I’m an Engineering Manager, previously a Senior Developer. I have done a lot of coding. I still try to do a little coding every now and then. Because of my past, I could be oppressive to senior developers on my teams. When making decisions, I found myself providing both the management viewpoint and the technical viewpoint. This usually means I was keeping a perfectly qualified technical person from participating at a higher level of responsibility. This creates an unhealthy technical organization with limited career growth opportunities.

As a manager with a technical background, I found it difficult to separate the two roles, but admitting there was a problem was a good first step. Over the last few years, I have been trying to get better at creating more room for technical people to grow on my teams. It seems to be more about focusing on outcomes for them to target, finding opportunities for them to tackle, listening to what they are telling me, and generally staying out of the way.

Another thing to keep in mind, it’s not just an issue with management. The technical growth track is a lot like a ladder: Keep developers climbing or everyone can get stalled. We need to make sure Senior Developers are working on suitable challenges or they end up taking work away from Junior Developers.

I mentioned this previously, but it’s important to create a path for technical leadership. With that in mind, I’m really happy about the recently announced Firefox Technical Architects Group. Creating challenges for our technical leadership, and roles with more responsibility and visibility. I’m also interested to see if we get more developers climbing the ladder.

http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2015/08/random-management-unblocking-technical-leadership/