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Comment by jayroh

2 years ago

> If you want money, do management.

If you make it to my comment, please - do not go into management for the money. If you want to build, then remain an IC. If you want to grow other engineers, further THEIR career, make THEM better - go into management.

The friends of mine who ended up in management for the money and complain about their reports make me so angry.

I mean, this has a certain truth to it... but this isn't really a situation unique to management.

A lot of engineers, of all flavors, are at least partially in the field for the money. Maybe they enjoy their work, maybe they're good at it, but for a lot of people it was more of a plan C or D after the things they really wanted to do turned out to be something they couldn't make money at.

Some of them would rather be authors or musicians, some of them chemists or physicists, a number of them are just waiting to buy a goat farm upstate. If you include them people who would rather be engineering something else, but that something else doesn't pay the bills, it may be a majority of engineers who are in it for the money.

Guys, everybody goes into management for the money.

  • Sometimes, people are asked to become managers because their managers think that they have the right combination of skills and attributes to be good at the job.

    And sometimes, the people who were asked, due to a combination of stubbornness and a desire not to “sell out”, deny the request for 7-8 years. Eventually, a person might realize that the original requesters may have been correct and that’s how they become a manager.

    Or so I’ve heard.

  • I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that many people get into management for the money. My thought is that the motivation, the incentive, is wrong.

    I’ve had too many shitty managers in my career to think I’d put other people through similar experiences. So, my switch into management was motivated by, hopefully, making the experiences on my team positive ones

  • I disagree.

    Plenty of people I know do it for other reasons: power, control, purpose, leverage, …