move.

If you’re comfortable you’re probably not succeeding. I was comfortable right before I took my current position and I took the position, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted it, because I recognized I was comfortable. Comfort was going to put me back at that old job where I ended up miserable. Comfort is actually grinding away everyday waiting for the clock to hit quitting time and for the weekend to get here. Also, as I learned the hard way, comfort may mean low risk but it doesn’t mean failure isn’t still an option. All it means is that the price of failure is mounting ever so surely.

(Ironically, I forgot to set this up to robo-post)

I mentioned some time back that my job was very taxing, although I do enjoy it.

Lately I am really struggling to make up some of my other “commitments”, which is trying to hang out with some of my X-Box Live Buddies (Mostly folks from Gamers With Jobs), reading blogs of people I really enjoy (Hi Corvus and bsangel!!!), and updating my blog. The job continues to demand more and more from me, but doing it while I am getting better at some tasks, so I don’t feel additional pressure though I am getting no relief as well.

I’m in a tough business right now and there is a lot of uncertainty going on, but I also realize that I have a good management structure above me, and that’s a good thing to have right now. I’m working for people I like doing a job I enjoy. Sometimes it’s tough to stay caught up and I’ve put in some longer hours, but we’re catching up on work we were assigned to retroactively (long story) and getting better at executing new processes. This is a job and a company where it is easy to complain, but I’ve been out there working as a consultant and I ended up where I am today out of careful consideration. So while I might get out of here dragging my knuckles some nights at least I’m enjoying what I’m doing and still get plenty of family time in. I hate that I can’t do everything I want to do, but at least the time I’m sacrificing isn’t taking away from what should always be my first priority.

Just so there is no misunderstanding, I love my job and I love what I do. I’m not sure I’d say that if I weren’t still connected to technology in some way. There is the very real possibility that what I enjoy about my job is that I get to manage technologists and the software applications that are a result of their efforts. I consider that all part of how I wanted my career to go, though. For me to be where I am today I wanted to make sure I stayed in the technology field. I think if I had taken a job managing business analysts or accountants I would be singing an entirely different tune. With that established, let me continue.

If I were a fry cook at McDonald’s with limited career options and education, I would be gunning for the manager’s job every hour I was at work. To put it quite simply, the only way to make the big bucks if that’s your job is to get into management. In the white collar world though, particularly in technology, it is quite possible to earn a decent living without ever having the word “manager” in your title. Indeed, in technology and certain business practices, people who wear the title “architect” of some sort often make just as much money or more as their management counterparts. Yet nowhere that I have ever worked prior to becoming a software professional do you see more people seeking after management positions, all the while those same people will profess an utter ignorance of how to attain said goal.

I went into management with my eyes wide open. I knew there were pitfalls. When I hit my magical five year mark I decided that I needed to start working on either getting into software architecture or management. About that same time I worked with the best manager and software architect that I had encountered since I had started working bagging groceries at the age of 16. I knew the third option, code until my hands dropped off, was not going to work because at some point I was going to get tired of the more tedious aspects of my job. I won’t go into the details of my decision but I choose to focus more on getting into management while also picking up enough architect skills that I could fall back on that if I needed to.

I enjoy being a manager, but there is a lot to not enjoy about it. Before my current employer I was a Technical Team Lead at the consulting firm I worked at. At least that was my title du jour since my exact role could vary based on project. I got my first taste of management suckitude conducting phone interviews for the development team in India. People like to talk about how stressful going to interviews are, but giving an interview is no cakewalk either. It is a repetitive process often exaccerbated by a candidate’s complete lack of appreciation for the fact that they were likely not the first person I have asked these same set of questions to. However, not having a team yet, the interview process was just the first in a series of not fun activities I would get to perform as a Technical Team Lead and later as a Development Manager for my current employer.

