I would say that you’re wrong on so many levels but I won’t as I know there are places such as the one you describe. BTW: if you feel like a prisoner you have two choices: either serve your sentence or escape :)

I made my choice and I don’t feel like I was a bad manager.

Of course it is very different when you’re promoted in a team you worked in for longer time so you get kick start basically for free. But even then, if you don’t spend significant time actively sharpening your skills, they will be slowly but continuously disappearing.

If I was a great developer in 2003 (I wasn’t but that’s not the point) would I still be one now? No. Unless I kept actively working as one. If I spent, say, one third of my time as a developer would I still be great? A half, maybe? Now would I be able to become that much better manager over this time? No, not really. And believe me, I was a crappy manager back then.

I will give you the same challenge I gave Yogish – give me an example of someone who achieved this, someone who is widely considered both: a great developer and a great manager. If achieving that was easy I believe we should have truckload of such people.

Yes, being a manager doesn’t automatically mean you have to abandon technical track at all. But I keep my point that excellence in either one management or development takes too much time to be able to do both.

You may be average manager and great coder. You may be average coder and great manager. This actually mean you can do both, but there isn’t much value of your average skill. It would probably be much better to focus on on your stronger side.

I can hardly imagine people who can excel in both areas but I don’t say they don’t exists. I’d love to see an example. But even though they would be very, very rare.

I agree that management stereotypes don’t help but that’s not where is the source of the problem. Good manager would overcome organizational constraints in 9 cases out of 10. Heck, I saw multiple great teams built in companies which are basically hostile for healthy groups.

Personally I stopped tricking myself that I can catch on with technical track long ago. I see people trying to combine these two all the time and they’re failing all the time and it happens in a wide range of different organizations. If someone finally succeeds, good for them, but I wouldn’t bet with my own money.

Yes.. In almost all the organization I have worked, what you say is correct. That is because all these policies are set by bunch of MBAs who don’t want to think outside the box (what they learned). They think that what they learned is what they need to use.

But choosing to stay away from management also means you won’t distribute tasks or motivate people (at least not the way most people consider it should be done).

From what you write I understand you have power to decide what exactly you’re going to do. If I were you I’d choose one side, either people management or technical leadership, and stick with it as much as possible. If your choice is technical leadership you can always switch to people management later. The other way around it’s much harder.

Does this make any difference in you opinion?

If you look for a way to leverage knowledge and experience you shouldn’t think about management but about technical leadership. This doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t if you ask me) be done through promoting a person to management position where he gets a team to supervise. You should rather think about all kind of guru roles, where a person has all the engineering tasks but is also a go-to guy when itcomes to technical advice or even decisions.

Call them tech leads, architects or whatever, but don’t give them teams to manage since all these administrative tasks (like performance reviews, budgeting etc) steal a lot of time. Time which you could use either on coaching others or on engineering tasks.