I’ve been a software developer for many years and the competition is so fierce and the high performers are so high performing that the route to even a basic supervisory position seems to be nearly unattainable.
I have bumped in to articles here and there about old-fashioned blue collar folk who aren’t too smart and just need to get a GED in order to be a supervisor. My reaction was, damn!
Is it really that easy to become a supervisor in low-skill fields, or are these “John finally learned to read properly and got his GED and was able to become shift foreman” stories really cases of people who were super-performers on the job who just lacked academic skills?
What are some fields where it is relatively easy for someone who is literate, reasonably well educated, and willing to try hard to advance to a supervisory and/or managerial role? In other words, I want a job where I can give orders, review subordinates’ performance, set workplace rules, hire, fire, have a discretionary budget, and/or make other organizational decisions.
Assumptions:
Making a lot of money isn’t the most important thing in the scope of this question, but it could have some relevance.
The difference between a “supervisor” and a “manager” isn’t terribly important in terms of scope. Some fields distinguish these terms whereby a manager has authorization to make decisions on where the business is going, and supervisors are in charge of how that gets done, who does it, etc…
Some ideas I had:
Registered Nurse (RN) at a nursing home. The way it was explained to me years ago is that nursing homes typically had an RN in charge of a floor or wing and they more or less ran the show and supervised a dozen or so LPN’s, orderlies, etc… An MD might come by every week or so, but when the doc wasn’t there, the RN sat on their throne of power and glory. In other words, if you’re an RN, and you get hired, you more or less become a supervisor by default. Is this really the case?
Military positions where command authority comes automatically with rank. Take your BS and apply to Officer Candidate School, pass, then you get to order privates and corporals around all day. Get promoted and you can march Lt’s around and such.
I’m kinda reading, “I want to be a rock star, even though I can’t play an instrument, sing or even dance very well. It can’t be too hard; look at the idiots who make it.”
While I suppose there are industries where you can be a “boss” without actually knowing the industry or jobs you’re supposed to supervise, there’s no question that the most effective bosses are ones who can sit in any chair in the department and do the job, and actually *have *done so for one or more of them.
Other than the era of “get an MBA, get $100k,” I don’t think there is a track to “job as boss” except up through training and experience in whatever’s being bossed. Preferably both.
Being a good boss and a good manager can be a lot of headaches. I have worked in truck repair shops as well as factories where I always ended up at some level of management. I didn’t need much education but had good basic math skills. I always made pretty good money.
I assume you now hate programming.
How many people report to a manager in your place?
Having been a manager and having identified people for promotion to manager, the people who get promoted are the ones doing management type stuff already.
They set up and lead small teams. They may get given budgets. They are looked upon as leaders.
I don’t know about your shop, but a small percentage of programmers in places I’ve been are the slightest bit interested in being managers, so the competition might not be that fierce.
And trust me, all that stuff you mention isn’t nearly as much fun as you might think.
I am thinking about industries where it is relatively easy for someone to learn the industry and become a supervisor. E.g. get hired as a night janitor where most of your colleagues are high school dropouts, illiterate, repeat felons, and/or lazy, shine like a star for a year or so, learn the industry, then nail the interview for promotion to Janitorial Shift Supervisor where you can yell at Bill that he needs to scrub harder and get to decide what brand toilet bowl cleaner to order this month.
Interviewer: “Why should we choose you as Janitorial Shift Supervisor?”
Me: “I’m the only person on the janitorial staff with a college degree, the only one who can read above a ninth grade level, and also don’t have a felony conviction record.”
