Are Ex-Developers Good Project Managers?
Sooner or later developers have to start thinking about their career path. They are facing a question like ‘I have been programming for x year … now what?‘. As I see it there are three potential career paths for developers:
- Well known path from development to project management
- Purely technical path towards “senior developer” / “technical lead” / “software architect”
- And finally third path towards technical consultancy
Quite often you can hear that developers are not good project managers. People say that mainly because being a good developer doesn’t make anyone a good leader or project manager. Programming and management require different set of skills. Majority of developers got technical training and they lack soft skills which are essentials when it comes to managing people. However developers want to “progress” and in some companies this is the most natural way, the most obvious path. Transition to manager requires learning new competencies and changing “point of view” but for sure it’s possible.
Assuming that ex-developers feel good in the role of project manager they have one big advantage over non-ex-developers PMs – they know what debugging is!
Every software developer knows how to debug code. When something goes wrong they can figure out what the problem is. Once the problem has been identified, they can figure out how to fix it. (In most cases.)
Ex-developers understand software creation process inside out. That puts them in much better position to investigate problems which may occur and solve underlaying issues. For them project is not only about tasks, estimates and tracking progress. They know what is really going on. PMs without technical background usually have following options when the project is in trouble:
- additional people to speed things up
- overtime hours
- functionality descope
Ex-developers are not limited to the above list, this is their strong side! 
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Great post!
Your are mostly right, however developers are doers managers on the contrary. As a manager you have to change your mindset, not tell people how would you do it but rather empower them to find their own ways. On the other hand manager with dev background has a potential to build a great team, because he understands everyday hurdles of his directs and can address it in a proper way.
Keep up the good work!
Bartek
23 Jul 10 at 6:11 pm
I have one great idea for developers who want to transit to some other position: become a tester.
And yes, I know how it sounds. But the few best testers I’ve ever met switched to QA after building software. And they were well worth the bigger money than they coding colleagues, which they by the way got.
The reason is exactly the same as you offer for PMs – if tester knows how software is built they are more efficient, dig deeper and are able to find most painful bugs.
There is one more thing – I don’t really get this “now what?” question. What’s wrong with building whole career as developer? I believe we generally lack experienced developers and I wish more people would stick with this role.
I believe even now vast majority of developers with 10+ or 15+ years of experience would be totally hot on labor market. I see how little I knew in terms of my whole software development career and I wasn’t that bad programmer.
There is one trick here though. If you stick with one position and one project for all these years you don’t unwind yourself. You make yourself very important but only for this single project. If project is abandoned, so are you.
Pawel Brodzinski
27 Jul 10 at 9:50 am