Tag Archives: leadership

Taking an IC role after being in programmer lead role

Published February 4, 2014 3:10 pm

In the last post, we talked about taking a programmer lead role. Once you are in a programmer lead role for couple of years, you may feel the urge to go back to your roots; that is taking IC (individual contributor) role. The reasons can vary:

  1. Lost touch of code because of not coding enough in lead role.
  2. Need to update on new frameworks/concepts since software development goes through paradigm shift 1-2 times in a decade typically.
  3. Need to upgrade my design/architectural/coding skills to next level.
  4. Find the lead role stressful to be responsible for something that you don’t do yourself.
  5. lead role feels like glorified cleric job to divide work and manage delivery.
  6. work-life balance is disrupted. I come the first and leave the last. Work never seems to end.
  7. Writing and delivering people reviews is stressful.
  8. Feel like sandwiched between management and team.
  9. Team health metrics for you are not favoring you in lead role.
  10. For personal reasons, you can’t take up more responsible role for a period.

As far as I can think, reasons typically fall around this. They can be categorized into the following:

  1. Need to upgrade technical skills
  2. Need skills to cope up with lead role
  3. others

For (1) and (2) – there is choice to stay with lead role or go to IC role. For (3) – it is like you have to simply go back to IC role; there is not a choice as such. For example, I have family emergency for a year and need to scope down on work responsibilities. In such case, you and your manager need to work out if there can be different role for you interim. Typically a lead role does not fit part time.

Need to upgrade technical skills

This might be quite stressful if you think your tech skills are rusting and you are struggling to find time to tune them in your role. Lead role has multi-tasking as given and high chance of getting randomized at least in the beginning. Finding your uninterrupted few hours to up your tech skills is a struggle at times. Soon you are getting concerned about it if not losing sleep over it. A techno-manager discipline focused role (dev/test) requires one to be up to date in his tech skills to be respected and deliver business.

There can be many solution for this. Prevention is the best approach. In this approach, you step into lead role – as we talked in the last post – only when you consider yourself ace developer. That means to start with, you have ace tech skills. If not, this approach won’t work for you. Now that you have a good tech skills to start with and say beginner managerial skills, focus hard on your team skills like setting team member goals, negotiation, impact and influence, mentoring and career development, giving feedback, leadership, writing and delivering people performance reviews. code and design reviews – to impart your good practices to team members and add your contribution to project technical deliverables. Each of these skills require their own post to go into detail but we will talk that another day.  First 1-2 years is key when making a transition to lead role – to ace these skills and to graduate out of beginner manager. Feeling uncomfortable at the beginning is being human. but sign of graduation is that you start feeling comfortable with these. e.g. you manage a feedback session as you would write code.

It is good to make time to write code themselves. Start with 3 team members and add slowly. As you get comfortable with managing, you find more time and use it to write code (that implicitly means you get to design also). This does not mean you will not get outdated. but it will take longer and reason to update yourself will be little different in this scenario.

As you move from beginner developer to advanced developer  on IC track, you get to solve more involved technical problems that requires 100%+ focus from a person. As a lead, it is hard to take up such assignments on your plate without stretching++ yourself. For example – taking up performance tuning for a component, security review of the project, prototyping to boot strap a new project. In such cases, it is wise to switch to advanced developer (IC role) for a period. After such project, you are a better lead. People skills don’t rust easily and stay with you longer.

Doing back and forth between IC, lead and M2 role in a discipline is healthy. It builds perspective and keeps you grounded. It requires commitment, hard work, patience and little bit of courage.

Need skills to cope up with lead role

In IC role, you used to do things. In lead role, your b**t is on line for team deliverable and requires you to get things done. It comes with additional ambiguity. First of all, it will need us to be comfortable with higher ambiguity in the system. For example: now it is not only about this-code-does-not-work but about work does not fit schedule, unplanned leave in team etc. Need to plan the work; stretching to meet target won’t work without planning first. After the planning, accept the ambiguity, and deal with it when it comes. Know what you can get done, have some level of buffer, under commit and over deliver vs over commit and under deliver.  Beyond that – Analysis paralysis or scheduling the unknowns won’t work. Basic principles like manage long poles in schedule, load balance, creating backup for team members, schedule risks first so that you have time to react, schedule prototype to iron out technical unknowns before committing to schedule if there is lot of unknowns, prioritize, cut features or buy more time, will help.

Communication is key to team work and deliverables. This is key to pass the right expectation to team. If you have steep target and soft in communicating the urgency – you will feel being sandwiched between the team and your management. It is like management want urgent deliverables and team is conducting business as usual.

Delegation at right level is key. e.g. You can’t delegate division of work and resolving dependencies to your developers. then, you don’t know how deliverables will line up to target date. At the same time – you can’t keep the work of team members with you. You can’t clone yourself and hence, you can only end up doing mornings and late evenings for the unscheduled work – to meet team deadlines. Again, this topic requires much more than one para. but you get the point right?

Change is always hard. Don’t look it through a wrong lenses in the beginning. This will lead to thinking that your work does not help add any value. You are simply a glorified cleric dividing the work among team members. You value addition is through code and design reviews. Further, you can generate able trained developers for the organization. An able dev lead is a factory that generates ace developers. Needless to say – don’t stop coding yourself.