Good point. What were, generally, the qualities they wanted in managers? E.g. did they primarily promote the people with the best performance metrics at their current job, or did they look for higher-order skills? One of the things I’m sort of targeting with this question is that my field has a lot of very very well educated people. If I switched to a field where they took high school dropouts, illiterate people, etc., showing enough higher order skills to qualify for management would seem to be a lot easier…
I’ve been in the skilled/construction trades since 1979 (painting contractor.) Most of that time I’ve been self-employed, but for a few years after a move in the early 1990s I went to work for a large commercial painting company and within a year was made crew supervisor over between 15 and 20 guys. I know I am a good boss and manager but being middle-upper management can SUCK donkey dong, I found out. I was frequently undermined by the owner of the company, I only had -so- much power, but never the final say, and as someone who generally tries to avoid “office” politics and bullshit, I was suddenly, unavoidably, and deeply mired in it.
(I am not sure whether it helped, hindered or made no difference at all that I was at the time the only female painter within the organization - I think it may have actually helped but I don’t know.)
I lasted about two years before I realized I was not only making about the same, or less, money than I’d made doing piece-work, but I was getting very, very stressed out. I told the company I just wanted to go back to being and underling and was much happier with them, then shortly thereafter I garnered enough of my own work to go back to self-employment.
Being THE BOSS is great, if you’re competent at that. Being the underboss, not so much. I’m sure there’s no cut and dried answer and a lot will depend on the workplace culture and individual organization.
Let me expand. First, in smart organizations the best at a working job is not the person who gets promoted to manager - unless they think the Peter Principle is a good thing. There are often technical non-management tracks for rewarding people who are great workers but who would be terrible bosses
Now, for your list
Giving orders is fun, making sure they get followed not so much - unless they are good and smart orders.
You think performance reviews are fun to do? I assume you’ve never done any. Telling a top performer she’s a top performer is kind of nice, but telling someone with issues that they have issues is not. Most people who have done it hate performance reviews. Plus you have to do it all the time, not once a year.
Hire. Okay - do you interview candidates now? Are you good at it?
Fire? You are not firing a cartoon, you’d be firing a real person with a real family. And there is lots of paperwork, unless you’re Donald Trump.
Discretionary budget? Hah. What you really do is allocate not enough money to the places which need it. If you enjoy telling your kids that they can’t have that toy - or dessert - then you’ll love budgeting.
Organizational decisions? Do you like politics? First level managers have input to these things, but they don’t make them.
Here is a good reason to be a manager - you see ways in which your group can be improved, or you have a direction you think it would go. You are not going to do that very well in a field you know nothing about.
As for the military - having a nice uniform, shouting orders, and having people salute you is probably fun. Sending them off to have their asses blown off probably isn’t.
You realize that a janitorial shift supervisor probably makes 1/4 of what you do as a programmer, right? How much of a paycut are you willing to take to be a boss?
As ‘the boss’ here at my work, think long and hard about if you really want to deal with all the bullshit from those people.
Just yesterday one of my employees made very small mistake. On her end it was no big deal because she really didn’t know any better. I wanted to let it go, but it took me like an hour to straighten it out so I had to say something so she doesn’t do it again. I said something, I (honestly) nicely explained the way I needed it done and she fucking exploded back at me. I yelled back at her, walked away, called in my boss and told him he needs to come down and referee the situation before I fire her.
Funny thing is, he went up to her and said “Joey really needs you to [what I needed done]” and she flipped out on him. He went on to say “You didn’t know, I know you didn’t know, Joey knows you didn’t know, it’s no big deal, you’re not in trouble, but how do we tell you when every time someone tells you the right way to do something you fly off the handle”
I’m not looking forward to telling her that she’s only supposed to be taking 30 minute breaks, not 45.
Oh and she sued the last person that fired her and has a restraining order against someone involved in that case.
Yeah, being a boss ROCKS!
There’s plenty of times where I think about how much I’d rather get out of management, go back to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and just be told what to do all day long. No thinking on my part. Tell me what to do, I’ll do it. If I do it wrong correct me and I’ll do it better next time. I can leave work and work and let someone else stay up nights thinking about how to fix a problem, someone else can tell the same employee to do something for the 9th time this week and still have it not get done. Someone else can mutter to themselves “If I want it done right, I’ll just do it myself” while they put their own work on hold to do what they’re supposed to be paying someone else to get done.
