On being a woman in tech slowly promoted out of tech

I'm sure your story resonates with many techies who have been promoted to development manager in the corporate world.

I've gone full circle on this. I worked on a decent sized Drupal site as the manager and didn't do half as much coding as I would have liked to do. I felt lost at times. Then one day I just left and jumped back into coding. However because of my career history I ended up being hired by companies to help with their Drupal processes and team building.

So I got hired for both the techie and the human side of Drupal builds. Both sides of my brain get regular exercise from this variety and I've grown to love it.

My experience tells me I need to do both now because if I stop the "herding" I'll get separation anxiety from that part in the same way I had it for coding.

I hope you will do both too.

Good luck and get started on the coding again today.

(Edit: Only just saw the group this is in. That will teach me to blindly comment on a link on twitter. Still I stand by my words)

Hey,
Even I am in the transition state now.
But, currently heading towards the architecture, design, automated approaches, capability building etc etc

But, again its a mixture of being at both the ends ....

I'm in this transitional phase too.... I love both types of work, actually, but since I identify as a feminist, it feels a little like I'm letting the 'sisterhood' down. Here I am spouting off about how there need to be more technical women and isn't it great to be a technical woman, but meanwhile my work isn't purely technical.

What's the stereotype? That the guys do all the coding and then they bring in some ladies to do 'soft' things like project management, marketing, support, etc. (Frankly, I personally think that all those roles can be hard and rewarding and necessary for a efficient workplace.)

When you walk into a room as a woman, people make assumptions about you, and it gives me great pleasure to bust those assumptions - I guess I'll still be doing that in a different way. And if I'm happy and fulfilled, what do I care what people think!

It happens to everyone men/woman, tech/non-tech, community/enterprise,...

as you get more experience you will be required for higher level task. The usual path for many in a tech company is to start as a developer, get to project manager, unit manager, cto, ....

I understand where you're coming from.

I really don't care for managing people - it's not my passion. In a lot of technical jobs, though, that is the natural progression because "isnt that what everyone wants?" according to the non-technical types?

I've been fortunate enough to be in a place owning a business with 3 friends that I can still do the things I love and feel like I'm able to advance without losing that. I feel I'll always want to work on a team where hierarchy is less important and being able to be continually learning new things is more important.

You're in a unique situation, obviously, but it still resonates with many in the technical fields.

I have the same problem. I came for the code but seem to stay in the conference room.

I don't think it's gender-related, except in any correlation between good communication skills and gender.

Ultimately though we have the power to shift our work more to what we like instead of what adds the most efficiency to the team. You just have to bump up your own satisfaction as a priority and not be so selfless.

I hope I never end up in that position. I have 0 interest in being a manager. I just want to write code and build sites. Hopefully, when I return to the workforce, I will find a company that will let me do it without any nonsense about having to have a career path.

Michelle

First a sidenote for @stwesnooze: though the IRC channel and some BOFs/meetups are Drupalchix-only, members of the Drupalchix Solidarity Committee and Allied Auxiliary Service (ie. male allies, awesome wording c/o @bangpound) are ALWAYS welcome to contribute to discussions here on g.d.o and to join the group! Welcome. :)

So, here's my take on this:

I think it is purely two things at play. 1) Being good at both the technical and interpersonal/communications sides of things and 2) Being willing to move away from just developing.

I think anyone who is good at understanding and building on the technical side and is also good with people and good at talking/writing is going to naturally be pulled in that direction. There aren't a lot of people who can balance a ton of projects at once AND multitask AND keep the peace AND review specs AND interface with clients all at once.

But also, maybe more guys are just acknowledging and saying, "actually no, I really want to build stuff, I don't want to manage people".

My first two years of my undergrad degree (before switching to geography) I studied technical theater, specializing in lighting design. Then I realized that I didn't really love lighting design, I liked being a lighting tech. Up on ladders, hanging from rafters lugging around lights half my size. But because of my ability to manage people well and think "big picture", I was pushed into design and managing the other techs.

Just like nearly a decade later when I had been doing a lot of Drupal "site building" and considering getting more into development, but was offered a job as a Project Manager at a company I really wanted to work for. I knew this would mean sacrificing learning development full-time, at least for the next while. But also, I was aware that there weren't a lot of other people who had the broad skills and also willingness to take on being the jack of all trades, mediator, super-organized wrangler, and person who facilitates a team of people to do development full time. It has its own challenges and rewards, but it's just different from doing dev work.

There's definitely a sacrifice involved in moving into a management position, but you also get insight and opportunities that might not arise otherwise. And if that doesn't seem to be sitting well with anyone I think that there is nothing at all wrong with deciding that you want to go back to developing full-time. Regardless of what your background, skill-level, or gender is, I think that this is something many of us will have to think about at some point!

Dilbert cartoons provided a warning for me when I moved from technical to management in the early ninties. I knew I had a problem when programmers started posting Dilbert cartoons on the bulletin board. I felt like someone who had injured his leg in a marathon race and was pushed to the sideline as spectator/commentator. I was happiest slogging code.

