Over the years a number of friends have been promoted to technical management positions, often against their will. Companies that use a traditional hierarchy need people at each level, and to manage technical people you need some understanding of that technology. What could make more sense than elevating a technical person into a management position?

After a while, I hear that they get more pay but less quality of life. The extra pay is not a reward for being competent, but compensation for the loss of doing what they enjoy (technology) and the meaninglessness of bureaucratic tedium.

I imagine a better version of the technical manager:

  • First, let’s rename it to something like coach or friction mitigator or even technical therapist. Something that makes it clear this isn’t the management drudge of yore.

  • Rather than pushing a technical person into a position that requires a completely different skill set, provide training. Preferably, everyone should receive this training as a regular part of work, and those who are particularly drawn to those ideas are discovered rather than forced into that position. If someone doesn’t have an interest in the so-called soft skills, insisting that they specialize in it anyway doesn’t benefit anyone, and certainly not the company.

  • Eliminate the time-wasting parts of management. There are lots of new ideas around this, for example, every meeting should have a cost-benefit analysis. Calculate all the costs of this meaning: the time costs of the attendees, opportunity costs from not getting actual work done during the meeting, the impact on the emotions and energy of the attendees, everything that makes this meeting a drag on the company. The value of a meeting must clear an extremely high bar to justify that meeting. And the topper: meetings must use “the law of two feet.” If you aren’t contributing to or getting something out of the meeting, it is your obligation to the company to leave and to go find a more valuable way to spend your time. This way, someone calling a meeting does not automatically have a captive audience–instead, that person must captivate the attendees.

  • Finally, removing a technical person from technology is a very expensive choice for a company. Not only is the experience of those skills removed from the company, the experience itself stagnates. If the person is going to coach others, it is important that they remain engaged. Eliminating bureaucratic dross returns more time to the manager, but an essential part of this job is interruptability–the coach must be available to help people get unstuck. More than planning and sprints and all that, mitigating friction is the most important job of the manager/coach.

    So what kind of tasks are interruptible? Those that are not on the critical path; i.e.: research and experimentation. These are the very things that would make such a promotion rewarding and attractive to a technical person. The job becomes looking at new ways to make things better, while being available to solve friction problems for the team. That’s a technical manager job even I might find attractive.