OTOH I get paid really well and I spend half the day on the computer, pretending to work.
I haven’t noticed supervisory roles to be especially rare in the tech world. In fact most tech people don’t really want those roles, they want to keep doing hands-on technical stuff.
They do want autonomy and freedom to make decisions of course. And I would’ve said that’s one of the defining differences between “programmer” and “software developer”.
To be fair I work in startups, and things are probably quite different from the corporate world.
Out of curiosity, what sort of development do you do?
Btw, RN shift supervisors and DONs (directors of nursing) know their shit inside and out. Nursing also operates in a union environment in many places. That puts a damper on any megalomania. The janitors have their own union.
Maybe construction where you could lead a small crew? More operational direction rather than actual management though. In public accounting if you are a top performer you can lead audit teams after 2 years of soul sucking drudgery. That’s just day to day supervision, no control over budgets or hiring/firing. Takes pretty specific skills though.
Is there any chance in your position to become a team leader, and to let your boss know that you’re interested in a management track and want to start taking some management classes? Depending on how well you’re perceived at being able to manage, how big your company is, and how well you’ve performed in your current job in the past, that might be one way to get to manager eventually.
This probably works better in a larger company. Are you willing to take some management training courses on your own if your company won’t pay for them? Are you willing to switch companies if, after you have made an effort toward switching to management, nothing seems to be moving at your current one?
Also, as somebody with 25 years in the tech industry (not as a programmer, but I’m married to someone who started out as a programmer and switched to QA), I agree with tellyworth: most good engineers want to stay engineers. They want to move up the tech track to positions like software architect, not jump to management. A lot of the skills that make good programmers don’t translate (in my experience, anyway) to good managers.
Frankly, your attitude as expressed in this thread strongly indicates you’d be a “Boss from Hell”, hated by your staff and probably fired by senior management in short order.
That said, the quickest route to “bossdom” is to become self employed. It’s glorious, I tell ya…I get to call all the shots. Of course, I also have to deal with all the shit…copier breaks? I have to see how the hell I can pay to have it fixed/replaced. Internet down? I get to stop whatever the hell I’m doing to deal with it. Out of toner/paper/other office stuff? I get to whip out the wallet and buy it. Etc.
Do you really want to be the boss or do you just want some acknowledgement that you are doing well? If they came to you tomorrow, told you that you are awesome, gave you a promotion with a token pay raise and some new assignments would you feel better?
Fast food. All the regional managers at pizza hut started as cooks, I don’t think any of them had college degrees. They hired one guy with an MBA though, but he was hopeless. He couldn’t even sweep the floor. I believe they made something like 30-40k base salary with up to 30k in performance bonuses.
That was my first thought as well. There’s only a couple of people I know of in my network engineering group that have expressed desire to go to a management track, they’re generally more interested in staying on the technical tracks.
Managing means you’re responsible for getting your people to get it done, regardless of obstacles. When a Dept fails to reach a deadline or target end product… It’s not the workers who get replaced, it’s the Dept Manager. I’ve seen this happen countless times. No thanks. I don’t want that kind of pressure.
“Uh, huh. Was it you that was too good to scrub all the shit off the toilets in the men’s room on the third floor?”
I guess there are positions out there where someone Real Smart oversees a platoon of knuckle draggers, but everything I said earlier still applies. If you aren’t willing to roll up your sleeves, scrub shit, sweep floors, haul drums of cleaner and keep at it when your boss isn’t watching, then there’s nothing including your college degree and clean record that will make you a very good boss of guys who do.
From experience: working a lifetime in tech fucks up your perceptions of how most of the world works. Not a slam at you, but the STEM crowd, especially the IT/tech part of it, has some strange-ass ideas about what jobs and bosses and working for a living is all about. They are especially dazzled by the idea that because they’re so damn smart, they can tell “dumb people” how to do jobs they themselves would end up in the ER trying.
“Supervisor” or “manager” might be handed out by HR. “Boss” is earned or nothing.