Especially combined with management tasks; I find coding and management hard to combine. At least in my brain they feel very different and as a CTO I feel I must do both. I do not want to end up like a CTO that is out of touch or has his current tech knowledge from buzz words in management magazines like so many tech management people I know who are my age.
I wonder if part of it is that some techies who aspire to management do so because they don't actually like developing software.
As an individual contributor I can't imagine giving up my day-to-day coding for a management position. Management responsibilities, sure. I'd wager that most software developers who are given enough autonomy are doing a lot of micro-project management anyway.
Giving up on researching new technology and playing around with stuff? Not a chance.
I'm in this boat at the moment (one man band contractor of many years finally starting to take on employees). I'm finding that as I delegate more of the routine day-to-day work away, I'm actually finding myself with more time to play around with new stuff. Trouble is, in my line of work (corporate .NET stuff) customers aren't interested in anything new and exciting - they just want Windows applications and ASP.NET forms connected to SQL Server databases.
Of course, if you're lucky enough to be in a job (I'm thinking frontend web) where playing with exciting new tech is part of the job, I can absolutely see how the move to management and the loss of overall hands-on time with the code can be a bad thing. Thankfully for me it's been somewhat liberating.
I can imagine. I think you can do both by focusing on one for awhile and then moving back to the other role. In the short term it is a set back but long term you can develop both skills. Meanwhile you can share management responsibilities with others and find out who makes the team gel the most and who are the great coders. Eventually if you can retain all this trained talent I believe you'll have a really strong team. Of course this happens naturally as people are promoted and moved around but I think if we could admit to ourselves that a manager once does not need to be a manager always, we'd all be so much better off.
In the Netherlands, where I am from, at least (I think it is less so in the US?), you are a complete failure/loser if you are a coder > 35 y/o (I am 40). You are supposed to be a manager then. My path was different than that but I cannot help thinking this attitude which is pushed in university and by (a lot of) parents influenced some decisions I made. Coders over 45 are considered sad and when you meet them in companies they are usually in the basement and treated like idiots. We were hired to give this mobile app development course to a large company in the Netherlands; it turned out this was just to fill out the training responsibilities the company had with their employees. All of the trainees were over 45, most over 50 and the company didn't care what we did and they would never use it there but apparently their employees expressed interest to learn about app development. Sad.
Yikes that is sad. Hopefully things like open source and github will allow aging developers to show their value. If a business sidelines an employee based on their age then that's the company's loss right? And hopefully the employee can find a smarter employer.
I hope this 'tradition' is ending/will end, but the past 5 years working with medium to large companies in NL showed me it was still alive and kicking.
I struggle with this every day. The amount of juggling priorities and helping a dozen different people that a technical manager has to do is completely at odds with the focus required to write non-trivial code.