As a manager you get to deal with interpersonal conflicts, scheduling conflicts, paperwork, personnel challenges (vacations, sickness, resignations, training, etc.), meetings, paperwork, planning sessions, design sessions, paperwork, customer calls, team-building events, and paperwork. Chances are you still have a boss to report to, and even if you do get to be a CEO you still have a Board of Directors to report to. You still have a boss, but now you have subordinates, and yet you still have peers. People will like you because you are in management and other people will hate you because you are in management and unless you’re an egomaniac it won’t matter if people love you or hate you for these reasons because you’ll still feel isolated since neither group has these feelings based on you as an individual. You are being judged based on your title, something the very people you manage would resent you for doing to them.

Speaking of judging, you’re performance is largely going to be based on how your team performs. So if you get a team full of hard chargers you look good, and if you get a team full of slackers you look bad. As a manager you have some control over this but you’re dependent on how others work in order to succeed. Now, it is a poor carpenter that blames his tools and I will say that poor managers often end up with poor teams. Even so, how do you feel about your future at your job being entirely in the hands of others? Nervous? Can you accept the responsibility if someone on your team performs poorly, or do you use them as the sacrificial lamb when your own boss wants to know why you missed a deadline?

I could continue to list downsides of being in management, but I think you get the point. What I have to wonder is, why is this position so sought after? I am doing what I do not for money or for power, but because I have always enjoyed building teams. I love the challenge of managing time and people to get projects done. I also like mentoring and sharing my experience with other developers to help guide them into better practices and habits in the hopes that a better product will be the result. I do all of this with the full knowledge that there are many downsides to the job, but I enjoy other aspects enough that I don’t mind. At the same time, I worked damn hard to get where I am today and I also actively sought opportunities. The question I used to hear so often when I was younger was “How do you get into management?” Truthfully, it’s like any job. You have to keep an eyes and ears open for new opportunities and display the qualities that the people hiring will want. Chances are you will need to work your way into positions that will allow you to demonstrate management skills. When there were no other team leads on a project I designated myself the lead developer by right of experience and expertise. This might seem presumptuous but it’s not as uncommon as you might think. Once I was accepted as a team lead I found it easy to become a team lead elsewhere. This eventually led into the opportunity as a Technical Team Lead, which I used as a springboard into my current position.

This also comes with a fair amount of rejection. Before delcaring myself Ruler of North America Lead Developer I had been turned down for positions as a Project Manager, Senior Developer, Lead Developer, Application Architect, and Senior Project Lead. For every step up in my career I have met with at least three failures or outright rejections to advance. I hear the complaints of “I just can’t get ahead”, but how do you get ahead if you never make your intentions known? I was surprised at my last review to find out two people on my team had management aspirations that they never spoke of before then. Hey, as your boss I consider it my job to help you succeed.

However, I still do not understand the desire some people place on entering management. People who do not want the headaches, the issues, the meetings, the isolation, and the rejection that are all part of the price still want the money (yeah right) and power (hah!) that comes with the position. Let me tell you a little secret, I know software developers who make more than I do as a manager. Also, I’m only one level higher on an org chart than the people who report to me. If you enjoy your job and are good at it, consider alternatives to being in management. You can retire quite nicely in a white collar profession without ever achieving a lofty title. If you really want to get into management, if that is really a goal of yours, then don’t complain about what comes with it. I always liked how I read the guys at Penny Arcade. “If your job is to eat bees you can’t complain about getting stung”.

Truly, Thank God it’s Labor Day.

Last week I had two of my support people at a customer site and another was out due to the recent birth of his child. That meant I had zero support staff and of course we had issues come up. In order to keep my developers insulated from support issues until I actually needed their help I ended up coordinating all support directly.

Just to prove that my old low paying jobs growing up did teach me something I remembered what some of my old managers were like. When other jobs were short-handed I remember the managers that would jump on a cash register, wait tables, or cook. I realize now that the least impressive people I’ve worked for were the ones who stood around and groused about how we were short-handed. I really don’t need much supervision, and when we’re short on staff extra supervision is the last thing anyone wants. I want help. Last week was a very long week for me, but I felt better about jumping in and taking customer calls then I would just sitting in my office wondering if the poor schmuck I had designated for support was doing. That made for a very long week.

So today I’m taking it easy and not contributing to the blog, yet also trying to make my commitment to blog every day (except weekends!). Nice, eh?