Thank god I'm not a manager

I have been working DBA + database performance expert + for quite some time in a large company. The work is very comfortable, but for some time I was worried because my position was deadlock. Growing up the career ladder is absolutely impossible for me: I am the only person in the Russian office who reports directly to America. Everyone else here is development.

Since I am in Russia, they will never make me a manager, because I am far away, because I am in a different time zone, and in general, these Russian hackers ... But now another reason has been added - I do not want this. Why? Just look at the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook on the schedule of American managers:



A couple of explanations - I removed myself, the evening time due to the time zone difference, they do not accept all the rallies, so they also sit at the hacked rallies - they simply did not send a formal accept. Often, their meetings are “butt” for 5-6 hours. Honestly, I don’t understand how they solve the problem with the body’s natural secretions - for example, I drink coffee all the time, and I have to make it. When they manage to do this is a mystery to me.

Meanwhile, I work comfortably in the office, if laziness - I work at home or take day off, the first half of the day, until America wakes up, everything is quiet and calm. I am fond of all sorts of hobbies and even write articles on Habré. What does the fate of a techie who decided to devote himself to career growth look like? For me it looks like this:

1. A bulge appears on the plane of technical knowledge. This is a talented techie. He is superior to others. He was noticed



2. The bulge is growing. He is more and more being fussed on various issues. Perhaps his formal pants already gave him out (team lead, senior something, etc.)



3. He is already a manager, but he has not lost touch with the technical part. In fact, this is a very good manager. I had the good fortune to work with this (and watched all the previous stages) - he supervised, but if that - could raise everything from scratch - Vmware, NetApp, the network - anything



4. The "jumper" is broken. Now a man has become a 100% manager. He does everything with the wrong hands. In technical terms, he can continue to develop “upstairs” - read about new versions of products, but his practical skills froze at the time of the jumper break. We can recognize such managers by their favorite technologies, for example, a techie who left as managers in the 90s will be a balm on the ears discussing the transfer of data between components in the form of files and waiting for them to be periodically checked for their presence.


5. “Drop” pops up in the corporate environment.



This stage is the worst for the manager.

A techie at work has two types of knowledge: technical (how to write a querie) and company-wise(how to fill out the timesheet correctly, where is it better to contact if there is such a problem, what kind of workflow to achieve where you want, and in general, where it is shorter - to crawl faster). If you work in a small team, then the second component is very small. In a large bureaucratic company, it is very large, but managers are almost entirely composed of company-wise knowledge.

You can move to another company and they will ask you for an interview ... what we recently had on Habr ... how to invert a string in javascript. But the middle manager has almost no knowledge invariant to the company. Is it just the ability to work with people, a success story - but it's not easy.

Managers of the highest flight regain their “invariance” - led the X network for the sale of sepules- You can calmly manage the production of electric vehicles. And CV is shortened to the first and last name of Bond, James Bond . I can not help but quote Stanislav Lem:

Children born on Zazyava receive a huge number of titles and titles, as well as a name, according to our concepts, unusually long.

Having been born at one time, Master Oh got the name Gridipidagitositypopokarturtegvauanatozatotutvontam. They called him the Gold-colored Support of Existence, the Doctor of Perfect Meekness, the Luminary of Probabilistic Comprehensiveness, etc., etc. As he grew up and studied, he was taken from year to year by rank and a bit of his name; and since he discovered extraordinary abilities, by the 33rd year of his life he did not have a single rank, and the name was determined only by one, and even by a dumb, letter of the Zazyavsky alphabet, meaning "palatine aspiration" - this is something like a suppressed sigh that breaks out from an excess of reverence or pleasure.

Of course, not everything is so bad - at DEV managers manage the development of complex products, products that you won’t write “in one snout”. They, like the captains of the ship, stand on the bridge and see how something big is being born. But alas - in the “admin” IT most often these are other tasks, for example:

• What are these old servers, what is spinning on them, and how would you turn them off if no one knows why they are?
• Write an Incident report to the client about the absolutely incomprehensible bluescreen on his server, and try to squeeze out the answer to the question “what would you do to prevent this from happening again”
• To find out that the security group has seized some rights - and to understand how to live with it now
• Once a year devote a month to passing audit about 100+ points, each of which requires at least one rally
• Think about what to do if two key team members leave, and taking into account the search, their replacement will be in three months. And how to work without them - nobody cares - # tyzhmanezher

And how much are you ready to hang on the phone?