Geek Philosophy

I’ve recently spent a lot of time thinking about how to grow professionally as a software development manager. Since I was a programmer before becoming a manager, I first thought about how to transfer some of what I learned about professional development as a coder to my role as a manager.

Programmers have it easy

Let’s think about how a programmer progresses. Of course, there’s experience and time, the greatest of teachers. Even if you have a programmer solve a similar class of problems on a regular basis, if she’s keen she’ll come up with new and better ways of doing things. Add a piece of automation here, a new editor trick there, perhaps a refactor or a domain-specific language – there’s always some opportunity to learn something new.

Luckily, most programmers aren’t stuck solving the same problems over and over – they’re doing different things. This could mean a new programming language (or new techniques with the one you already use), a new platform, a new module or third-party API, or a new paradigm, such as incorporating more of a functional design style into otherwise object-oriented code. Programmers can also change their focus, for instance from user experience to scalability to embedded systems.

Additionally, professional programmers most often don’t have to do it alone. If you run into a database problem you don’t know how to fix, you can go look over the shoulder of the local SQL guru as they optimize your query. If you’re fortunate enough to be on a team where pair programming is the norm, you’ll be in almost constant learning mode. At a standup meeting, at an architecture design meeting, or at a security review, there’s a group of your peers (or superiors) solving technical problems.

All that said, the title of this section is a bit flippant – to really take advantage of these learning opportunities, a developer would ideally have the will to learn, the drive for self-improvement, and the hacker ethos of experimenting with programmable systems. It’s not that this learning comes for free, it’s just that it can be part of the job (or some on-the-side project, or an open-source effort, etc.).

What exactly would you say you do around here?

So now, back to the land of management. What does a software development manager do, and how would one go about improving those skills?

Roughly speaking, you can break down what I do into four areas:

• People management. This includes conflict resolution, career development for my direct reports, and managing up.
• Project management. This involves task prioritization, risk assessment, project tracking, and scope management.
• Process / team management. This is broad, but in part consists of promoting technical and team best practices, and focusing on how the team does their work.
• Technical guidance. Although I’m not the most senior technical person on the team, I have substantial product experience and a higher-level context that proves useful during in-depth technical discussions.

Of course there is overlap. What is a team if not a group of people? Choosing continuous deployment could be process or project management, and encouraging pair programming is part team management and part technical guidance. The list goes on and on – I’ll stick with the above demarcations tfor now.

How do you grow?

There are several paths towards professional self-improvement, but I’ll lump them into three broad categories: Experience, Training, and Self-Study.

Experience in this case refers to professional experience, and covers most of what I talked about above with respect to programmer development. This is the knowledge that comes from trying new things, learning from mistakes (both yours and others’), and paying attention to what works in various situations, all as part of your day to day work life. There is always some sort of experiential learning to be had, should you choose to take advantage of it.

Training is another way to learn, and can be helpful in circumstances where there’s a specific skill set to be learned that is too broad to wait for experience to teach, too critical to be learned through trial an error, or too time-sensitive to be learned through self-study. School and certification courses are obvious forms of training, but I also count mentoring (external or within your company) and conferences under this heading.

Self-study is a broad term. and I use it here to refer to everything from reading blog posts and books, to podcasts and forums or user groups, to side projects and open source contributions. Self-study is the most accessible form of learning for most people in this profession, since it is plentiful and often free, but it is often the least taken advantage of.

Naturally, like the overlap in the management responsibilities above, the distinctions between these categories are not hard and fast. Would MIT Open Course Ware count as training, or self-study? Work experience often has aspects of self-study, even though it may not self-directed. A conference may be training, but what about an unconference?

So what are you doing about it?

Now that I’ve laid out the loose definitions for the types of learning I might undertake, as well as the areas in which this learning could be applied, I’ll get into what and how I’m trying to learn.

People management is an area where I think there is a limitless amount of experiential learning to be had, and it’s one I’ve been focusing on more recently.  Even if I was managing the same people for 10 years, they would change, I would change, and the project would change, so there would be new challenges and opportunities. That said, I have been pursuing self-study in this area (mainly through blogs, books and podcasts), and the upcoming Much Ado About Agile conference has several talks and tutorials on the subject of people.

Project management is something I do as part of my job, but I’m not really a project manager. I have experience working within my company’s project framework, but there’s a lot of inertia to overcome to change anything since it’s a framework the entire company uses. This is an area I’m not putting a lot of effort into improving on my own time, since it’s not a primary interest and there’s relatively little I can do about it in my current position, but I’m always on the lookout for things that I can improve during my day to day tasks.

Process and team management is where I’ve spent a the most time learning, through experience, training, and self-study. I’ve followed the Kanban community, posting questions and comments, and even helped review a great book on the subject. I’ve read books by Mary Poppendieck, Tom DeMarco, Esther Derby, and more, and my to-read list just keeps growing. I’ve attended and spoken at Agile meetups and conferences. I’ve tried to be an Agile coach for my team (which can sometimes be difficult). Although this is where I’ve focused most of my efforts, I’m starting to back off a bit here in favour of People- and Technical-centric learning, primarily to round out my management style.

Finally, learning about technical management. Although over the years I’ve done some self-study on this, reading books on design patterns, lean and agile development practices, and architecture, I haven’t been as rigorous about this as I could have been. Part of it has been that I haven’t been coding at all (maybe a few lines every few weeks), a situation which I’ve started to correct. Picking up new technologies, even if I’m not using them at work or for any serious projects, helps broaden my perspectives when faced with the challenges I do need to solve at work, providing me with a bigger technical toolkit. I’m also getting more involved in security reviews at work, and have recently had some work-sponsored training by a security expert, and I hope to get some further training on the technical track of the upcoming conference.  While I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to primarily being a developer, I think staying sharp technically is an important part of being a development manager.

Your turn

Thanks for making it this far! Do you agree or disagree with my assessment of the learning opportunities for programmers or managers? Have anything to add? Let me know in the comments.