Holding off the pointy-heads

[Tarwn]

Ok, here's the situation. For the past year and a bit I have worked for a company that was primarally (sp?) a maintenance and installation company. I was unhappy as my skills lie more in the design and development arena, but it was paying the bills and I didn't have to move. Recently they decided to split a couple people off into a subsidiary in order to write software as a primary goal using the knowledge gained in the maintenance and installation arena. The split gave the new child company one sales person, one developer (myself), and a few weeks later a second developer (at my insistence) with a third coming a couple months (again at my insistence). The goal was to fix a piece of software that was 6 months behind on delivery (which has been taken completely back to the drawing board and rewritten).

I don't like management. In college I spent a lot of time working with the Chair of the CS dept and he often mentioned how much he disliked the beauracracy that came with his ojb that kept him from what he would really like doing, ie programming. Between this and the fact that I have some minimal management experience in the past (.5-1 year management in restaurant business) I know that I dislike holding management positions myself.

The sales guy has been acting as the intermediary between myself and the CEO. He is constantly checking up on our work progress and then turning around and talking to the CEO in my place, explaining whats going on in his own limited fashion. Within the first week he had decided that we needed a test server and this server now resides at his house (we are currently officeless). It is rather obvious that he is trying to move over to management of the company (we will soon be growing) in order to allow the CEO to gracefully stay in the background where he would prefer to be.
My dilemma, of course, is whether to allow the sales guy to become the de facto manager and then manager in name, with full control over the hardware I am buying, the development process, etc (did I mention that despite past sales positions in this field, he has difficulty installing software?) or to take the leverage I will have over the next 6 months to try and split the management duties into a sales side and development side, with myself at the helm of the development side. As a person I like the sales guy, but I think he fits to well into the slot of classic Dilbert management. At the same time I am afraid that by assuming a management position in name and etc that my classic work ethic will keep me working more on management than on design and development (ie, something I enjoy) as well as make it more difficult to use this job as a stepping block. To explain the last, I find it harder, ethically, to leave a company as a manager then to leave it as an employee. While employees need to have at least a certain level of respect and desire for the companies good, a manager spends their time (or should anyway) increasing the companies good and accepting responsibility for the company.

Anyways, I'm sure you can see which direction I am leaning on this, but am interested in hearing peoples viewpoints. Keep in mind that the company is still new (less than 3 months) with 3 solid products already (1 nearing release, 1 under development, 1 fully designed and awaiting development) as well as distributors, outisde interest, etc so i think if anything is going to be done in the direction of management, now is going to be the tme to start moving on it.

-Tarwn

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The never-completed website:

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[CajunCenturion]

Good question Tarwn. The nice thing is that in some ways you're in a win-win situation. If you sit back and allow the sales guy to move into the management position, then you win because you stay in development. If you take the initiative and assume some of the management obligations, then you win because you keep control of what and how the development process should go.

Of course, neither win condition is not without it's downside. I generally like to take focus on the win conditions and decide which is best, but in this case, there is a big part of me that is saying evalute the downsides of each condition and choose based on the lesser of two evils.

Good Luck
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As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[cian]

Tarwn
difficult one, what a dilema!

Working towards the goal of management would be great for your career, what a boost for your CV, not to mention salary. It would also give you more control (obviously) over the development dept and you could really create a nice niche for yourself there allowing you to really develop the department while developing your own skills.

But the job would come with a serious amount of headaches to deal with. As you said, you don't like management but in management there's really no way you can avoid all the troubles that come with it. Whether it's working with department budgets, project schedules, personnel problems, annoying customers or dealing with senior management there's a whole load of hassle to deal with.

I work in a totally different business but I was in management here for almost 2 years, a re-organisation and a bunch of layoffs shifted me to another department as an engineer. I still deal with much of what I did as a manager, schedules, the annoying customers etc but I have far greated "hands-on" type of work while the current manager deals only with the management side of things. I have never being happier in this job to be honest. Less stress and more free time with the same salary







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