The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

Your manager is kind of a pain. She isn’t terribly supportive of your desire to open source a system because you think it provides a new twist on logging that the industry needs, and she suggests that if you want to give talks or write books perhaps you need to spend some of your personal time on those efforts. She seeks out your feedback on technical matters, but sometimes forgets to tell you about new initiatives until it’s too late for you to put in your two cents. You suspect that you are missing out on crucial information because you aren’t in the right meetings, but every time she invites you to sit in those meetings you remember how boring and inefficient they are, and how much valuable focus time you’re losing. And she doesn’t have much patience for your desire to be free of tedious work like answering email, interviewing, or responding to code reviews promptly. Still, you get to build things most of the time. You get to spend your time focused on technical problems, systems design, and engineering issues, and you don’t have to do all that much dealing with people or sitting in boring meetings. You can often choose your projects and can easily move between teams if you want something new. And you just found out that you get paid more than your manager! So, life isn’t all bad.