Writing people reviews may come as shocker for some at the beginning. Be objective. Focus on the behavior, results rather than individual. Doing frequent feedback will help not have one marathon annual review. Write detailed feedback. Do one review a day. Keep 1-2 weeks of schedule around annual review to be able to reflect and do good home work before delivering the review.

Personal connection with team is key have good team health. It’s like making time to laugh together by going for a lunch or dinner on an occasion. Across the table, you talk anything from cricket, movies, music to physics. You get to connect as team. You open up to each other to discuss things. Every individual is a human apart from developer. A manager role is to marry business to people. You need to know their aspiration, and constraints; guide, and mentor them. One need to see how work is adding to his skills and growth apart from delivering business. These are basics of team health. Again – this requires much more discussion than one para. Nevertheless, one need to be little more than a nerd – a little social being to build team health.

In summary, moving between IC, lead and M2 (second level manager) roles is healthy to build perspective and good to consider doing this. Lead/manager role requires honing people/team skills which needs attention and action when taking the role first time. Good luck to you to be an ace IC, lead and M2 . Keep rocking! Next time – we talk about whether to take a programmer role for life time career?

 

To take or not to take a programmer lead or manager role

Published December 4, 2013 1:02 pm

In the last post, I tried to go over natural traits of a programmer and see whether one has natural inclination to be a programmer? As a programmer, you come at a crossroad – typically in 1-5 years – where you have to decide whether you want to lead a team? It exposes itself as an opportunity or you come across it when thinking about your career growth. In my case, it came as an opportunity within 3rd year of the career as programmer.

It is human to feel uncomfortable with the change at the onset. I did not know much theory about change mgmt. then. Later, I had come across theory about how people respond to change. Closest picture I could find on net about that is here and here. Your response to the expected change might be inline with the curve in the picture. That is ok but there is more to this.

There are 3 parties involved when you take up lead role – you, work and team. As long as you work as a programmer (individual contributor aka IC), there are only two parties involved – you and work. This change is key to note. There was so much to learn when I boarded my first job. My key focus at that time was to grasp, learn at exponential rate. In a way, focus is so much on you and what you produce; your excellence. The other parameter – team – brings team deliverables, team performance and career mgmt. to name a few items. Like it or not – they are equally important if not more – in your role as lead. (There are many titles that are used for this – like dev lead, project manager, test lead, qa lead. I will keep it as lead in the post.). It is good to come to terms with this. This will impact how much time (at the least in the short term) you can spend programming/researching yourself. Typically, you get to spend good 50% time or more with other items – to begin with.

Lead role typically comes with career growth though it may not always be the case. There are companies where there is a parallel career path for IC and manager. That is there is no need to be a lead – only for growth. Also in this role, supporting people through their career growth generates intangible job satisfaction. It is very key to know your intention. That is whether you are interested in the lead role for career growth or supporting people or both. If for career growth only or mostly, it may not work well. It will be hard to grow as a manager without being genuinely interested in people, and you may finding it taxing. Well, we all see during our career – good managers and bad managers. How come the bad manager could grow so much in that case? You are right. Let me put it other way – you might not make a great manager although you could still grow based on other parameters like – taking scaled up responsibility and deliverables. In nutshell, it will always help – to have genuine interest in the growth of the people – as manager. It may not stop you from taking a manager role.

First level manager are better accepted as techno managers. Are you at a stage where you have something to impart to the fellow team members? Some of these questions might help know that objectively?

  1. Do you ace your deliverables in the project?
  2. Are you considered a go to person for some of the component(s) in the project?
  3. Have you successfully on-boarded/mentored new joiners in the project?
  4. Do you produce code as per the standards of the group – if not help improve it?
  5. Do you debug difficult technical bugs and issues for the project?
  6. Have you handled external communications (technical or otherwise) sometimes?
  7. Have you negotiated your schedule/deliverables with your manager?
  8. Have you debated technical designs/issues with fellow team members?

Some of these question will help answer objectively whether your team can look up to you – to learn & lead and whether you have basic skills to lead a team. I am not going through the laundry list of skills here to avoid going by the book. Your organization might have listed the management skills formally and it won’t harm to skim through them.

If these parameters are aligned – that is 1) you are ok juggling – you, work and team – priorities and its impact on your daily working pattern 2) you are interested in people n their career 3) you ace your art as IC and have basic skills required to be first level manager, it won’t harm to take your first plunge into leading a group of programmers. Even if you are not be able to make an long term choice – to take IC vs lead track now, experiences from lead role will help hone up new skills that compliment technical skills for your career growth. For example: it helps – to be a better communicator, to be able to influence fellow team members, have empathy and to be little more team-social – as IC.

If you have made a choice to take up lead role, congratulations in your new role and best wishes! After few more years into your lead role, you may face more choices. For example: shall I go back to an IC role, is moving between IC and lead roles ok, Shall I take up M2 role, Can I take up programmer role as life time career path? Let’s pick up one of these in the next post.