I'm considering a change like this right now, and you've got me thinking hard. Any change in life tends to bring on rewards and disappointments. You can "grieve" what you've lost, but as long as you're enjoying new challenges, it really depends on where the scale tips. Are you happy or not?

I took a Work/Life Balance class years ago, and the point was that you essentially have two lives: work and personal. The two need to balance each other. If your work life is rewarding in many ways, can you temper its disappointments by taking on those same challenges in your personal life? Don't let work take over every hour of your days, and make sure you're doing what you want to do in those non-work hours (other than sleeping!) That may mean writing code, or it may mean learning yoga.

One piece of advice, I would not recommend "giving up entirely." If you do, the very knowledge that made you a good manager slips away, and you become a Dilbert manager. You need to stay in touch for professional effectiveness and personal satisfaction.

First, note that I commenting here even though I am male and may not be able to appreciate the gender dynamics at play here. I still feel that I can totally relate to your situation and I hope my comments can help you or others stuck in this situation somehow.

I am living through similar issues these days. In my day job, I used to do a lot of coding and systems engineering and deployment. I had the feeling I was actually producing something, and if I pushed my mind and my fingers long enough, bugs would be fixed, servers deployed and basically, something beautiful would sprout.

Now I'm watching others do this. For some reason I can't totally understand, my technical capabilities now actually hinder my capacity to apply them. Because what I call "technical authority" develops naturally, even in self-managed/horizontal organisations like ours, I get more and more drawn towards managerial roles, meetings, answering, training and helping other people, and as a consequence my technical capabilities actually decline over time. I believe this is a a cynical and twisted fate that is imposed upon us by hierarchical structures and specialization.

My take on it is that it's possible to refuse that trend. Do not become a manager if you don't want to. I am in the process of trying to remove myself from a lot of decision-making processes in the organisation and cleanup the backlog of "poutine" (ie. random administrative crap i have to deal with) to be able to focus on what I actually like to do. Maybe I am just being naive and I won't be able to pull this off, but I sincerely believe that we, as a collective, have a shared responsibility towards management (ie. everybody should manage their own stuff) and respecting our workers desires to do what they do best. Putting a programmer in a management role doesn't make him/her a manager, it's just a programmer in a management role, and it may not be the best fit.

I am trying to not specialize myself in management, basically. And it's surprisingly hard, because the system wants us to become "bosses", even though that's a very inefficient way to do things: I believe that workers are the best to know and understand their own work and that while some coordination is necessary, it can be accomplished without hierarchy.

A possible alternative to just refusing management and sticking to tech work is to focus more on training. I really enjoy giving training. I think it's a good way to use my knowledge in a very efficient manner by sharing it with others. It also allows me to learn more things, as students and teachers often reverse roles more often than we can imagine. So if somebody is going to try to bring you up the ladder, try to go into those sweet spots where you help (instead of boss) other people.

Note I do not mean to diminish non-technical roles here. I have a specific grunt against management and authoritarian approaches, and I do not believe that all non-technical aspects are bad - I just believe specialization is especially problematic in that field.

Another thing. I also relate with the "herding cats" and "stopping core devs from killing each other" problem. I am sometimes placed in the role of coordinating a bunch of geeks, and it can be very frustrating. I have also dealt with conflicts within the team (and sometimes been a source or target of conflict too, obviously), and this is delicate work that is really hard to do, very important and often under-estimated and under-appreciated..

I feel a lot of people do not take responsibility for their behavior and threaten the fabric of the community they are in by being violent, threatening, aggressive or just mean with each other. I could be mistaken, but women (or "gentle men", i could say) very often end up in the role of doing conflict resolution and mediation. I can certainly appreciate the role that mediators can play in conflicts, and I think this is really important work. But people (often men, and sometimes me even) sometimes do not take their own responsibilities in there. As men, we need to grow up and resolve our own interpersonal issues by ourselves.

To finish, I'll join the chorus of "thank you" and I hope that you can find your way and be happy in your work, that's all that really matters in the end. Any path you take from here, you can be proud of the work you have done as a geek, teacher, manager or whatever role you end up taking in the future. You are great and you don't have to be a hero. :)

I started out as a coder (not a REAL developer), and then was moved into management quickly. It's been ten+ years now and I still love to roll up my sleeves and troubleshoot. Finding the balance between the satisfying hands-on and the satisfying orchestration & quality control is tough. I try and sneak a bit of hands-on time into every project, otherwise I am really only able to do it in my "free time". I have thought a bit about taking a step back and just doing a hands-on project now and again but that would be easier for someone like me who works on a project-to-project basis than fulltimers. I don't think fulltimers get to reinvent themselves to suit their moods as much.

I too have heard that women generally make better managers then men because of inherent communication skills, but I had never thought of promotion as taking away from the techie girlpower.