Not really. Operations is, at best, 5% software and more like 90+% project management. It is handy being able to write original applications on the fly to automate some of the insanity because there are multiple things happening simultaneously and many things to account for.
But in reality that's just a natural career progression for like 90% of people as they move up the ladder.
There are actually very few people above around age 45 or so that write code for a majority of their day (percentage-wise), and that includes people who still consider themselves in "individual contributor" roles. E.g. even a principal engineer is going to be spending a majority of their time reviewing code, doing systems and architecture work, mentoring more junior developers, organizing more junior developers, etc. When I was a principal engineer a huge part of my job was "project management" as you put it.
That is like saying “doctor” as you put it. It’s super cliche for people in software to title themselves as principal or expert or famed ninja grand wizard and yet simultaneously not know how the real world works. Project management is actually a real thing, seriously. It’s not just some imaginary invocation like lawyer or teacher. People actually do that for a job and get paid real money. Unlike software where developers pretend to be qualified against their own imagined baseline there is actually a license/cert from a universally recognized governance body.
This kind of nonsense is why so many developers that don’t have imposter syndrome want out.
If you want to see what real project managers do then peer into construction where they manage billions of dollars in assets with critical timelines that have multimillion liabilities.
OP said he "Runs operations for an enterprise API". My guess is that they are running a team that manages an infrastructure platform which developers in their org target. My guess is that this involves a team which manages deployments to multiple clouds / regions / data centers, some load balancing configuration, etc. using some software like Akana or some IBM product.
Not really. Operations is, at best, 5% software and more like 90+% project management. It is handy being able to write original applications on the fly to automate some of the insanity because there are multiple things happening simultaneously and many things to account for.
But in reality that's just a natural career progression for like 90% of people as they move up the ladder.
There are actually very few people above around age 45 or so that write code for a majority of their day (percentage-wise), and that includes people who still consider themselves in "individual contributor" roles. E.g. even a principal engineer is going to be spending a majority of their time reviewing code, doing systems and architecture work, mentoring more junior developers, organizing more junior developers, etc. When I was a principal engineer a huge part of my job was "project management" as you put it.
> "project management" as you put it
That is like saying “doctor” as you put it. It’s super cliche for people in software to title themselves as principal or expert or famed ninja grand wizard and yet simultaneously not know how the real world works. Project management is actually a real thing, seriously. It’s not just some imaginary invocation like lawyer or teacher. People actually do that for a job and get paid real money. Unlike software where developers pretend to be qualified against their own imagined baseline there is actually a license/cert from a universally recognized governance body.
This kind of nonsense is why so many developers that don’t have imposter syndrome want out.
If you want to see what real project managers do then peer into construction where they manage billions of dollars in assets with critical timelines that have multimillion liabilities.
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What an I missing? You said you were writing “enterprise APIs”.
OP said he "Runs operations for an enterprise API". My guess is that they are running a team that manages an infrastructure platform which developers in their org target. My guess is that this involves a team which manages deployments to multiple clouds / regions / data centers, some load balancing configuration, etc. using some software like Akana or some IBM product.
1 reply →