EDIT: What I meant, is: if there are a few roughly equivalent programmers, and one of them must be selected as the project manager, just take this role. Even if the boss thinks it should be the one with most skills, and it isn’t you. Because from that moment, you are the one who provides feedback about skills of members of your team.
if there are a few roughly equivalent programmers, and one of them must be selected as the project manager, just take this role.
That’s not how it works in real life.
In a corporate setting with a team that’s not tiny, “project manager” is a separate position and moving from a programmer to a project manager is a big promotion. Moreover, it’s a switch from a programmer career track to a manager career track and so is quite important. You don’t “just take” it.
In freer settings (e.g. open source) or with teams of only a few programmers, project managers don’t have that much power and, in particular, lack the capability to be the sole source of information about how the project is doing and who’s contributing what. The boss may talk to you more, but he’ll chat with everyone else, too.
Moreover, unless your co-workers are total muppets, they will detect your attempts to shove them aside and hog all the glory for yourself. This is likely to have dire reputational consequences, especially if you are also lying to the management about who contributed how much to the project. In severe cases you can make yourself unemployable in the industry.
No, this is how it shouldn’t work in real life. But I think I know two specific examples where it did.
I guess in both situations it helped that no other programmer wanted the position. Also it seemed that the leadership of the company didn’t have a clue about what the team leader should really do; they probably imagined something like a programmer who coordinates other programmers, not a separate career track—but that is just my guess.
In both situations, these people were disliked by the rest of the team, but since no one wanted to replace them, their positions seemed safe.
In one situation, a few years later the company leadership realized that they need a separate management career track, and hired managers from outside (I don’t know what happened with the specific person). In other situation, a few years later the company hired a new programmer who replaced the original team leader (he became an ordinary programmer again), but that was caused by some changes in the company, mostly unrelated to how the old team leader behaved. So yeah, this strategy doesn’t work forever, but a few years are nice, and I don’t think there would be consequences for these people after changing a job.
if you are also lying to the management about who contributed how much to the project
I think you can see after a while whether the leadership of the company is interested in the details of how the company works, or if they prefer to isolate themselves and see the programming department merely as a “black box” that produces the desired output (it was the latter in both cases). And of course, you should avoid big specific lies.
I still consider this path dangerous and wouldn’t walk it myself. But I saw people who took the risk and seemed to win. It probably happened because the whole environment was ready to be abused this way.
I still consider this path dangerous and wouldn’t walk it myself.
You recommended it to people on LW:
Therefore, you should be the project manager. … if there are a few roughly equivalent programmers, and one of them must be selected as the project manager, just take this role.
Therefore, you should be the project manager.
EDIT: What I meant, is: if there are a few roughly equivalent programmers, and one of them must be selected as the project manager, just take this role. Even if the boss thinks it should be the one with most skills, and it isn’t you. Because from that moment, you are the one who provides feedback about skills of members of your team.
That’s not how it works in real life.
In a corporate setting with a team that’s not tiny, “project manager” is a separate position and moving from a programmer to a project manager is a big promotion. Moreover, it’s a switch from a programmer career track to a manager career track and so is quite important. You don’t “just take” it.
In freer settings (e.g. open source) or with teams of only a few programmers, project managers don’t have that much power and, in particular, lack the capability to be the sole source of information about how the project is doing and who’s contributing what. The boss may talk to you more, but he’ll chat with everyone else, too.
Moreover, unless your co-workers are total muppets, they will detect your attempts to shove them aside and hog all the glory for yourself. This is likely to have dire reputational consequences, especially if you are also lying to the management about who contributed how much to the project. In severe cases you can make yourself unemployable in the industry.
No, this is how it shouldn’t work in real life. But I think I know two specific examples where it did.
I guess in both situations it helped that no other programmer wanted the position. Also it seemed that the leadership of the company didn’t have a clue about what the team leader should really do; they probably imagined something like a programmer who coordinates other programmers, not a separate career track—but that is just my guess.
In both situations, these people were disliked by the rest of the team, but since no one wanted to replace them, their positions seemed safe.
In one situation, a few years later the company leadership realized that they need a separate management career track, and hired managers from outside (I don’t know what happened with the specific person). In other situation, a few years later the company hired a new programmer who replaced the original team leader (he became an ordinary programmer again), but that was caused by some changes in the company, mostly unrelated to how the old team leader behaved. So yeah, this strategy doesn’t work forever, but a few years are nice, and I don’t think there would be consequences for these people after changing a job.
I think you can see after a while whether the leadership of the company is interested in the details of how the company works, or if they prefer to isolate themselves and see the programming department merely as a “black box” that produces the desired output (it was the latter in both cases). And of course, you should avoid big specific lies.
I still consider this path dangerous and wouldn’t walk it myself. But I saw people who took the risk and seemed to win. It probably happened because the whole environment was ready to be abused this way.
You recommended it to people on LW:
No, you should be the boss’s boss :-P