Did not do managerial work long because it did not agree with me that well. Can work with others but rather work alone ![Cool 8)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/cool.gif)
Interesting to hear. I am being politely "herded" towards management. I stated quite a while ago that I would like to remain firmly on the "technical ladder", which every company I've worked in has had, the 'technical practices ladder' and the 'management ladder'. You are of course free to hop either way, if you can meet the requirements.
In the new company (we got bought a year ago). Seem to blur this a lot, by attaching company values to roles and even as you go up the technical ladder, management topics like "delivery contract awareness, commercial awareness, team leadership, people management, business stakeholder meeting involvement, business case documentation".... etc. So at the level of senior architect you need to basically be pen pushing an agile team or several, while spending the rest of your time in management meetings on contracts, commercials and delivery of said teams, with net 0% time actually available to technically involve yourself enough in those teams day-2-day to even provide technical mentorship, except in the broadest academic sense.
I can work WITH people. I can drive people towards a technical goal. I can mentor people. I love mentoring people, I love passing on information, knowledge, skills, experience. I love broadening people and making them better engineers. But, I can't MANAGE people. I can't manage myself! My private life is a complete bomb site, my profressional self management can best be described as "How did I get to where I am?". I forget things, I over context switch when given more than 2 tasks of equal priority, I hate deligating tasks I don't know how to do! I hate estimating, I hate being timeboxed, I hate that management do NOT understand that engineering is not a mechanical machine you put requirements in the top, pull a handle a fixed number of times and a product pops out. We don't know how long it's going to take, because we've never done it before. If we HAD of done it before we would have 'canned' the code as a library and written patterns so we don't have to do it again, that's the whole core ethos of the past 30 years, "Never write the same code twice!", so how are we meant to know how long it's going to take? It's not a science it's a creative art.
Management should
be see us as customers, not be our masters (used in the academic sense of above in hierarchy).
So... you see why pushing me into management is pushing me into failure.
EDIT: For incorrect gramar spoiling meaning